Telegram, one of my least favorite messaging apps, has finally done a revamp of web.telegram.org and it no longer has abysmally awful UX, but rather similar UX to things like Discord, Zulip, Matrix, Slack, etc...
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The native app has Telegram Folders, which are similar to Element Spaces, but still inferior to Discord/Slack/Zulip-style orgs.
Telegram Web still doesn't appear to have support for them? But maybe coming soon?
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Spaces in Element are also only a very incomplete version of what they're ultimately meant to become. It's supposed to become a lot more like a Discord server with the ability to require membership in it to use the rooms and handle permissions/roles across them there, etc.
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Yup, exactly my point. Element Spaces and Telegram Folders feel like half-measures as these tools pivot to a more org-based chat.
At least Element (Matrix) is trying to build that on reasonable well-designed E2EE. Telegram gave up on that long ago but still blusters.
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Matrix E2EE protocol is quite good but a few things like reactions are quite strangely not part of what's encrypted. Also, no attempt at protecting metadata. It's still far better than anything available for IRC, XMPP or Email which it's quite ready to replace completely already.
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Well, for comparison, Telegram doesn’t have any support for E2EE group chat whatsoever.
The native apps use their wacky custom “MTProto” transport encryption algorithm for all client/server encryption, versus some standard protocol like TLS, QUIC, or Noise.
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Yeah, the Matrix encryption protocol itself actually appears to be very good including the group chat support.
Element also defaults to E2EE for all private rooms now, which can actually be a bit annoying if you intend to make them public since you can't yet turn it off.
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Ideally, I think clients should probably tie whether it's E2EE to public vs. private with it getting turned off by default when making it public.
It's quite annoying for a huge public room because it's totally useless and it adds a lot of overhead, but you can't turn it off yet.
You would have to make a new public room and then direct people from the old one to the new one with a tombstone and pings. That's what we had to do for the GrapheneOS testing room simply because we couldn't turn off the default E2EE when making it into a public room.
I mean, there was always a switch, it's just turning it on resulted in a horrible and confusing UX for a long, long time.
It's getting better now.
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The UI of E2EE enabled by default for private and disabled by default for public is great. The main UX issue is just that you can never turn off E2EE. Rooms growing and going from being private to public is quite normal, and then having E2EE becomes very annoying due to overhead.
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