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
I don’t like what I see in the iOS app stores privacy section for the app.
Seriously, WTF?!
What do you find WTF about it?
That’s a lot of data collection.
That’s the problem with how the app store presents privacy info: without context it’s nearly meaningless. “may be collected”. It’s optional, but that’s not show here. The Play store does show that these are all optional.
“Collected” is also a scary word here. Having my location “collected” sounds scary, but what it actually may mean is that I can optionally and explicitly share my location with a contact.
Oftentimes “location” can just mean “needs to access Bluetooth”
Notice it says “MAY be collected”, because if you want to you can share your phone number, email, etc with the app to allow people to find you easier.
Same with location and stuff like that, if you use an option to share your location or connect to bluetooth devices it will obviously need your location permission.
do you know what the average mobile app looks like? lmao
Element is able to use features called “Integration Manager” and “Identity Server”. When using an Identity Server, you can choose to link name, email, and phone number to your Matrix account. When using an Integration Manager, there’s a feature to share your location with others in chat.
As such, Vector discloses that they “collect this information”, although (except some diagnostics), this is completely optional.
(I am not associated with Vector, just interested in Matrix)
Ah interesting ok. So basically even though it CAN link all of that info to you and such doesn’t mean that it WILL if you opt out of things. Is that correct?
The way permissions are listed on mobile operating these days is honestly pretty misleading.
For example, I know some apps that need to request network permission even though they don’t need to connect to the internet. Not because they want to do anything shady, but because they legitably have to in order to get certain info.
Not to mention the problem of listing everything an app can do as if it is doing all of those things.
Correct any personal info is opt-in, ie; you can put your phone number and email in if you want to make it easier for friends to find you.
Even better.
It’s opt-in instead of opt -out
Correct, Vector does not receive this information unless you willingly share it with them.
Ok thank you
Strange. I could only find vector settings in the regular Element app. And even stranger, it prompts me with “Accept Identity Server Terms” but if I tap on the identity server option it says “You are currently using vector…”. I also cannot disconnect unless I accept the terms. I really wish all of this was more clear.
“invisible cryptography” I sure hope this isn’t an empty promise. The number one gripe I have with matrix/element is the absolutely horrendous crypto dance they make you do.
What are you talking about? Even before this new “invisible cryptography” you set it up once per device and never have to think about it again.
except for the “unable to decrypt” errors, and when new invitees can’t read previous messages
It’s probably the number one reason I can’t convince friends to move over, I know they would bawk at how it makes them do that on every device
while I agree that there are too many problems right now, 2 things really can’t be avoided:
- setting up key backup after registration asap
- verifying your new logged in devices, possibly with the key backup password
well, unless they are fine with using it like signal, which is basically one device only
Signal can have multiple devices, I have it on my phone and laptop.
(part 2) technically, though, the other part of it is still the case: if you haven’t set yo key backup and you lost your phone, don’t be surprised if you can’t recover all your messages
that must be a relatively new feature
Not really, have used it for years like that. But you need to set it up initially on your phone. The newish feature (less than a year) is that I think they do not require a phone number to set up a new account.
The newish feature (less than a year) is that I think they do not require a phone number to set up a new account.
How do you do that? A few days ago I have registered again, and I didn’t see the option. Didn’t you perhaps mean that the app can hide phone numbers?
Ah that must be it sorry. I thought they had decorelated phone numbers and IDs
I studied cryptography and I can’t figure out how to do the dance right. I thought I did, but one of my contacts says they can’t read any message I send them. And I can’t message them to figure out why.
We haven’t spoken since. Thanks Matrix.
Not available on f droid yet it seems
Schildi chat has SchildiNext on f-droid
not on f-droid official yet, but on a separate repo. the page also refers to the list of customizations
My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
The new release isn’t out on F-Droid my friend, last updated 3 months ago as of this comment.
last F-droid weekly news mentioned problems with their reproducible build process
Indeed, probably in the coming days
~~https://f-droid.org/packages/io.element.android.x/~~
f-droid seems a few versions behind.
https://apkpure.com/element-x-secure-messenger/io.element.android.x/download
That release is quite out of date. See this issue
The last time I used element x was probably a couple months ago and I wouldn’t really call it ‘production ready’. But I guess I’ll have to try it again.
Element x still doesn’t have support for spaces. Trying to navigate between rooms just by scrolling through one huge list is a nightmare.
I still don’t think it’s there, but development hss been fast, so a lot has changed and improved in the last couple of months.
You still can’t sign in to Element One on it.
not on linux yet?
I currently use Synapse with bridges to Signal and Discord, and Matrix API. Is Element X a better way to go server-side now?
as I understand, Element X is a client application (for mobile, for now)
The title of the article, and body, say otherwise.
No, that’s your reading comprehension. You are conflating Matrix 2.0 and Element X.
I wouldn’t say it that harshly, the title is really not the best
No they don’t, it’s just confusingly worded
Element X is a matrix client that will eventually replace Element for android/ios
Matrix 2.0 is the server suite, some of the changes in matrix 2.0 are necessary for element x to work.
I think it’s actually Element X, Element Call and Element Server Suite, and they just did not want to write Element 3 times
Got it, thank you. So if I’m following now, Matrix 2.0 a new protocol, and the solution to run instead of synapse is Element Server and Element Call?
Yes except element call is a frontend for voip and p2p
Is that still the case?
This level of integration means that group VoIP in Matrix finally benefits from all of Matrix’s native end-to-end encryption, cryptographic identity and decentralisation - no longer handing over to a third-party system such as Jitsi which doesn’t integrate with Matrix’s encryption guarantees.
And, native E2EE for voice and video (through the Element Call integration mentioned above) ensures that Matrix’s encryption guarantees now extend to video conferencing.
Though I’m assuming you mean protocols not app names.
Store reviews are 2.4 / 5 why the poor reception
Might be historical reviews
Have you read the reviews?
Just now, sounds like it’s feature incomplete, still I am curious if I missed anything big
Bombastic
Still no Spaces support. Even the short list of rooms I’ve joined are unmanageable when listed flat with no way to identify which Space a
#generalbelongs toWhat do you mean by “spaces”?
A way to group organize discover and control access to multiple Rooms.
Here’s an extra ironic Elements post describing them: https://element.io/blog/spaces-the-next-frontier/
It’s the equivalent of discord servers
I can’t use discord because they require phone numbers from users who use privacy tools.
What does this mean for people who don’t use discord?
Spaces have nothing to do with Discord. They’re just a way of grouping multiple Matrix rooms together into one “space” like how Discord channels are grouped into one “server.”
A space is a collection of rooms. So you have a clean list of spaces, then when you click into one of them it shows all the rooms that it contains. Without spaces, every single room is shown in one big list.
This is dependent on matrix-rust-sdk, when (if) it ends up supporting it, all apps using the SDK will be able to add support for spaces
Spaces is an underused feature that I hope see gain more traction! It makes Matrix a credible competitor to Slack and Discord
Space support and multi account support and I’ll install it. Fluffychat has many features but still laggy.
Native OIDC support…something I wish more self hosted apps would prioritize. I shouldn’t need to maintain a bunch of user account systems on my own servers.
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.
“Blazing fast” makes me check out so fast.
You can self-host it, making it as private as you want.
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.
Thank you for answering the question! I am genuinely both trying to make a point and still be open to try new things. To me, there seems to be a real downward turn on UI/UX in a lot of applications these days, corporate included. When they mentioned the bit about supporting corporate, I have a hard time believing they will get very far with that customer group right now.
I really wish software, especially FOSS, would stop making the UI the afterthought. I try to keep a holistic view when designing things and everyone has a seat at the table. I wonder if projects are boxing themselves in and making it harder for the UI teams to properly integrate, and vice versa? I will happily take criticism and ideas from pretty much anyone, especially outside my immediate teams.
I am pretty out of the game on that as I spent quite a few years doing controls engineering instead. I am back in Software now and I feel old and a little lost. I graduated back in 2012 and we didn’t have all of these crazy developer roles and more specialized degrees. They were trying to get a Game Design program started when I graduated, and it was supposedly a mess for a few years.
I also think the Element Web UI is lacking, but it’s gotten better over the last few years, after they started taking design more seriously. With Element X they do proper UI/UX design as a first step, and then implement it.
The old Riot.im client was exceptionally terrible, in performance and design, so I’m really happy with Element X.
Element being focused on corporate needs is nothing new, since they’ve a few large (government, healthcare) contracts, and they’ve struggled with financing for years now. Big deployments using Synapse is the big reason dendrite doesn’t see much development anymore, even though it was planned as a replacement for Synapse at first.
I believe many of their side projects (P2P, VR) exist because they try to find possible business avenues, although I feel like most of them aren’t successful (and they stretch to thin because of that).
We should probably stop arguing about Matrix vs XMPP and finally decide what to use or else we’ll never move forward.
Got it. I’ll use matrix, and you can use XMPP
and judging by user numbers the answer is matrix lmao
Still waiting for an XMPP client to support threads
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?
Does Element X run directly on X now, without electron?
No. Unless you use waydroid
