A Week in Matrix: Debugging Spaces, Bans, and Broken Federation
I document a frustrating week managing a Matrix community, tackling accidental notifications in spaces, resolving spurious domain bans via Draupnir, and fixing federation issues caused by Dendrite configuration errors. Despite these technical hurdles, I reflect on the stark contrast between the polished public image of Matrix and the messy reality of maintaining interoperability across diverse homeservers and clients.
Saying Matrix is great but only if you use the flagship client on a flagship server made by the flagship company doesn't have the same ring to it.
- solarkraft
Seeing such issues with Matrix and other open, common-good projects, I get the feeling like they just aren’t architected for good everyday-user UX.
Matrix is making real efforts to change this with Matrix 2.0, but still seems to suffer from design debt in many places.
I think this is partially due to the people they attract who largely work on the projects for free: Tinkerers who care about some form of technical elegance for the fun of it. I’ve had a few conversations around FOSS, including Matrix, at this point, and a not-too-uncommon response to my relayed criticisms was “then the user is wrong”.
I can’t tell them what to do. I could tell them what to do if they want adoption by normal people, but many don’t seem to be interested in that and you really can’t argue with that.
If adoption by normal people is a project goal, you have to seriously engineer for that. As much (partially fair) criticism as Gnome gets, they managed to build a desktop package that can seriously be used by normal people in the real world.
- fedpost
Are there any real options in this space for something that is
- E2EE
- Large group capable (100+ users)
- FOSS + self hostable
- Not riddled with security issues
- Relatively easy to use for iOS and Android users (safe for normies)
I help run a Matrix server for people who are at risk from the current administration and I can attest to all of the issues mentioned plus a few more.
I'd rather not move to something as hostile as Discord and while we've tried Stoat it's infinitely more buggy and the lack of iOS apps is causing problems.
Rocket chat is interesting but E2EE is early in development, lots of security issues at last check.
Simplex isn't going to be better for large group stuff, it has the same fundamental sync issues Matrix does and the devs are more interested in crypto than fixing that.
- louiskottmann
Remark half-way in the rant they are using dendrite, an experimental matrix server implementation that has been abandonned. Thus ranting about it is cheeky at best.
I have been using synapse for years with little issue.
- bronson
I feel this. And it doesn't even cover the very first conversation I have with my users.
"You want to install Element"
"But I want Matrix."
"They call it Element now."
"I want to speak on Element?"
"No you want to speak on Matrix using Element."
"Uh."
"Don't worry about it. Look, just install Element."
"Well, I see Element and Element X."
"Oh right. Well, do you want to video chat?"
"What?"
"Element X doesn't video chat well. If you want video chat and a more featureful but slower chat experience, install Element. If you don't care about reliable video chat and don't mind rooms jumping around and not organizing them, but you want to subscribe to a zillion of them, choose Element X"
"What?"
"Oookay, let me explain. See, once there were--"
"Can't I just install the Matrix app?"
"It's Element or Element X. Do you want to video chat?"
"Um probably?"
"Well then Element, not X, that's the one you want to start with."
"Start with Element without the X?"
It's so needlessly complex.
- NetOpWibby
The unfortunate surprise with self-hosting Matrix is that Element X requires sliding sync and Element X cannot be installed on macOS if you have System Integrity turned off (I assume they store the keys in the Secure Enclave or something).
Conduit gained support for SS fairly recently so that’s good.
For a decent client, I’d recommend Cinny. There’s currently a fork of Cinny in development but it doesn’t work with my self-hosted server right now.