this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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Pro@programming.dev
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Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org: The Matrix.org network has great potential, but after years of dealing with glitches, slow performance, poor UX, and one too many failures, I’m done with it. (xn--gckvb8fzb.com)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by Pro@programming.dev to c/Technology@programming.dev
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After five years of using Matrix.org/Element as my primary communication platform, and rooting for it, and promoting it, and enduring its many quirks, I’ve decided to move on (or rather back). Despite promising ideals and growing institutional adoption, the network remains slow, unreliable, and confusing for everyday users. Development feels directionless, client and server projects are fragmented, and the user experience still lags far behind my expectations. A recent incident that essentially broke my own community channel on the Matrix.org homeserver was the final straw: I’m heading back to XMPP.

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[–] popcar2@programming.dev 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Every year or so I try Element again and the experience is just bad. As an IRC alternative for quickly joining some random chat to ask a question, it's fine. As a day-to-day chat app it's miserable, I also don't understand why it's forcing encryption woes on the user by constantly nagging about it.

The mobile app used to force me to re-enter my password every now and then so I don't forget it, and since I deleted the app I'm now unable to access encryption settings on the web version because I'm forced to verify this device by using another device I was logged in at, but that's fine because I didn't have anything worth saving. I did a reset of my account, except that doesn't work: I got an error "Failed to allow crypto identity reset".

It's such a hassle. I also hate that you can be in a server but most rooms will be hidden and you have to join them manually which is so counter-intuitive!

[–] rimu@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago

Yup. Dumpster fire.

[–] HoopyFrood@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago

I don't like choice was made to try to create a centralized matrix.org service to try and be a discord, Matrix makes sense when self hosted for an organization or peer group that needs messaging while owning the platform it is distributed on. Admittedly a bit niche, which is probably why a centralized big main instance was produced on what should have been a fully federated platform.

Marrying the protocol to its most well funded client was also a huge mistake, a lot of what element does is propriatary to element making alternative frontends functionally unsupported. Matrix is very confused about what it wants to be.

That being said, i use it as a self hosted alternative to discord for me and my friends; anyone who gets added to the platform receives a light education about how the encryption key management works. Just about every discussion channel created is deliberately made an unencrypted room. I desperately wish they made the high stakes encryption an optional thing that you only enable when needed. Encryption by default can be configured per server, but the reputational damage is done and the settings are at a sysadmin level, so matrix.org is just fucked