Element is launching the world’s first communications platform based on the upcoming Matrix 2.0 release. The result is blazing performance which outperforms the mainstream alternatives - across a decentralised system that enables self-hosting and end-to-end encryption - as well as open standard interoperability to revolutionise real time communication between large organisations.
Built on Matrix 2.0, Element X now rivals the performance of centralised consumer messaging apps, empowering organisations to address the shadow IT issues caused by consumer-grade messaging apps in the workplace.
The new Element communications solution consists:
- Element X, our next-gen app with an array of new features
- Element Call fully integrated into Element X, for native Matrix-encrypted voice and video
- Element Server Suite, our backend hosting solution for powerful admin control and Matrix 2.0 performance
All I read is Marketing Tech Speak that sounds no different than anything else that gets advertised in my face. At work, we use Teams. It is a pain sometimes when it gets a little buggy, but integrates into SharePoint/OneDrive and the noise suppression in meetings is pretty awesome. At home I use discord or GChat because that is where all my friends are. I don’t assume I have privacy on any of these platforms and they all work on my phone and computer.
How is the user experience? Ultimately, give me privacy, but if the user experience and UI don’t give any improvements over the corporate ones, I will have to try it some other time.
But my question is about the user experience and UI. I can run a docker script, but I care about the thing I can see and interact with.
The user experience is generally worse than Discord, like any federated system compared to centralized platforms.
There is Cinny, a client with an UI similar to Discord. Element X is a great mobile client, and imo far superior to Discord for 1 on 1 chats (to be fair, I really dislike Discord 1 on 1 chat experience, so I’m biased).
Edit: It’s worth noting that Element X does not support Spaces yet, which allows for grouping of rooms similar to Discord Server.
We should probably stop arguing about Matrix vs XMPP and finally decide what to use or else we’ll never move forward.
Which is largely whether or not the eventual consistency model or not is the route to take. Is the resilience for chat worth the explosion of storage & preformance cost of sync/search & maintaining all that data amongst all servers? Or is limited/functional sync without always duplicating the entire history with the occasional out-of-order message & missing old attachments good enough? Is ephemeral chat okay to save resources which in turn makes it more feasible to self-host on lower-end hardware or is it better to trust a couple big servers with massive storage who probably have admins?
Is everything encrypted yet? Or do they still allow users to send unencrypted messages?
Unencrypted messages are useful for very large rooms, where encryption doesn’t provide meaningful more privacy since public rooms have to be considered public space anyway. Encryption does have overhead, so it makes sense to disable it.
Private rooms are E2EE by default and can’t be created unencrypted (at least in the Element X mobile UI). This is a good way to handle it IMO.
I’m still sad they stopped work on dendrite. P2P level decentralization, with E2EE, would be amazing.
These are still great improvements though. I’m hyped that loading seems to be so much faster.
Not available on f droid yet it seems
