element-x-ios

for people already with very fast load times in Classic, when X becomes the only flagship App in the App Store.

un fine on it. I'm not convinced the "ill-suited tech stack" crit holds. > Community projects like Dendrite emerged to rewrite the homeserver more sensibly Dendrite is not a community project and never has been; it was written by the core Matrix team, and then when we realised Synapse had critical mass we backported most of its architectural improvements to Synapse. > New Vector seems to be chasing too many goals simultaneously, with no clear direction No? we killed all the sidequests in order to just do Element Web, Element X, Element Call and Synapse. > Just a few months ago, they migrated to the Matrix Authentication Service (MAS), which was supposed to be a leap forward, yet lacks even essential security features like 2FA/MFA. No? the whole point of MAS is that it lets you delegate straight through to a proper IDP which provides 2FA/MFA/Passkeys etc. > Launching the app requires network synchronization that hampers responsiveness No? Turn off your network, launch Element X, and see that it launches fine? Obviously it does need to talk to the server to retrieve new data. I guess there was the https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/issues/4102 issue, but that was fixed 3 weeks ago. > The Matrix.org service, especially its matrix.org homeserver, is also slow matrix.org feels pretty good to me these days, even on my mammoth account (other than when talking in Matrix HQ) > On my laptop, I’ve been using iamb, a TUI Matrix client, and even there I experience delays of tens of seconds when launching it, and a lag of several seconds between pressing Enter and seeing the message actually appear in the chat room. I'm assuming that's because iamb hasn't enabled sliding sync, and/or hasn't implemented local echo, or has some other perf bug. Or perhaps you're on an old build. Given it's using the same matrix-rust-sdk as Element X it should in theory be instant. > And that’s certainly not iamb’s fault, because it’s written in Rust, btw™. ... > the lack of proper first-party libraries for 3rd-party developers to build on top of, it became visible that the once-vibrant ecosystem, does no longer look so healthy This is really weird. It's not clear that the Matrix Foundation should publish software at all, to be honest - it's effectively a standards body. W3C doesn't write browsers or web servers any more, for instance. As it happens, we have invested a huge amount of effort into publishing a flagship first-party client SDK anyway: matrix-rust-sdk. And matrix-js-sdk is still there too. We very deliberately have handed off other SDKs to the broader community to maintain, which they do a great job of. Surely the fact that go-matrix got surpassed by Tulir's superior go-mautrix fork is a good thing, not a bad thing? > Development on Synapse alternatives has stagnated The conduits seem as active as ever, from what I can see, even if there's been forking. Dendrite development has stalled, but this reflects lack of funding rather than the ecosystem failing, and the core team at Element having to put all its effort it into one server (Synapse) rather than splitting between two. > Other clients like SchildiChat are faced with the dilemma of continuing their existing work or starting over by forking Element X That's just false? SchildiChat seems to have quite happily forked EX into SchildiChat Next years ago and looks to be doing a great job of it; ahead of EX itself with many features (e.g. it already has spaces!) > Speaking of SDKs, New Vector appears to lack a coherent technology strategy. They’ve built infrastructure in Python and Node.js/TypeScript, moved into Go for the Synapse replacement, and now maintain a Rust-based client SDK, while abandoning their Go client library (which is now community-maintained). NV's stack is Python+Rust and Node/TS on the serverside, and Rust + (TS/Swift/Kotlin) on the clientside. It's true that over 11 years of work we've also sprouted a few Go projects (e.g. complement), and there's even some Perl (sytest), but that is very much the minority. > Especially for an organization that appears perpetually cash-strapped. New Vector’s approach feels more like indecisiveness than the right tool for the right job when looking through their repositories on GitHub. It feels unfortunate that the OP is complaining that NV doesn't provide enough 1st party implementations in different languages any more, while also complaining NV has too many languages in use. > Matthew, if you’re reading this: We both know that naming things is one of the hardest problems in computer science, right after cache invalidation. I totally get the geeky, 31337 thrill a name like Matrix might evoke, but believe me when I say that using generic names is a bad idea. Things would have been a lot easier for everyone involved if you had at least rebranded Riot to something more distinctive. For future rebrandings, I highly recommend using the Synthwave Band Name Generator and some good old human creativity. :-) Honestly Matrix & Element seem to get quite a lot of traction and successful press despite the generic names. For instance, I just spun up Tor and googled the word Element, and Element.io came up as the 2nd hit after the skateboard brand (and the whole sidebar). The data just doesn't back up this particular criticism. Overall, though, I get why the OP is frustrated and has given up. All I can say is that we're working away on getting Element X to parity with Element as fast as we can so we can retire the 'classic' app, at which point I think much of the pain people are experiencing will go away. It's taking longer than I'd like given the work is entangled with building and deploying government messaging systems as a way to keep the lights on, but if anything all the negativity here makes me more determined and stubborn to keep plugging away to dig out of the transitional period we're in, and get back on track.

some kind which has got confused? You mean in Element X itself? I have no accessibility features enabled on my devices, so I doubt it's an OS-level control in the way.

to enter recovery keys too. Eitherway, it's being fixed: https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/issues/2424 EDIT: looks like a fix landed on Friday: https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/pull/2471 > also seems to still lack TOFU for my private server Yup, sorry, TOFU for TLS isn't implemented yet in EX. > The same with the homeservers, there's synapse and dendrite is supposed to take over at some point but that point is forever far in the future. And then there's conduit, so which one is it? Synapse is a stable server where the core team is putting its effort currently. Dendrite is a 2nd gen server from the core team, but is beta and a) ended up being focused on P2P and embedded homeservers and experimental MSCs, b) is starved of resource atm due to funding pressure (c.f. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5BrVVf0B1I&t=316s). Conduit is an independent server implementation in Rust, which is promising but beta. It's like asking whether you should use Apache httpd or beta versions of nginx or lighttpd in the early days of the Web. > The strategy doesn't really feel well thought out in that sense. The strategy at Element (which employs most of the Matrix core team) is pretty clear right now: 1. Improve Synapse as the most mature and stable server implementation (and package it in Element Server Suite for those needing an enterprise Matrix distro: https://element.io/server-suite) 2. Finish implementing sufficient features in Element X that it can replace the old classic Element mobile apps asap - converging on a single Rust codebase, so that bugs & audits & new features can all land in one place. 3. Keep building Element Web/Desktop and Element Call. ...and that's it. If it seems confusing, that's either because we're in the middle of the Element -> Element X shuffle... or because the nature of Matrix is that there's loads of other independent implementations running around too. But that's what makes it fun, too :)