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Comment by vanilla_nut | Hacker News Reader

God fucking dammit. I literally just put my reputation on the line with family last week that we should all switch to Signal. All I want is a decent E2EE messaging app.

Between this and their upcoming crypto payment system, I’m thinking I made a huge mistake switching from Telegram.

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I'm confused at how stories may make this no longer a decent e2ee app. Is it that you actively dislike stories and don't want other people to have the option to use them? While you may not want them, is it possible your family does and this may even make it easier for them to switch to Signal (and stay) than not?

Not trying to add snark, just genuinely curious why the addition of stories would detract from its e2ee nature.

Budgets are necessarily spent somewhere. A useless feature is paid work away from maintenance and staying relevant.

Ah, spreading too thin. Yes, I think that's a possibility. I also think not developing certain features can make one lose relevance. It's a trade off, no? I guess it just depends on someone's definition of a feature being "useless" and "irrelevant." Someone else sees live location as a necessary feature, I've never used it. Whereas I use statuses on WhatsApp almost every day.

Yup. Social media is constantly searching for the perfect product by trying out ridiculous but interesting combinations of technologies. Something works, we try out different stuff and hope to make progress.

But where is progress taking us? Should we follow it blindly?

But how to know whether it makes progress or not?

Exactly. Maybe it's all just a very clever proof of waste. Advertizement industry certainly looks like a cancer on collective conscioussness. Maybe art can supplant it. Extravagant displays of nothing in particular.

Figure out a new business model and I imagine many platforms will gladly move away from advertising. Advertising, unfortunately, has a pretty strong growth model. People get something for free and advertisers pay increasing prices for the one ad spot and when the spot maximizes its price, the platform creates more spots. As most business models, it burns out eventually, but subscriptions seem to burn out more quickly.

> All I want is a decent E2EE messaging app.

> I’m thinking I made a huge mistake switching from Telegram.

Does not compute.

I'm disappointed as well. I wish they would fix bugs such as messages presented out of order, non-stop ringing when syncing messages you've already read on another device, or add a robust backup solution.

What speaks against riot+matrix?

I agree matrix is the dream but getting people to use Signal was hard enough and the UX of Element is good but not _quite_ up to snuff for the general populus yet.

Matrix as an underlying technology is pretty good.

All of the clients are varying degrees of suck though.

What I want is a 1:1 copy of Discord's client UX. That's it.

Matrix[1] is fantasising and WhatsApp/Telegram are reality.

Signal is somewhere in the middle trying to be something that solves nobody’s messaging problem except a small set of people (journalists, whistleblowers?) where the communication is mostly like “A needs to discreetly communicate with B and they both can use Signal”, anything other than that it’s pretty useless (yes, I’ve tried it for really long and convinced many others to try it).

1. Especially all the clients. And not again Fluffy chat please. Name alone puts off most.

Related : I converted some friends to Element+Matrix. Then some unbearable bug showed up in Element UI and we had to move away immediately (I reported the bug to the Element project, and a year after the correction is still in progress) so I moved us to the next best solution : Signal. It works really fine. (although a pain not offering conveniences like : easy chat backups, and difficulty to move your conversations to a new phone and stuffs like that...)

I can't wait for the Matrix ecosystem to be mature enough !

Please can you point me at the bug in question? It shouldn't be taking us a year to fix unbearable stuff :(

I'm not OP but a while ago I wrote this comment which you responded to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27206569

Since then basically none of the specific bugs I cared about got fixed (that I think could be unbearable to me, some of them definitely are, not sure about all), which are: 8751, 9437, 9811, 10287, 10577, 13263, 13485, 14323, 14424, 15416, 15565, 16123, 16184, 16763, and 16807, all these were all opened before my comment, and everything earlier than 16123 is more than one year old and still open. Maybe one of those is miok's. Newer ones raised since then that also look important to me at first glance: 20046, 20005, 19929, 18458, 17838, 17218.

Also there is this closed bug still attracting comments: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/15500#issuec....

As much as I hate NPS scores in the industry, I think these bugs are preventing Matrix from getting new promoters.

Yes. We now have a dedicated crypto team which is literally wading through that bug list. It's taking longer than I'd like but folks have momentum now and are on the case.

This is the one I am talking about : https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/issues/516

Same issue is discussed here : https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/issues/1192

(I cannot find my own ticket which was a dupe of these ones)

The first mention of it is 2.5 years old.

For my non tech friend this was so annoying (whatever she tried that stuck message was still there) that she wanted a solution fast. I gave up after a few tries to solve this. (Like the classic : uninstall / reinstall) And I decided she didn't have to suffer this, just because I have ideals about software philosophy. Thanks god, Signal exists and my friends were okay to trust me on this one more time :)

I really hope to come back to Matrix one day ! (We really enjoyed it for nearly a year before this bug came up)

Thanks for pointing me at it; we revisited the bug and (at last) found what looks like the root cause: https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/issues/516#issu....

Thank you, I am really glad this old bug is gone. I haven't had the chance to check the fix yet (and the bug is pretty difficult to reproduce). I'll let my friends know about this conversation & fix :) In the long run I really hope to bring people back to Matrix. Thank you and the team for your work !

take a deep breath, calm down. this does not invalidate anything you want or use.

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