by pentagrama | 2025-08-17 00:07:27+00:00
Auto-generated YouTube transcription:

Hi everyone and welcome to Matrix Live season 11 episode 7 where you are stuck with me Matthew project lead for Matrix.

I guess I'm going to be wearing both Matrix and Element CEO hats in this week's recording. I will try to identify which hat I'm wearing at any given point.

What I wanted to talk about this week is that there is clearly a lot of unhappiness being expressed out there about Matrix and Element this week.

I think we've basically seen a blog post a day, sometimes twice, ending up on the front page of Hacker News or Lobsters or wherever, with folks expressing quite reasonable disappointment and irritation at where Matrix and Element are at the moment.

And so I basically wanted to try to respond. I was thinking of putting out a blog post to articulate this more coherently, but I haven’t had a chance to put it together, so let's risk me improvising one off the top of my head.

Now, the root causes of the feedback that we're seeing are multiple, but one of the main ones that keeps coming up is this feeling that most people experience Matrix via Element.

Element currently has two apps: the classic Element apps, which haven't been updated for two years now, and then Element X, which is the rewrite we've done over the last two or three years in order to have a much better platform to build on.

However, the Element X apps have not got the full feature set of the classic ones.

As several folks have pointed out, this means that you either have a choice of a stale app which has performance issues and UX issues and hasn't really been updated in a few years other than for security issues, or an incomplete app.

I guess this is entirely my fault as CEO of Element, greenlighting and pushing for the whole rewrite in Element X.

This was not a failure mode that I anticipated, perhaps stupidly. The rationale was that the improvements in usability and performance of Element X would be such that folks would forgive some of the more exotic features like threads or spaces being missing at first.

That’s why back in September of last year we made a big song and dance about launching it as a Signal, iMessage, or WhatsApp style replacement.

None of those have spaces or threads, and for the messaging use case, I personally think Element X is a really good app for supporting that.

However, in practice, we’ve had two problems.

First, casual users just still end up installing the old app, don’t even know that Element X exists, and use that to gauge their opinion of Matrix.

Second, more interestingly, existing power users are just not moving over to Element X because it turns out people like spaces and threads way more than I ever realized.

Perhaps this is weird self-selection bias, where everyone assumes that people use apps similarly to how they and their colleagues, friends, and families use them.

In practice, I haven’t used the classic Element app in over two years now. I've been dogfooding Element X and I personally haven’t missed spaces and haven’t really missed threads that much, given that you do have compatibility. You can see the messages, you can respond in them, even if they don’t end up with dedicated UI like you get in the classic apps.

Either way, this is, to use the technical term, a cockup. Clearly, there are a lot of unhappy, angry people who have ended up feeling abandoned, basically let down by Element, due to being stuck between two stools.

And it's a weird one, because this is in some ways a good problem to have. If people were saying, "Element is awful, there is no solution, here are all the terrible things wrong with it, and they’re never going to fix it," then we’d really be in trouble...

Full transcription here: https://telegra.ph/Reflections-on-Matrix-criticism-over-the-...

(didn't fit due to Hacker News 4000 character limit).