Does this depend on sliding sync and their standalone authz server like Element X does?
I'd love to use Element X, but Element abandoned the form of SSO my community depends on, and I don't really have an appetite to spend 12 hours of my free time standing up sliding sync, a separate auth server, migrating my users to the separate auth server, spending hours explaining to everyone that their credentials live in some other place now, and then migrating my custom server admin software to use OpenID connect. Oh well.
What about Matrix Authentication Service? That's still a separate piece of software that requires PostgreSQL (as opposed to SQLite like my Synapse instance uses) and has no clear migration path for those of us using our own SSO solution (SAML, CAS, maybe your own OIDC provider like Keycloak...), right?
I don't want to run Dex and complicate the stack further, either.
I think 12 hours to migrate is probably optimistic even with built-in sliding sync, actually...
I've lucked out and haven't had any issues like that on my tiny home server.
I wish it were easier to be a Synapse admin! It seems like all server updates are focused on scaling matrix.org and the little guys that provide network diversity are not really being considered a priority.
We're actively trying to fix that - we're finally launching an official Web admin interface as FOSS (AGPL) for Synapse in the next day or two (it was meant to ship today in fact, but got blocked on a debate on how to distribute the containers).
Meanwhile you can see me trying to improve diskspace for Synapse by ~100x here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5zAgVYBuGk&t=1851s - admittedly motivated by matrix.org, but it would improve disk storage immeasurably for everyone.
Then, https://element.io/server-suite/community is built to be a really simple FOSS distro (albeit for k8s) which provides Matrix Auth Service, Synapse, Element Web, Element Call and (in a few days) Element Admin all in one package for self-hosters.
We have very much not forgotten the self-hosters - not least because Element tries to make money by selling the enterprise distro for enterprisey self-hosters at https://element.io/server-suite/pro. The rule of thumb is that stuff which privileges the end-user goes FOSS, and the stuff which privileges the enterprise over the end-user goes Pro{prietary,fessional}.
"We’ve also removed the duplicative meta-spaces (People, Favourites). Filters are the new foundation — more flexible, more future-proof, and built for growth."
As a heavy Element user for work, I have long hated this in Element X iOS and now I have the pleasure of hating it in Element web. Everyone at my job is mad about the remove of these "duplicative" metaspaces. Here's a GitHub issue about it: https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/issues/30849
I am a UI dev and I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but after using Element for nearly 5 years, it really does feel like the user experience only gets worse over time. It is really sort of amazing.
As I mentioned here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45377920), sections may well return - they just didn't make the first cut. Meta-spaces ARE duplicative though, if you already have filter buttons which do precisely the same thing - and these are the filter buttons which have been added.
Still rooting for y'all but did you do any user testing of this? It constantly collapses the filters meaning it's absolutely more thought and clicks every time than just having the favorite button. It would be so, so easy to just not collapse those filters. Or, potentially consider that "duplicative" is not a reason for an unpopular UX change.
> Meanwhile, the company appears to have begun quietly phasing out the classic Element app in favor of Element X, even though it still misses crucial features like threads and spaces, besides the less important things like widgets, grouping by priority, and live location sharing.
I didn't even know such "important" features exist, and never needed them.
> Whenever you log on from a new device, you have to cross-verify the device using either a secret key or, more comfortably, another device that has already been verified.
If you have a laptop and a smartphone, you need to verify the device once, doesn't look complicated. And most smartphones are probably backdoored anyway so you should not be using matrix there.
> Matrix was never good.
Web version of Element allows sending messages, files and calls, and they actually work. That's already better than many open-source projects including Jabber.
Although I must I admit, I see a warning that I need to "verify this session" in a web client, but no meaningful way to do it. Also web client annoys and distracts me by messages like "Chats have a new look". What's the point of showing this popup? If they have a new look, everyone will notice without any popups. Stop copying worst features of commercial software.
> it still misses crucial features like threads and spaces
fwiw, threads & spaces are in beta right now on Element X iOS and Android, aiming to launch in the coming weeks. If you are unafraid of bugs, and bearing in mind that it's very still WIP and none of the perf work has happened yet, you can enable dev mode by 7-tapping the version number in settings and enabling them on.
> Matrix was never good.
I'd be first to admit that Matrix clients like Element have had their usability challenges over the years. However, we have spent the last 2-3 years doing nothing but trying to fix this, and we believe the Element X generation finally punches its weight against the proprietary/centralised alts.
Live location share is next on the list after Thread/Spaces; "Low priority" is already an option in dev settings, and then Widgets are pretty much the last thing left.
The real crucial missing piece in Element X compared to Element is key/device/session/verification management and insights. Fully self-managing a user account or chat sessions currently can not be done in X. Verification ceremony becomes meaningless without the degree of control and detail which is available in Element but not Element X.
"The authenticity of this message can't be guaranteed on this device"... OK, now what? In Element it's at usually at least
possible to understand the cause of and do something about those situations. In Element X, that notice is all you get.
Because of this it still feels like a toy beta since you basically need a second not-Element-X client running as a backup for when issues occur or you otherwise want that control or insight into your own account, sessions, and chats.
Oh, and not everyone is content with Apple/Google duopoly.
This is interesting timing because I self-host a Matrix server (Conduit) for some friends and we were lamenting the dearth of good apps. I'm currently using Cinny as a Safari app on desktop and PWA on my phone, and Element.
I noticed it yesterday and I have to say I hate it. The "Peoples" section seems to be entirely gone (it's now intermingled with rooms in the "Home" section). You no longer can see favorite/ normal/ low priority DMs or rooms in proper order at once. E.g. in Spaces I had my one or two favourite rooms at the top in a separate section; now it's somewhere messed up in the middle with the normal priority stuff. You constantly have to fiddle with the space-wasting bubble buttons to find stuff.
No idea how that is supposed to improve things really. Why is it always necessary to break user's muscle memory with this types if extreme "improvements"?
I'm still trying to find out where to manage my Sessions in the newer Element versions (I have to keep a very old one around to do that).
I'll just go and say I hate the design changes in desktop, it's more cluttered without good reason. Feels like they made the text bolder and added a bunch of borders or increased them where they weren't before. You can't collapse the names down as far as you could in the past to save space so when this app runs tiled it's stuck with like a third less functional space than it used to have.
I'm probably going to switch back to using nheko which also has the benefit of being much lighter on resources. Nheko I can collapse the name list right down to icons if I want.
Yes, it's pretty terrible. Especially since the filters reset every time you switch spaces, so you need to set them again constantly. And filters only is just worse than dedicated sections where you can actually see multiple at a glance in smaller spaces.
This might be the point where I give up on Element (or Matrix entirely), I was willing to excuse some of the jank in exchange for it having all the features in a somewhat reasonable UI, but if they break that what's the point. Messing with it while Element X is still incomplete feels like a very weird choice.
Honestly, this was the reaction I expected to have when I first started using the new roomlist (which was built by the Element design/product/eng teams, rather than the old one, which was originally written by me).
However, in practice, I've rapidly found that I genuinely don't mind the new layout, and actually prefer it. (And I tend to be have a bad attitude to change in general). The reasons are:
* It's way faster to switch rooms
* You can filter on People by hitting the People filter button rather than having a dedicated section.
* I spent my life scrolling around the previous sections, or manually resizing them, etc, whereas the simplicity actually feels a bit refreshing and lighter weight.
That said, this is an initial release of the new room list, and there's a bunch of work to be done still:
* Need to support collapsing the LeftPanel like we used to be able to.
* There's a plan to re-introduce Sections again (so you can see your favourites etc separately to the main contents if you want - and reclaim muscle memory)
In terms of where to manage Sessions in Element Web/Desktop - it should always be the 'Sessions' tab in Settings? If your server is using native OIDC (i.e. matrix-authentication-service) then some of the management gets delegated to MAS and links through to account.matrix.org (or wherever your MAS lives). But if you can't see any way to manage Sessions, then it's likely a misconfiguration or a bug; please let us know the details.
Yeah, no. I lost hope that they have any idea of what they are doing, or any willingness to improve and drop out of the sunk cost fallacy that paralyses them. Every two years or so they break protocol and implementations with big promises that "this time the charm, finally", and it's essentially the same slow mess with some new bugs.
I think it would be nice to get even more people using something like Element rather than a Meta-owned app, Microsoft Teams, etc.
For that to have a chance they need user-interfaces that are just as easy to use, and almost feature parity with what chat program people currently are used to.
I'd agree with that, but based on this post I don't see that this is a huge step forward. From my perspective the big UI issues are not with this kind of stuff. Some of the bigger problems are intertwined with the server and protocol.
Search, for instance, is a major weak spot; it sometimes gets its index messed up and resetting it a bunch of times still doesn't work. Even when it does work, it fails to find what I'm looking for. This is partly because because the protocol doesn't actually define any particular search behavior, so there's no way to even know what the search is doing (i.e., whether it's searching for literal text, some kind of "smart" search, or what).
Another obvious UI gap is moderation tools, which are woefully inadequate to actually handle the kind of spam that sometimes floods in. Some of this also has to do with things that probably should be fixed on the protocol or server level (e.g., some kind of flood detection).
For people looking to Element as a Discord replacement, what would help are changes that make things work more like Discord in various ways (e.g., joining a space auto-joins you to various rooms), but again these require protocol-level support.
Overall I'm actually pretty satisfied with the Element desktop UI, and the main issues I've had with it (apart from the above) are in the onboarding/verification stuff, which is an area where things have noticeably improved over the past year or two. I wouldn't say that the Element desktop UI is a major weak point for Matrix. There are much bigger problems that need to be tackled, and my prediction is that as long as they remain untackled, small-scale UI changes like the ones mentioned in the post aren't going to move the needle.
Does this depend on sliding sync and their standalone authz server like Element X does?
I'd love to use Element X, but Element abandoned the form of SSO my community depends on, and I don't really have an appetite to spend 12 hours of my free time standing up sliding sync, a separate auth server, migrating my users to the separate auth server, spending hours explaining to everyone that their credentials live in some other place now, and then migrating my custom server admin software to use OpenID connect. Oh well.
> I don't really have an appetite to spend 12 hours of my free time standing up sliding sync
This has been built into synapse now for months, maybe a year. Does not require a second sliding-sync component anymore.
That's great!
What about Matrix Authentication Service? That's still a separate piece of software that requires PostgreSQL (as opposed to SQLite like my Synapse instance uses) and has no clear migration path for those of us using our own SSO solution (SAML, CAS, maybe your own OIDC provider like Keycloak...), right?
I don't want to run Dex and complicate the stack further, either.
I think 12 hours to migrate is probably optimistic even with built-in sliding sync, actually...
> What about Matrix Authentication Service?
Still its own thing which I have not deployed on my homeserver.
> as opposed to the SQLite like my Synapse instance uses
I've done this for testing but they really don't recommend it for production. It's had a history of being broken: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/issues/18325
I've lucked out and haven't had any issues like that on my tiny home server.
I wish it were easier to be a Synapse admin! It seems like all server updates are focused on scaling matrix.org and the little guys that provide network diversity are not really being considered a priority.
We're actively trying to fix that - we're finally launching an official Web admin interface as FOSS (AGPL) for Synapse in the next day or two (it was meant to ship today in fact, but got blocked on a debate on how to distribute the containers).
Meanwhile you can see me trying to improve diskspace for Synapse by ~100x here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5zAgVYBuGk&t=1851s - admittedly motivated by matrix.org, but it would improve disk storage immeasurably for everyone.
Then, https://element.io/server-suite/community is built to be a really simple FOSS distro (albeit for k8s) which provides Matrix Auth Service, Synapse, Element Web, Element Call and (in a few days) Element Admin all in one package for self-hosters.
And if you hate k8s, then there's always the trivial docker-compose thing I did for the same stack at https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo.
We have very much not forgotten the self-hosters - not least because Element tries to make money by selling the enterprise distro for enterprisey self-hosters at https://element.io/server-suite/pro. The rule of thumb is that stuff which privileges the end-user goes FOSS, and the stuff which privileges the enterprise over the end-user goes Pro{prietary,fessional}.
"We’ve also removed the duplicative meta-spaces (People, Favourites). Filters are the new foundation — more flexible, more future-proof, and built for growth."
As a heavy Element user for work, I have long hated this in Element X iOS and now I have the pleasure of hating it in Element web. Everyone at my job is mad about the remove of these "duplicative" metaspaces. Here's a GitHub issue about it: https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/issues/30849
I am a UI dev and I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but after using Element for nearly 5 years, it really does feel like the user experience only gets worse over time. It is really sort of amazing.
As I mentioned here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45377920), sections may well return - they just didn't make the first cut. Meta-spaces ARE duplicative though, if you already have filter buttons which do precisely the same thing - and these are the filter buttons which have been added.
Still rooting for y'all but did you do any user testing of this? It constantly collapses the filters meaning it's absolutely more thought and clicks every time than just having the favorite button. It would be so, so easy to just not collapse those filters. Or, potentially consider that "duplicative" is not a reason for an unpopular UX change.
> Meanwhile, the company appears to have begun quietly phasing out the classic Element app in favor of Element X, even though it still misses crucial features like threads and spaces, besides the less important things like widgets, grouping by priority, and live location sharing.
I didn't even know such "important" features exist, and never needed them.
> Whenever you log on from a new device, you have to cross-verify the device using either a secret key or, more comfortably, another device that has already been verified.
If you have a laptop and a smartphone, you need to verify the device once, doesn't look complicated. And most smartphones are probably backdoored anyway so you should not be using matrix there.
> Matrix was never good.
Web version of Element allows sending messages, files and calls, and they actually work. That's already better than many open-source projects including Jabber.
Although I must I admit, I see a warning that I need to "verify this session" in a web client, but no meaningful way to do it. Also web client annoys and distracts me by messages like "Chats have a new look". What's the point of showing this popup? If they have a new look, everyone will notice without any popups. Stop copying worst features of commercial software.
> Meanwhile, the company appears to have begun quietly phasing out the classic Element app
I'm not sure we've been quiet about it - c.f. https://element.io/blog/element-x-ignition/ :P
> it still misses crucial features like threads and spaces
fwiw, threads & spaces are in beta right now on Element X iOS and Android, aiming to launch in the coming weeks. If you are unafraid of bugs, and bearing in mind that it's very still WIP and none of the perf work has happened yet, you can enable dev mode by 7-tapping the version number in settings and enabling them on.
> Matrix was never good.
I'd be first to admit that Matrix clients like Element have had their usability challenges over the years. However, we have spent the last 2-3 years doing nothing but trying to fix this, and we believe the Element X generation finally punches its weight against the proprietary/centralised alts.
Live location share is next on the list after Thread/Spaces; "Low priority" is already an option in dev settings, and then Widgets are pretty much the last thing left.
You can see a full parity comparison between Element Classic & Element X at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17_j_HAPZEopqDAbKKsaw... fwiw - which hopefully puts the "EX is missing crucial features" complaint more in context.
The real crucial missing piece in Element X compared to Element is key/device/session/verification management and insights. Fully self-managing a user account or chat sessions currently can not be done in X. Verification ceremony becomes meaningless without the degree of control and detail which is available in Element but not Element X.
"The authenticity of this message can't be guaranteed on this device"... OK, now what? In Element it's at usually at least possible to understand the cause of and do something about those situations. In Element X, that notice is all you get.
Because of this it still feels like a toy beta since you basically need a second not-Element-X client running as a backup for when issues occur or you otherwise want that control or insight into your own account, sessions, and chats.
Oh, and not everyone is content with Apple/Google duopoly.
This is interesting timing because I self-host a Matrix server (Conduit) for some friends and we were lamenting the dearth of good apps. I'm currently using Cinny as a Safari app on desktop and PWA on my phone, and Element.
The new Element design is nice.
Seems heavily inspired by MSTeams
> We’re dialling down the drama (yes, that red !) and turning up readability
Kind of sad that this is touted as a 'feature' in 2025.
The back button does not work on my phone, android.
Should add a link to the main site from the blog on the mobile layout
I noticed it yesterday and I have to say I hate it. The "Peoples" section seems to be entirely gone (it's now intermingled with rooms in the "Home" section). You no longer can see favorite/ normal/ low priority DMs or rooms in proper order at once. E.g. in Spaces I had my one or two favourite rooms at the top in a separate section; now it's somewhere messed up in the middle with the normal priority stuff. You constantly have to fiddle with the space-wasting bubble buttons to find stuff.
No idea how that is supposed to improve things really. Why is it always necessary to break user's muscle memory with this types if extreme "improvements"?
I'm still trying to find out where to manage my Sessions in the newer Element versions (I have to keep a very old one around to do that).
I'll just go and say I hate the design changes in desktop, it's more cluttered without good reason. Feels like they made the text bolder and added a bunch of borders or increased them where they weren't before. You can't collapse the names down as far as you could in the past to save space so when this app runs tiled it's stuck with like a third less functional space than it used to have.
I'm probably going to switch back to using nheko which also has the benefit of being much lighter on resources. Nheko I can collapse the name list right down to icons if I want.
Yes, it's pretty terrible. Especially since the filters reset every time you switch spaces, so you need to set them again constantly. And filters only is just worse than dedicated sections where you can actually see multiple at a glance in smaller spaces.
This might be the point where I give up on Element (or Matrix entirely), I was willing to excuse some of the jank in exchange for it having all the features in a somewhat reasonable UI, but if they break that what's the point. Messing with it while Element X is still incomplete feels like a very weird choice.
Honestly, this was the reaction I expected to have when I first started using the new roomlist (which was built by the Element design/product/eng teams, rather than the old one, which was originally written by me).
However, in practice, I've rapidly found that I genuinely don't mind the new layout, and actually prefer it. (And I tend to be have a bad attitude to change in general). The reasons are:
* It's way faster to switch rooms
* You can filter on People by hitting the People filter button rather than having a dedicated section.
* I spent my life scrolling around the previous sections, or manually resizing them, etc, whereas the simplicity actually feels a bit refreshing and lighter weight.
That said, this is an initial release of the new room list, and there's a bunch of work to be done still:
* Need to support collapsing the LeftPanel like we used to be able to.
* There's a plan to re-introduce Sections again (so you can see your favourites etc separately to the main contents if you want - and reclaim muscle memory)
In terms of where to manage Sessions in Element Web/Desktop - it should always be the 'Sessions' tab in Settings? If your server is using native OIDC (i.e. matrix-authentication-service) then some of the management gets delegated to MAS and links through to account.matrix.org (or wherever your MAS lives). But if you can't see any way to manage Sessions, then it's likely a misconfiguration or a bug; please let us know the details.
You'd think Element would have enough "we'll fix it in the future, we promise" problems that you didn't intentionally cause...
A little bit of slack here, a little bit of teams there and a smidge of discord. Really not sure about it.
The only design issues I ever had with Matrix was the protocol design. This is lipstick on a pig.
From the post:
> ...lays the groundwork for a more resilient technical foundation
Let's hope the protocol improves
I have no hope for matrix.
Good summary of what's wrong: https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/giving-up-on-element-and-matrixorg...
Poor performance, UX, and reliability issues. WELP, seems like XMPP is much simpler to use.
For anyone who doesn't know the difference between XMPP and Matrix (like me): https://claude.ai/share/a2624334-d21e-455a-a1b3-9025c69a921a
What do you recommend as a better (secure/private) alternative?
Yeah, no. I lost hope that they have any idea of what they are doing, or any willingness to improve and drop out of the sunk cost fallacy that paralyses them. Every two years or so they break protocol and implementations with big promises that "this time the charm, finally", and it's essentially the same slow mess with some new bugs.
Whats Bad with the protocol design?
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/giving-up-on-element-and-matrixorg...
For example.
I don't really get why they're spending their time on this kind of window dressing.
I think it would be nice to get even more people using something like Element rather than a Meta-owned app, Microsoft Teams, etc.
For that to have a chance they need user-interfaces that are just as easy to use, and almost feature parity with what chat program people currently are used to.
I'd agree with that, but based on this post I don't see that this is a huge step forward. From my perspective the big UI issues are not with this kind of stuff. Some of the bigger problems are intertwined with the server and protocol.
Search, for instance, is a major weak spot; it sometimes gets its index messed up and resetting it a bunch of times still doesn't work. Even when it does work, it fails to find what I'm looking for. This is partly because because the protocol doesn't actually define any particular search behavior, so there's no way to even know what the search is doing (i.e., whether it's searching for literal text, some kind of "smart" search, or what).
Another obvious UI gap is moderation tools, which are woefully inadequate to actually handle the kind of spam that sometimes floods in. Some of this also has to do with things that probably should be fixed on the protocol or server level (e.g., some kind of flood detection).
For people looking to Element as a Discord replacement, what would help are changes that make things work more like Discord in various ways (e.g., joining a space auto-joins you to various rooms), but again these require protocol-level support.
Overall I'm actually pretty satisfied with the Element desktop UI, and the main issues I've had with it (apart from the above) are in the onboarding/verification stuff, which is an area where things have noticeably improved over the past year or two. I wouldn't say that the Element desktop UI is a major weak point for Matrix. There are much bigger problems that need to be tackled, and my prediction is that as long as they remain untackled, small-scale UI changes like the ones mentioned in the post aren't going to move the needle.