I’ve been moving myself and my friends and even clients to Element, but I recently came across blogs about them helping onboard German, US armed forces, and NATO. This is shared with pride everywhere. And Element also goes so far as to say that they “choose who they work with” and not just everyone. And how they don’t work with governments sanctioned by the US, EU, and UK or governments that might “cause large scale harm” or something to that effect. But NATO is a harmless puppy I guess.
I’m so conflicted right now. This is both a rant post and an ask for advice and suggestions.
First of all if it’s open source and secure it doesn’t matter who made it. The instruments of capital will bring about it’s own destruction and all that.
My problem with Matrix/Element is that it’s shit. My online friends put up with it because they’re privacy nerds but my IRL friend group all said that it’s shit. They’ve mostly moved to WhatsApp and I can’t blame them, because it works. Heck even some of those privacy nerds prefer to use the IRC that’s bridged to our matrix chat.
With Element, notifications hardly work, sending files doesn’t consistently work, calls are definitely not reliable. And they do not bother to make a stable bug-free version, instead they focus on adding even more features for the next release. There’s an issue from 2016 that’s one of the most liked and requested features: multiple accounts. They closed the issue, and opened another one they can ignore. By now Element should be a stable piece of software and it’s slow and horrible. And I say this as someone who hosts two separate matrix homeservers.
Matrix being how shit it is feels like proper fifth column stuff. Entrench yourself deeply in the private messaging market, initial product shows promise, then let it remain unusable so that any normie who is not a masochist uses centralised and/or proprietary service and becomes sceptical of open source software.
I have the same feeling about it. And I even told one of my normie friends this theory and he said it’s definitely possible.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
I’ve given up on Element a long time ago. I’ve been bouncing between Nheko and NeoChat since those are the most mature Matrix clients that aren’t bloated webapps.
What bugs me more is encryption still is kind of a mess across devices and clients. Also I hate how there still isn’t any alternative Matrix Server that’s not Synapse or Dendrite and isn’t abandoned, doesn’t suck, is relatively fast and supports at least most of the Protocol. Can’t even really blame people because I’ve tried writing my own Matrix Server and Client before but I eventually gave up because the protocol is what I call “A JSON clusterfuck”. Why can’t the protocol be as simple as IRC? Why does it always have to be JSON over HTTP?
Is there something you would recommend? I’m definitely not going back to WhatsApp. Signal works. But the centralization makes me feel iffy
Session
I’ve never heard of session, but someone needs to do a comparison between Session, Briar, SimpleX, Delta Chat, and any others as a matrix replacement. There’s also retroshare. There’s too much shit tbh
You cannot say there are too many. They’re fucking free. Do wantever you want but complaining about free software being free is about the most jackass thing I’ve ever heard about software.