- cross-posted to:
- technologie@jlai.lu
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
“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.
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.
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
(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
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.
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
I had just uninstalled Element X like two weeks ago because I found it to under perform compared to the normal Element client on Android, in addition to lacking some features. I guess I’ll give it another shot.
Update: WOW this thing feels lightning fast compared to just a few weeks ago. This is great. Not sure about feature completeness, but based on speed I think I’ll migrate Element > Element X again. Great job to the team!
It hans’t changed speedwise for me. It has been lightning fast since it’s first release
I guess it depends on the phone, but even if you didn’t notice it, it should be more efficient now with less resource usage (battery, ram)
that’s interesting. I had found it fast initially when it was first released. I didn’t use it often but when I finally stared using Matrix more often I was bouncing between both and Element X was significantly slower than normal Element so I decided to uninstall just a few weeks ago. I had even tried un/reinstalling to see if it would fix it, but it didn’t. Much happier with it now.
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.
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.
Element x still doesn’t have support for spaces. Trying to navigate between rooms just by scrolling through one huge list is a nightmare.
Screensharing would let so many people move from discord
Wire supports it. Also more secure than Matrix
How is it more secure than matrix? I can’t even self-host it.
Yes, you can. The server code is on github. But I don’t know why you would, since all messages are encrypted client-side.
Its more secure because you know that all your users can’t send a message unencrypted, either accidentally or intentionally.
there’s a graphical indicator if they send something unencrypted, and there’s no way to turn an encrypted chat into an unencrypted chat on matrix. Plus they start encrypted by default, I honestly don’t even know how to make an unencrypted chat, I don’t think there’s any good way to other than using a client that doesn’t have encryption.
this is not a real problem.
It is a problem. Many orgs have strict rules not to use messaging solutions that support unencrypted messages
This doesn’t tick the box, so it blocks adoption
Discord uses their own screen sharing implementation because it performs better than what’s available in Electron by default. I don’t expect Element to achieve that, considering their focus isn’t gaming.
however this app does not use electron, so it might be less of a work here
Last time I checked they had it in the web version
Only through Jitsi as I remember, it wasn’t very good if that’s what they’re still using.
I’m still sad they stopped work on dendrite. P2P level decentralization, with E2EE, would be amazing.
These are still great improvements though. I’m hyped that loading seems to be so much faster.
They didn’t though? Source?
They paused funding for all of the exciting P2P and low bandwidth stuff last year. Hopefully it resumes soon, as mentioned in the GitHub thread.
https://matrix.org/blog/2023/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update-2023/#In-other-news
Meanwhile, P2P Matrix and Low Bandwidth Matrix is on hiatus until there’s dedicated funding - and Account Portability work is also temporarily paused in favour of commercial Element work, despite the fantastic progress made recently with Pseudo IDs (MSC4014) and Cryptographic identifiers (MSC4080). Given P2P Matrix and Account Portability were the main projects driving Dendrite development recently, this may also cause a slow-down in Dendrite development, although Dendrite itself will still be maintained.
as I understand they may resume work on it, but they have so few human resources that they nedded to put a full stop to it for now
Not available on f droid yet it seems
~~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
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
The result is blazing performance which outperforms the mainstream alternatives
I highly doubt that. At last the last version of it (released earlier this year) that supported my previous phone I’m pretty sure was more sluggish than telegram.
And even though it’s not really a visible problem on my new one, and even though that I can’t check it’s resource usage anymore (thanks again google for fucking uo /proc! it was a huge idea!), it still means that it uses more battery powerNative Sliding Sync (AKA Simplified Sliding Sync) was just released to Synapse and Element X over the past couple of weeks. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it is FAST now. My fairly large account usually syncs instantly now. If not instant, the longest I’ve seen was 1 second. Give Element X a try again (assuming your home server supports SSS).
my previous phone is not supported by current versions of element x. on the new one, I would probably not notice anything, because it’s not slow there and OS battery usage accounting is garbage.
currently I’m waiting for an F-droid release, as they are 3 months behind
Unfortunately the rust SDK / android version still doesn’t support native / simplified sliding sync. I updated synapse to v1.115.0 and cannot login. Apparently you have to use the proxy server sliding sync to login then toggle a developer setting, logout and log back in to use native one on android.
Android and iOS EX actually both use the rust SDK under the hood, but iOS is usually used as the test bed so it gets features a little faster than Android. EX iOS just got a stable version of it a couple days ago, so a more native feeling login process for SSS on Android should be coming very soon!
Yeah was kinda sad since android got like 3 releases in the last 3 days but SDK is not updated yet I guess. I’m hoping unified push will work with it better since it stopped working this month.
Edit also unread count / marking as read, that seems super broken in the older app.
Element X is a completely different beast though. Not only is it a successful Rust rewrite, but they also fixed the system architecture of Matrix to improve speeds. They haven’t matched Telegram’s usability though, but they’re close to Signal’s.
Not only is it a successful Rust rewrite
only the crypto SDK is Rust, the frontend and other app code is kotlin
but they also fixed the system architecture of Matrix to improve speeds
they did that by storing a lot less of the state on your phone in my understanding, and that means it won’t work as whell when offline or on a slow connection, and will use more mobile data from the cap. that is, if I’m correct.
Telegram isn’t really an alternative, they don’t even use encryption by default, so it should be faster. Better to compare real alternatives: Signal, Whatsapp, Simplex etc.
Telegram isn’t really an alternative, they don’t even use encryption by default, so it should be faster
even the user interface? the animations all over the app, scrolling between 2 consecutive messages of a room or anywhere in the settings? It’s not like element would encrypt the data at rest anyway. any and all menus of telegram are noticeably smoother, when not even looking for it
When telegram team is mainly focusing on UX instead of privacy and security, it is not wierd for me. They don’t have to bother about encryption, about matrix protocol which federates all the self-hosted servers, about self-hosting in itself etc. I’m pretty sure element’s UX is a side-quest compared to all those other things under the curtain. Summing it up, Element X is in fact a huge upgrade, making it closer in UX to other mainstream apps like those i mentioned above, not Telegram, because it is not even a messenger, its just a social media app that immitates “private and secure” messenger, but in reality it is just twitter DM.
No but people use it because it’s pleasant and easy to use with a nice UI, lots of features for stickers and sharing content, etc…
Having encryption and being ‘secure’ is not what will get most people to switch from Discord and Telegram, having the same features and doing it even better will.
Has anyone tried the new app?
Space support and multi account support and I’ll install it. Fluffychat has many features but still laggy.
Does Element X run directly on X now, without electron?
No. Unless you use waydroid
Bombastic
not on linux yet?
Is everything encrypted yet? Or do they still allow users to send unencrypted messages?
Unencrypted messages are useful for very large rooms, where encryption doesn’t provide meaningful more privacy since public rooms have to be considered public space anyway. Encryption does have overhead, so it makes sense to disable it.
Private rooms are E2EE by default and can’t be created unencrypted (at least in the Element X mobile UI). This is a good way to handle it IMO.
Encryption is, what, a 10% hit? I (and most companies) would gladly take that tax to ensure that it wasn’t possible for me or anyone in my org to accidentally send an unencrypted message.
10% of what? keys are regularly rotated, per-member, and it would soon cost a lot of storage to store historical keys for very large rooms (by their member count)
Sounds like a design flaw. How does this work with other messengers that don’t allow users to send unencrypted messages, like Wire, Signal, and WhatsApp?
(part 2) it doesn’t seem that signal has such a limit. maybe they’re just fine with using relatively a large part of their data for key storage
probably the same way, and probably with an upper limit on group chat member count
Groups have an encryption key that I guess you receive from other members upon joining.
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 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.
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
Store reviews are 2.4 / 5 why the poor reception
Might be historical reviews