Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Ecosystem & Adoption

  • Matrix is seen as the de‑facto place for many FOSS and Fediverse/ActivityPub projects; Discord/Slack more common for general OSS.
  • Some see this as a reason to “stick it out”; others argue Matrix’s weaknesses are now actively pushing them back to XMPP or proprietary tools.

Client UX: Element vs Element X

  • Broad agreement that “classic” Element is slow, buggy, and has poor encryption UX.
  • Element X is widely reported as faster and more pleasant, but criticized for missing key features (threads, spaces, search, some inter‑client calling) and rough edges.
  • Some users find Element X itself clunky/buggy; others say it’s the first Matrix client they’re actually happy with.
  • Frustration that there are effectively two bad choices: fast but incomplete vs full‑featured but sluggish.

Protocol Complexity & Spec Process

  • Commenters highlight the huge number of Matrix spec change proposals (MSCs) and a growing backlog, comparing unfavorably to earlier criticism of XMPP’s extension sprawl.
  • Others argue this is just how an evolving spec works, not a flaw in itself; backlog is blamed on underfunded spec work.

Server Reliability, Federation & Self‑Hosting

  • A major matrix.org outage (broken rooms) traced to corrupted Postgres indexes; recovery took weeks and caused state/federation anomalies.
  • Some report chronic issues: images not delivering or loading, media auth misconfigurations, odd invite failures, unexplained blacklisting, and high admin overhead.
  • Project maintainers insist federation should not drop messages except under extreme misconfiguration/corruption and ask for concrete bug reports.

Governance, Funding & Priorities

  • Several users describe interactions with the Matrix/Element team as arrogant or dismissive (“pay or accept it”), especially around large architectural changes (auth, calling, Element X).
  • The project lead counters that both the Foundation and Element are underfunded, forced to prioritize paying government/enterprise work and can’t maintain old and new stacks in parallel.
  • Some see Matrix’s multi‑language stack and repeated rewrites as “architecture astronaut” behavior; maintainers frame it as converging on a common Rust core.

Security, Privacy & Trust & Safety

  • Complaints include flaky E2EE (lost keys/history), poor bot encryption support, and UX that encourages logging in on random web clients.
  • Strong accusations that Matrix is “not really privacy‑focused” are labeled as FUD by others, who point to open source and ongoing CVE work.
  • CSAM/abuse on the public matrix.org server is acknowledged as a serious, hard problem; proposals range from better hash‑based filtering to restricting uploads to paying users.

Alternatives & Trade‑offs

  • XMPP (Conversations, Gajim, Monal, ejabberd) is the main suggested alternative: simpler, mature, easier to self‑host, but weaker on group UX and feature‑parity.
  • Other options mentioned: Zulip (excellent for threaded, geeky workflows), Delta Chat (promising but niche), IRC‑based solutions, and Signal (great UX/security but centralized, phone‑tied, hostile to self‑hosting).