there's matrix, which is also kind of aggravating to use, but at least the people who develop matrix clients actually care about them being good
Conversation
We've tried to make Matrix work for GrapheneOS but it's honestly quite terrible and causes substantial issues.
Official server implementation has terrible performance and reliability, E2E encryption has major issues with usability / reliability and the IRC bridge isn't great.
2
3
I've hit all three. I mention Matrix because I think Matrix will improve and Signal will not.
1
2
I think it's going to improve but it's also going to get worse as the servers, clients and room versions get more fragmented. The process of upgrading room versions already seems pretty disruptive, and ends up pushing out users just like the idle kicking by the IRC bridge bot.
1
1
the context though is Signal, which is primarily a 1:1 chat client. Matrix isn't going to be nearly as bad for that, would it?
1
I'm not sure. I expect it to end up with more and more caveats. It really should have had painless end-to-end encryption by default with verification being the optional part.
For public channels, IRC manages to be a lot more usable and reliable which is really saying a lot.
1
1
People have so many issues with Matrix that I'm starting to feel that I need to strongly recommend using the channel via IRC. Just one of example of the myriad of issues I run into with it is that I wanted to add links to the chat rooms at grapheneos.org/contact#commun to make it easy.
1
Turns out there's still no way to do a protocol link for Matrix.
Good news: they have a client-side (static) web app for this: matrix.to.
Bad news: it uses invalid URLs with double # and doesn't handle escaping properly, so I can't link to it. Element is the same.
3
1
I tried giving a channel link as an example and Twitter says this: "We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.".
This link: gist.githubusercontent.com/thestinger/a60. Weird.
1
Curious if Twitter allows me to link this:
app.element.io/#/room/#graphe
I can't put links like this on our site because it's run through an HTML validator as part of deploying it.
1
1
Maybe matrix.to links were being used as part of some cryptocurrency scam and now Twitter hates them...