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Synapse via ESS Community (https://element.io/server-suite/community), as it just works and is trivial to update, and tracks the best practices from Element in running a deployment with all the Matrix 2.0 stuff (sliding sync, OIDC auth, Element Call) enabled. The Helm charts are literally the same underlying codebase that powers ESS Pro for folks like NATO and the UN; the only difference is that ESS Community doesn't have the horizontal scaling and enterprise-privileging features that ESS Pro has.

The only gotcha is that Synapse is still not very resource efficient, especially for disk space, although work is finally under way to solve that.

(Meanwhile all our customer deployments run Synapse Pro + ESS Pro in order to get the scalability and Rust worker implementations in Syn Pro.)


only around 35% of the publicly visible matrix accounts are on matrix.org…

remember when you agreed with me that it was maybe regretable that the Favorites space was removed in favor of a process that required multiple clicks? and now it's months later and Element still has this redesign shipped, with every single one of the original flaws mentioned, still present.

I think Matrix has a lot of smart people involved, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but dear god, are you hiring for a TPM, by chance?

Every, single, time I have to go "Home" -> "Expand" -> "Favorites" to do what used to take one click, I lose a bit more faith in Element/Matrix.

Though, y'all did finally fix the notification sound that made me want to kill myself every single time it violated my ear drums. Only took.... 4 years? for that?


What were meant to be fast-follow fixes to the new left panel after it shipped in September ended up getting starved out by deadlines for paying customers, frustratingly. The work is happening now however.

Matrix has a pretty comprehensive featureset with clients across a broad range of platforms.

The accusations of it being overengineered come typically due to the Synapse server implementation being slow. This is basically an artefact of Matrix being quite complicated to provide a byzantine fault tolerant decentralised equivalent to WhatsApp or Slack etc - and time has gone into fixing stability and usability rather than performance. Meanwhile performance is getting better, but progress is slow due to tragedy-of-the-commons related funding challenges. We will get there in the end, though.


Thanks for the response Matthew! But please go to sleep!

Yes it's unfortunate how much Synapse's unperformant implementation has decreased general confidence in the protocol itself. I'm confident it will get better


Synapse has improved; Dendrite has stagnated due to lack of funding; meanwhile there are also rust-native homeservers like Conduit which are beta but smaller footprint. The plan on the Element side is to keep optimising Synapse - the main win to be had is https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pKtLl4vCV3-8xz8crvxW...

Those slides were interesting! And I use Claude similarly... kinda like Rubber Duck debugging except it's like Rubber Human debugging.

it's clean room.

How can you claim something accurately that is impossible to prove?

bleurgh. that issue is very actively under investigation (modulo xmas). please can you submit debug logs from Element Web referencing that issue.


I’m facing it on Element Desktop, but I’ll try to reproduce it on Element Web. I’ve tried to submit logs from Element Desktop, but it says that `/rageshake` (which I was told to do) is not a command. I’m happy to help with debugging this, but I’m not sure how to submit logs from Desktop.

Something like this happens basically every time I try to use Matrix though. Messages are not decrypting, or not being delivered, or devices can’t be authenticated for some cryptic reason. The reason I even tried to use Element Desktop is because my nheko is seemingly now incapable of sending direct messages (the recepient just gets infinite “waiting for message”).


Weird. Encryption these days (in Element Web/Desktop and Element X at least) should be pretty robust - although this whole identity reset thing is a known bug on Element Web/Desktop. You can submit debug logs from Settings: Help & About: Submit Debug Logs, and hopefully that might give a hint on what's going wrong.


No “Submit Debug Logs” there, as far as I can see. Do I need to be on matrix.org homeserver for this to work or something?

https://photos.goldstein.lol/share/OIgowBN4Wmi4zlm8DmDP0s8jH...


looks like whoever’s run that Element has disabled debug log reporting. not sure i can do much to help here :/


In theory https://element.io/en/download should provide an equivalent experience.


I'll have a look into what the transfer story from mattermost->element looks like.


what are you missing? the only things i can think of now are live location sharing, and a thread index?


According to the official Matrix website (https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/element-x/, https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/element/): threads, voice calls, spaces, SSO.


the “official matrix website” is basically a wiki that people happen to have PR’d against; it’s updated best effort.

In practice EX has threads, 1:1 calls, spaces and SSO now (threads and spaces in labs, as per the OP, but usable)


At least a while ago Element X broke bridging in a pretty annoying way, since all chats with more than 2 members were classified as groups, even if they were marked as DMs.


this is what we effectively did with https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers (on a per-room basis). the OP is from 2024, and so predates this.


ugh, sorry. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/424... should help significantly with this, and is due to happen in 2026 (it's required for Hydra Phase 2). But it's not there yet.


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