My team started using Matrix/Element after years of frustration with Teams and Slack. It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads, AI, bloat, crap, etc is wonderful.
I really hope the EU throws some serious money at them to get the bugs worked out, add some minor features, and clean up the UX enough that an "office normie" can onboard as easily as MS.
My dream is that Matrix can do for intra-org comms what Signal did for SMS.
I don’t know much about Matrix. Maybe in this case the key is money.
But having worked at various startups and enterprises, it is very common for lots of money and resources to thrown at projects and for little or no progress to be made.
Money might be a necessary condition but it’s definitely not a sufficient one. See Microsoft teams.
Again I know nothing about Matrix, but I found your comment about UX concerning. UX is a problem that is almost immune to money. An extremely clear vision is almost always the bottleneck. Money can always help with adding features or performance or scaling, but I feel like it doesn’t usually fix UX. Hope I’m wrong.
Oh I doubt it, unless you have that person with vision to interpret the results of the usability testing and turn them into a single cohesive design.
Good UX comes from someone that has deeply internalized the problems a piece of software is solving for users and the constraints on those users. Most startups do this without usability testing by doing things like sales or customer support. Anyway, IME usability testing is not the bottleneck to good UI.
I don't disagree with you that you need to have a singe cohesive design vision based on solving for users. But I think that certainly usability testing can lead to even better results and is mostly constrained by cost.
But on the other hand, I think it's reasonable to hope that the "clear vision" for Matrix can largely be cribbed from all the other nigh-indistinguishable team chat apps like Slack, Discord, Mattermost, et al. In that case money to actually make the obvious fixes might be enough.
Sometimes good enough is good enough. Slack, Teams, Matrix, whatever, as long as you're meeting most daily driving requirements, everything else is maintenance and long tail quality of life improvement (imho).
What else are Teams users going to get out of Microsoft chasing an ever increasing enterprise valuation and stock price target with regards to their user experience? Email just works, make teams comms that just works and is mostly stable. Get off the treadmill of companies chasing ever more returns (which will never be enough) at the expense of their customer base. We have the technology.
I think the PowerSync [1] team is missing out on an opportunity to showcase their impressive data sync technology by building a minimalist Slack clone.
Yea, if you have to waste an extra 15 minutes per day due to bad UX who cares, it’s much better that you get the self-satisfied feeling of sticking it to “the man” (American big tech).
I mean it only adds up to 90 days of your life wasted over a 30 year career. European peoples time has a lower salary value anyways. UX doesn’t even matter that much, the political meme of the day is much more important.
Microsoft Teams already is already terrible UX, we have nowhere to go but up. Perhaps you are unaware, and if so, you should be thankful you don’t have to lose time using it. There are objectively better solutions available.
I'm in several Slack teams for non profits and professional orgs, Teams for a client or two, IRC and Matrix servers for digital archiving ops, Signal/WhatsApp/GroupMe/Telegram groups, etc. I have been in tech for 25+ years, I am familiar with the extremes. You are right, things can be bad, that is the point of systems engineering: to drive directionally towards continual improvement. Success is never assured, but throwing our hands up and giving up is not reasonable. Make a plan, work the plan. Default to action. Work is hard.
I recommend "Thinking in Systems" by Donella H. Meadows (ISBN13 9781603580557) on this topic [1]. It's ~$10 on Amazon as of this comment, and the PDF is easy to find with a quick web search.
Care to give me an example to satisfy my morbid curiosity? I have used a lot of really bad chat clients over the year and Microsft's rewritten Skype is one of only a handful worse than Teams. Teams is not the worst but it is on my top 3 or 5 worst of the 30+ chat clients I have used. I have heard Lynk also was really bad but I never used it. Microsoft certainly has some of the worst.
Element is bad but it is way better than Teams from my experience.
Matrix is so much worse than Team it will make your head spin. It suffers from design by committee to an unbelievable extent, and its various end-to-end security features are wonderful from a privacy standpoint but make things much much more complicated.
I've used both and written code to integrate into both. You never have to worry about, for example, losing access to all previous messages in your Teams channels if you get a new phone.
I’ve used matrix for years, ran my own federated server for a while.
I’ve been critical of the user experience and issues with how it’s handled by the matrix team before but I acknowledge that by and large these problems can be fixed with money.
Big players need to put their big boy pants on and throw a couple coins from their farcically large coin purse and they can drive a stake through the wretched heart that is Teams.
And this is the part I hope Europe gets. They don't have nearly as much money to throw at Matrix as Microsoft can throw at Teams, but they do have massive resources, and I bet that since Matrix doesn't have many of the same shitty KPIs as Slack and Teams, those resources can go much further.
The lack of shitty KPIs is the main thing. Hiring 10 full time devs to work on Matrix would probably be more effective than 500 full time devs on Slack/Teams with most of them stuck on weird Product Manager goals and renaming things to Copilot 365 Teams with Copilot.
> Are you saying that Microsoft is more wealthy than all of “Europe”?
"In 2024, the EU spent €403 billion on research and development" [1]. In 2024, Microsoft spend $29.5bn on R&D [2]. So about 20 Microsofts makes up the entire EU's R&D expenditure.
Alphabet, meanwhile, spent $49.3bn on R&D in 2024 [3]. It earned $350bn that year. So it would be correct to say that Microsoft and Alphabet's revenues, alone, rival the total amount Europe spends on research and development. (Non-EU non-British spending is insignificant.)
Nah I'm just saying that Microsoft has more disposable money to throw at Teams than Europe has to throw at Matrix because Microsoft is a corporation that is choosing how to spend its money internally and Europe (or the EU, but why leave Switzerland, GB, etc. out of the fun?) would be funding an external entity in a (possibly?) new way.
I'm still learning how the EU applies grants to open source projects for specific feature sets, but I'm guessing that there's a lot of friction that could be removed.
And yeah, I agree that the money needed to improve Matrix is nothing. It's about getting organized and applying that money well.
To me Europe's push for digital sovereignty has the potential to reshape open source software's competitiveness around the world and in turn, Europe's.
France donates to the Matrix Foundation (which helps the protocol retain its neutrality and independence, and is very much appreciated), but doesn't currently financially support Element's dev as their upstream. We're trying to fix that though!
Element has put tens of millions of dollars into Matrix over the years and today provides hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of resources per year to support it.
Amandine (acting managing dir on the fdn) is preparing the public financial report of the Foundation which will have more details on this; it should be out in a few weeks.
I've always thought the really low bandwidth support they added a few years ago was to support the french subs. It matched all the requirements of VLF/ELF communications.
I don't know anything about Matrix. What makes it "far from perfect"? First priority of every business chat should be to move the conversation to something designed for the business concern at hand, because a chat app is a terrible place for it to live.
> It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads, AI, bloat, crap, etc is wonderful.
I think there are three main reasons it's not perfect yet:
1. Building both a decentralised open standard (Matrix) at the same time as a flagship implementation (Element) is playing on hard mode: everything has to be specified under an open governance process (https://spec.matrix.org/proposals) so that the broader ecosystem can benefit from it - while in the early years we could move fast and JFDI, the ecosystem grew much faster than we anticipated and very enthusiastically demanded a better spec process. While Matrix is built extensibly with protocol agility to let you experiment at basically every level of the stack (e.g. right now we're changing the format of user IDs in MSC4243, and the shape of room DAGs in MSC4242) in practice changes take at least ~10x longer to land than in a typical proprietary/centralised product. On the plus side, hopefully the end result ends up being more durable than some proprietary thing, but it's certainly a fun challenge.
2. As Matrix project lead, I took the "Element" use case pretty much for granted from 2019-2022: it felt like Matrix had critical mass and usage was exploding; COVID was highlighting the need for secure comms; it almost felt like we'd done most of the hard bits and finishing building out the app was a given. As a result, I started looking at the N-year horizon instead - spending Element's time working on P2P Matrix (arewep2pyet.com) as a long-term solution to Matrix's metadata footprint and to futureproof Matrix against Chat Control style dystopias... or projects like Third Room (https://thirdroom.io) to try to ensure that spatial collaboration apps didn't get centralised and vendorlocked to Meta, or bluesky on Matrix (https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean/, before Jay & Paul got the gig and did atproto).
I maintain that if things had continued on the 2019-2022 trajectory then we would have been able to ship a polished Element and do the various "scifi" long-term projects too. But in practice that didn't happen, and I kinda wish that we'd spent the time focusing on polishing the core Element use case instead. Still, better late than never, in 2023 we did the necessary handbrake turn focusing exclusively on the core Element apps (Element X, Web, Call) and Element Server Suite as an excellent helm-based distro. Hopefully the results speak for themselves now (although Element Web is still being upgraded to use the same engine as Element X).
3. Finally, the thing which went wrong in 2022/2023 was not just the impact of the end of ZIPR, but the horrible realisation that the more successful Matrix got... the more incentive there would be for 3rd parties to commercialise the Apache-licensed code that Element had built (e.g. Synapse) without routing any funds to us as the upstream project. We obviously knew this would happen to some extent - we'd deliberately picked Apache to try to get as much uptake as possible. However, I hadn't realised that the % of projects willing to fund the upstream would reduce as the project got more successful - and the larger the available funds (e.g. governments offering million-dollar deals to deploy Matrix for healthcare, education etc) then you were pretty much guaranteed the % of upstream funding would go to zero.
So, we addressed this in 2023 by having to switch Element's work to AGPL, massively shrinking the company, and then doing an open-core distribution in the form of ESS Pro (https://element.io/server-suite/pro) which puts scalability (but not performance), HA, and enterprise features like antivirus, onboarding/offboarding, audit, border gateways etc behind the paywall. The rule of thumb is that if a feature empowers the end-user it goes FOSS; if it empowers the enterprise over the end-user it goes Pro. Thankfully the model seems to be working - e.g. EC is using ESS for this deployment. There's a lot more gory detail in last year's FOSDEM main-stage talk on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkCKhP1jxdk
Eitherway, the good news is that we think we've figured out how to make this work, things are going cautiously well, and these days all of Element is laser-focused on making the Element apps & servers as good as we possibly can - while also continuing to also improve Matrix, both because we believe the world needs Matrix more than ever, and because without Matrix Element is just another boring silo'd chat app.
The bad news is that it took us a while to figure it all out (and there are still some things still to solve - e.g. abuse on the public Matrix network, finishing Hydra (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Keu8aE8t08), finishing the Element Web rework, and cough custom emoji). I'm hopeful we'll get here in the end :)
yes, Element is venture-funded, which is where much of the money came to build all this in the first place - see the bottom of https://element.io/en/about.
I've been running a Matrix homeserver for a couple of years now and I've never had any issues with it. Not saying Matrix is perfect, but it is not as bad as you are making it out to be either.
Have you never run into any issues with encrypted chats not syncing properly between different clients, or messages not getting transferred correctly between users on different homeservers because of federation issues? Or matrix clients attempting to do some action, spinning for a bit, and then failing with an error message with no details? Or searching for rooms not working correctly and the UI not being able to clearly tell you what is actually going on with the search? I set up a Matrix server relatively recently and these were all issues that came up pretty much immediately.
Zulip is phenomenal. Cool and unique concept, clean and snappy UI. I have no idea why it's not more popular. (Network effects and an unfamiliar layout, I suppose.)
I see the comments that say Matrix has improved a lot, so maybe it's fine now, but yeah, when I tried it previously it sucked. Weird UI was my chief complaint, but more importantly it didn't seem like there was a proper concept of organizations, in the sense of Discord or Slack servers? With roles, channels, even silly things like custom emojis. Matrix at the time seemed like just an SMS group chat replacement, I have no idea why people recommended it for organizational use. Maybe it's improved since.
It's been more than a year, and Element X does honestly look a lot better. But it's been mobile-only for years. And if I'm correct, the desktop/web clients still require you to use embedded Jitsi. And what about non-Element clients?
As a user, I just need stuff like this to be standard, and work for every participant regardless of what client they use.
Element Desktop/Web (and Element X) use Element Call for proper encrypted group VoIP/Video these days rather than Jitsi - since Sept 2024. Meanwhile we're busy upgrading Element Web to use the same rust-sdk engine as Element X (although this will take a year or so).
In terms of non-Element clients... I can't really speak for them, but I hear really good things about Cinny for folks who want a more Discord-like experience on desktop, and we livecoded an Element Call integration for it at the Matrix Conference in October (hopefully it merged). I think FluffyChat also may support the new MatrixRTC calling too.
Element X is in some cases still a downgrade from Element. For instance there doesn't seem to be a way to create local key backups anymore. Also, that calls between Element and Element X are incompatible means both apps need to be installed in order to receive calls from all contacts.
Still, I love Matrix and hope that these issues will be resolved in time.
Manually importing/exporting keybackups is on the todo list (albeit towards the bottom). Supporting legacy calls is not (unless someone contributes it); the intention is to converge asap on native Matrix group calls.
yeah, it's fine for me - probably as good as an electron app can get (def not good as a true native app but it's def better than having to use my phone...)
Personally I've found Matrix significantly more user friendly than Threema work. Zulip I haven't used in anger so I can't comment on that but I've seen a few places that even open source they charge per user for things like notifications. Not ideal IMHO. There should be an option to replace notifications with a separate service.
It's hard to find a decent service that ticks all the boxes but I do sincerely hope that the EU can support Matrix to bring it up to the standard that we all deserve.
> Mobile notifications for organizations with up to 10 users
Why does the self-hosted edition have this restriction? If the software is truly OSS, the limit could be trivially patched. But this kind of restriction just does not inspire much confidence in the project to be honest.
Mobile notifications do not require outside operators. UnifiedPush / ntfy is FLOSS, and allows for a single background connection for multiple apps / notification channels. It can also be self-hosted (and I do!)
This puts the operational costs (number of devices and notifications) on whomever is running the server - and because of how valuable metadata is, I expect them to be run in-house by governments
Well I guess you can do the same with zulip, redirect notifications somewhere else that is. Never hosted zulip, but it should be more or less staightforward when hosting it yourself, the 10 free looks like a limit when using their endpoint, not universal.
Someone once said to me, be very careful about negotiating with leverage… when you twist someone’s arm, they’ll say, “I’ll remember that. You may have won this one, but I’m gonna win the next one.”
Sadly, the US has done this to ourselves… all this arm twisting and strong-manning is coming home to roost.
It’s not clear that patchwork EU government back offices migrating off Teams will hurt US tech, but long term, in aggregate, this is going to be a headache for American tech.
EU can’t out innovate US tech, but they can make it harder to dominate their markets.
I hope you're right! I mean, at the level of personal relationships I fully agree[0]. However, institutions tend to be forgetful.
[0]: Someone once said to me something very similar to what you quoted: "Be nice to people. People will remember you. And they will gossip if they don't like you and you have wronged them. It's much easier to ruin your reputation with a single action done to a single person than to build up a good one."
If so, I think the onus would be on you to prove it, not me.
Or, more importantly, if you really think the EU will be a tech powerhouse, shouldn’t you be writing checks to their startups left and right?
Because I think that would be the revealed preference here. I’m guessing you’re not heavily invested in EU tech companies, right? Because that would say a lot about your true beliefs.
> Sadly, the US has done this to ourselves… all this arm twisting and strong-manning is coming home to roost.
No it's not. This is theater to give the impression that they are "getting the orange buffoon". They'll be back in short order, and even if they aren't, it'll just be an insignificant blip on a financial chart somewhere, not even big enough to warrant someone's attention. They did similar things in Trump's first term, and came back groveling.
Maybe, and you might be right. These might be one-off posturing things from the EU.
Sure, a few back office shifts to OpenOffice aren’t a big deal today, but I’m worried about where we are in 10, 20 years. There is no EU tech competition to us today, but who knows… tomorrow is a new day.
A lot of the worlds actual problems are not about innovation but correctly using existing technologies and making the right investments in the needed infrastructure.
zulip seems to me like it would be a better solution to me (open source, self hostible, familiar paradigm, etc), but then again, I think _anything_ would be better than teams... so more power to them!
I'm not sure if it ended up being used this way, but if I recall correctly, when that was being initially implemented, federation was actually a core feature: different agencies / municipalities / etc could have their own servers and control their own data and accounts, but inter-agency conversations and rooms would be well-supported, along with each agency retaining a copy of the rooms on their own servers.
The real issue is that there is no easy-to-self-host complete enough solution. We do not have something go install-able, pio-able, without a gazillion of deps web-app who offer:
- a direct call UI
- a chat UI, with optional group chats
- a simple web site to be used as a wiki-like tool to share textual stuff + common media, storage internally managed
We have anything to do all of the above, but all very complex, spread across many different projects, fragile, hyper tedious to set up etc.
Even if those don’t work SAP, Dassault, etc… make massively complex software and services across multiple verticals and could trivially ship a competitor
Element’s topco may be UK based for now, but the vast majority of our business and footprint is in the EU - https://element.io/en/about. All but one of our mobile app team is in the EU for instance (and when we started, the UK was too :|)
In the Netherlands, a lot of government systems aren't procured from the Microsofts of this world. There are a lot of middle men (consultancy agencies) involved that over the years have helped build a strong ecosystem with lots of expertise around Microsoft and related suppliers.
So indeed, it's not like you can just replace a software product (or service) by some EU or open alternative. And there are huge vested interests.
Installing another app, such as Signal, on your personal computer is one thing. On 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 computers, installing it, configuring it, changing settings, updating it, backing it up, locking down settings from user changes (such as retention) - all that requires special tools to do it efficiently at scale. Without the management tools, no way that bit of IT can be used.
The most common tool by far is Microsoft's Active Directory and Group Policy, which has the best compatibility with Windows and with Microsoft applications, including Office. If AD/GP is already deployed, imagine the burden of deploying a second tool to your 1K/10K/100K computers, setting up the server, learning to use it ... you're not doing that for one application unless it's very valuable. The exception is a tool bundled with the application for its own management, but that's going to have to be efficient to deploy, learn, and use to be worthwhile.
Therefore, for many organizations, any application must be effectively managed by AD/GP, which requires the application's developer to create AD/GP management components.
Do Matrix, Signal, or any other application have system management tools?
Zoom came along with a securre video/voice chat, sure it's American, but it was by far the world leader
Microsoft then used its monopoly in office tools to push Teams to everyone
You can't compete with a trillion dollar company offering your product as a bundle your clients already pay for, even if your product is better. Even VC money runs out eventually
To be fair, Microsoft already had Skype (for Business) and NetMeeting before that. It's not like they were new to that market. NetMeeting existed for more than a decade before Zoom even came into existence.
Zoom had COVID-19 play in it's favor, that's about it.
Skype for Business is the VoIP component for Teams, now. Sharepoint is the file service for Teams, too.
Basically, Teams is a front end for a bunch of old Mircosoft cloud services... plus chat. Actually more than one chat as teams channels chat is a separate tech stack from private chat. It used to be much more monlothic and then the Sharepoint people got their hooks into it.
I don’t know how Teams even got the approval to be released. It must be so embarrassing to be Satya and be forced to use this shitty piece of software.
I can’t believe that software of this quality is used so widely. Market competitive forces are not able to do their thing unfortunately.
It's because of the licenses mostly. If you buy e.g. business standard or business premium or whatever you want to make the most of it. Hey, there is a free chat app included, and it integrates so well with the rest of m365!
(Also most people don't know that you can still use a KMS with/for office 2024. You don't need M365.)
errr market monopoly forces are doing their thing … the point is that only a govt can force eg an OS + APP anticompetitive monopoly provider to split up into multiple companies
I think Mattermost lost a lot of instance admins' trust when they recently decided to update the server to limit access to old messages without good reason. On self-hosted instances!
That's a shame, I interviewed there once, decided not to take it but it was one of the few places I could have seen myself working at, they seemed like decent folks trying to build something worthwhile.
If you work with lots of other entities who want full control over their own comms (e.g. other governments, other departments, other EU entities like European Parliament and Council, the UN, NATO, etc) then decentralisation or federation is a big deal.
In the public sector it's basically a requirement: it's bananas if your country's critical infrastructure ends up dependent on some a product effectively controlled by another country (e.g. Teams) - and you obviously want to be able to communicate with other govt entities rather than being stuck in an island.
Then it's a natural extension to the private sector - although for now, it feels more folks are on the "nobody got sacked for using Teams" train.
Well there's always Matterbridge. If you don't have complicated workflows to replicate (and even then) you can just replicate to XMPP, Nextcloud or whatever.
Matrix is a decentralised encrypted chat protocol on which you could build something like Zulip, except decentralised and end-to-end encrypted.
Element is the actual app being trialled here, which feels more like Slack and/or Signal than Zulip. The point is that you get something you can selfhost while also interoperating with other deployments… while also encrypting the data end-to-end with Signal protocol.
I'm sure you could do some of Zulip's features on top of Matrix.
But for what it's worth, as Zulip's lead developer, every time I'm looked at whether we could have built Zulip on top of Matrix, it just feels impossible to me. And a big part of it is the architectural decisions Matrix made to support a decentralized E2EE social network, which are not required for a self-contained chat system like Zulip or Slack (which can still be bridged with other chat systems). Permissions enforcement, performance, and lots of other details really benefit from the more focused goal, where we've explicitly decided we're not building a generic distributed network architecture and are not competing with WhatsApp.
That said, I think it's great that we have multiple OSS chat systems with different strategies that are targeting different collections of niches!
I will never understand why so many organizations entrusted the communications fabric of their organization to Microsoft and SalesForce Cloud services over the last decade. If an organization can succeed in escaping Teams or Slack to Element/Matrix, that's great, even if it's a use case where Zulip would be a better end-user experience for their requirements.
Speaking as the CEO/CTO of Element... the classic Element apps on mobile were buggy, thanks to being a ~10 year old codebase with no shared code between platforms and effectively the 1st generation Matrix client. Which is why we replaced them over the last few years with Element X, with all the heavy lifting shared between iOS & Android via matrix-rust-sdk (effectively a 3rd gen Matrix SDK).
That said, 70% of our users haven't got the memo yet - we'll do a hard-upgrade when the remaining missing features in Element X (Spaces & Threads) are fully out of Labs.
Meanwhile, Element Web is lagging behind Element X - but we're now in the middle of an incremental in-place upgrade (not a big-bang rewrite, thank goodness) to use matrix-rust-sdk - see our talk from FOSDEM last Sunday for the details: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/DZJVTS-an-element-web...
> That said, 70% of our users haven't got the memo yet - we'll do a hard-upgrade when the remaining missing features in Element X (Spaces & Threads) are fully out of Labs.
This isn't users not getting the memo yet, this is users being faced with an unfortunate choice between a buggy, slow client and a new client that doesn't implement important functionality like Spaces and Threads.
Can i ask why is Element Classic even available on the Google Play Store? If you want people to move away from this?
I've only started my Matrix journey, in the form of writing bots using the matrix Python library. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, as the Matrix protocol could be really impactful.
When Element X first launched, the goal was for it to cover the personal messenger use case. This worked just fine for some people, but for many, feature parity with the old apps and parity with the web experience was a hard blocker.
Both Spaces and Threads are about to land, and there are other lower-profile features that also need rounding out. We would expect full parity by April this year. At which point migration should be an obvious choice.
I’m excited to watch the talk. I’m generally critical of Matrix, but that’s because I want it to succeed. Lately I find you’ve been doing a lot of things right, so I hope you keep going!
I assumed it was because people here are constantly telling Arathorn that Element (not ElementX) is slow and buggy, and that when they last tried the default server (circa 2019 or so) is was buggy and full of rough edges
He's (in my mind) always positive, open, and willing to admit the shortcomings of the platform he shephards... but damn does he deal with a lot of undeserved criticism (and deserved criticism, where applicable)
Federation can feel like "just a feature" but the E2E encryption (also in group chats) is a reason for Matrix to exist and a big reason why it's so slow.
"Slow" in what sense? Development? Because I self host a Conduit server and I don't ever notice messages being slow. It would be hard to notice anyway, as in a group chat people usually take some time to type in their responses.
The sync between large groups used to be slow because of amount of data, but Element X and "sliding windows" were rolled out to help with it.
AFAIK, the public Matrix server used to be slow because of a heavy load (I think), but on my self-hosted instance that's not a problem at all.
The experience of using Matrix involves a lot of sluggishness at various points in the client - waiting to decrypt messages or properly sync keys, waiting to join a room or for room search to load - these are the things that have been salient to me using multiple matrix clients with a freshly-spun-up server within the past month.
I more mindfully played a bit with my Element (web UI), and Element X (Android), and while there might something to it, and I suspect the e2e encrypted data model will always lead to some extra work required. Element seems a bit sluggish. However Element X on my Android seems butter smooth.
And event the slower Element seems far better than Discord that I'm forced to use, where I can't even scroll history without the whole thing stuttering.
I hope that at some point a focus of the Matrix project will become why this isn’t being done. A better developer experience would supercharge the ecosystem, IMO.
Matrix should be the default for anyone building a chat app, but for some reason it’s not.
They are different, and the biggest reason is (I suspect) that a Zulip workspace is self-contained while a Matrix server is able to federate with other Matrix servers.
Other European institutions are also adopting Matrix, so federation may turn out to be an important feature.
Matrix has threads. So does discord, but discords UI around them basically renders them functionally useless.
Anyway, the first goal listed in this project was to move to European sovereign solutions so Zulip failed at the first hurdle.
Given the (lack of) speed of European bureaucracy, this is likely more a reaction to the US sanctioning the ICC than the more recent Greenland saber rattling, but you'll probably see more of this in the future.
I wouldn't say Discord threads are useless - I do wish the UI made them more obvious, but I'm in many discord chats that use threads all the time.
Matrix has threads in a sense, but in this very thread the project lead is talking about how the new, ostensibly less buggy and more performant flagship client does not yet fully support them.
Element Software SARL and Element Software GmbH however are not. In practice I believe it's Element Software GmbH providing the European Commission deployment of ESS. (Both are owned by the UK topco, but at the current rate we might flip one of them to be the topco instead).
The Declaration for European Digital Sovereignty defined digital sovereignty as the EU and its Member States' ability to act autonomously and to freely choose their own solutions, while reaping the benefits of collaboration with global partners, when possible. The UK is not the EU or a member state.
Part of Russia is in Europe. Do you believe Russian products were considered?
The EU's definition of digital sovereignty included collaboration with global partners. It is obvious why UK companies could be considered more reliable global partners than US or Russian companies. A muddled concept of European was not needed to explain it. If where an open source solution was developed mattered even.
If nothing else this puts the spotlight on alternatives to Teams/Slack, which will increase adoption, and should increase pressure to improve (as far as that goes...)
I've not liked Slack for FOSS projects (it's not IRC, it has problems with moderation enforcement), and NOBODY likes Teams.
As I've said before, Matrix really is the only viable open source solution for in-company communication.
Every other solution (Zulip / Mattermost / whatever) is too risky, they could easily bait-and-switch you like Gitlab did, by moving important features to different tiers, or engage in other shenanigans afforded by the open core model.
Matrix has a bad reputation because it used to be downright terrible (first time I tried it, in like 2018-2019), but is a lot better now.
Correction: Zulip is 100% open-source software, and has been for a decade now. (I lead the Zulip project). Zulip's protocol, which is used for client/server communication by all major clients, has extensive documentation including the complete change history for the last several years on https://zulip.com/api/ and https://zulip.com/api/changelog.
As far as I know, there is no mechanism through which Zulip could bait-and-switch a customer that Element could not also do. And I think that as a practical matter, it would be a lot easier for a new team to pick up developing Zulip if the Kandra Labs team were to disappear than the similar question for Matrix/Element.
The core reason is that Matrix is far less simple and self-contained than Zulip. I've talked to multiple groups who tried to build apps on top of Matrix and found it too difficult. https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/giving-up-on-element-and-matrixorg... may be a useful third-party reference.
This isn't to say Matrix is bad. It's just targeting a different niche. Matrix was designed around the requirements of a global social network, where you want to be able to keep writing in channels even in event of a network partition. As a result, Matrix is far more complex and less self-contained than a Zulip server is. If you are doing internal communications with some external guests, you are far safer from technical risk with a robust self-contained system like Zulip than something like Matrix that is also a social network.
Zulip's goal is to be the best way to do complex work, focused on replacing tools like Slack, Teams, and Discord, without the ambition to support a social network, and that changes a lot about the architecture and what we can do in terms of performance and focus on the human experience.
The complexity associated with Matrix comes from wanting to build a multivendor ecosystem around an open standard, the decentralisation (and federation) to avoid building islands and then implementing things like multi-device e2ee and VoIP in such a context.
However, it is exactly these properties that make it so appealing to an organisation like the EC as they pursue digital sovereignty.
The goals of Matrix have nothing to do with being a social network. You could theoretically build a social network on top of Matrix (Matrix essentially syncs JSON in real-time), but I'm not aware of a project with traction, and more to the point, those projects are not relevant to this discussion. Yes Matrix is resilient to network partitions (that's a good thing for a messenger!), but that seems entirely orthogonal to your point on social networks.
Finally, I don't think it's fair to draw a comparison between the relationship between Kandra Labs and Zulip vs Element and Matrix. Yes Element is a major player in the Matrix eco-system having originally formed to hire the Matrix founding team, but since then many Matrix vendors have sprung up and if Element were to disappear tomorrow Matrix would continue. In fact, this is the whole purpose of having an independent Foundation, which in turn encourages multiple vendors to operate side by side.
I think the intention was never to get their communication audited (potentially via poor security), but ours. You know, to protect the children and all that.
I don't really care if it's good or bad for the US as a whole; I care whether or not it's good for free software communication apps. I'm an American citizen and I own MSFT in my index funds just like lots of other people do; but I'd also rather run a free software chat app than Microsoft Teams.
The U.S. government has long looked out for U.S. companies, even to the point of staging coups (e.g. United Fruit Company). The Trump administration has been threatening direct invasions while also levying tariff's and other actions when other countries try to enact taxation or legislation of American tech companies operating in their jurisdictions. U.S. tech execs have applauded and lined up to bend the knee. Now they're finding out that their products are replaceable.
The replacements aren't perfect, but an injection of new users and funding could allow them to improve rapidly. Meanwhile, American companies like MS and Google seem determined to enshitify their products and force AI adoption because they're financially entangled with OpenAI.
Is this bad for the U.S.? It depends on how fast Americans smarten up. MS needs to start putting their products first again. Meta needs to stop relying on their government links to coerce other jurisdictions into accepting utterly irresponsible products that cause social harm while producing no tax revenue to mitigate that harm. All Americans need to stand up to their government and force it to back down from imperialist aggression.
The U.S. and U.S. software have lost international trust and are now losing out to competitors because of it. Those competitors no longer need to be better or cheaper. Just trustworthy. It is possible to mitigate this loss of trust with prompt action, but every delay causes permanent harm. The world is watching.
My team started using Matrix/Element after years of frustration with Teams and Slack. It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads, AI, bloat, crap, etc is wonderful.
I really hope the EU throws some serious money at them to get the bugs worked out, add some minor features, and clean up the UX enough that an "office normie" can onboard as easily as MS.
My dream is that Matrix can do for intra-org comms what Signal did for SMS.
I don’t know much about Matrix. Maybe in this case the key is money.
But having worked at various startups and enterprises, it is very common for lots of money and resources to thrown at projects and for little or no progress to be made.
Money might be a necessary condition but it’s definitely not a sufficient one. See Microsoft teams.
Again I know nothing about Matrix, but I found your comment about UX concerning. UX is a problem that is almost immune to money. An extremely clear vision is almost always the bottleneck. Money can always help with adding features or performance or scaling, but I feel like it doesn’t usually fix UX. Hope I’m wrong.
> UX is a problem that is almost immune to money
Usability testing seems like something where you can get better UX with a lot of money: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-testing-101/
Oh I doubt it, unless you have that person with vision to interpret the results of the usability testing and turn them into a single cohesive design.
Good UX comes from someone that has deeply internalized the problems a piece of software is solving for users and the constraints on those users. Most startups do this without usability testing by doing things like sales or customer support. Anyway, IME usability testing is not the bottleneck to good UI.
I don't disagree with you that you need to have a singe cohesive design vision based on solving for users. But I think that certainly usability testing can lead to even better results and is mostly constrained by cost.
For sure. But without a cohesive vision throwing money at it can only make it worse if it does anything at all.
> UX is a problem that is almost immune to money.
Unfortunately this is very well-put.
But on the other hand, I think it's reasonable to hope that the "clear vision" for Matrix can largely be cribbed from all the other nigh-indistinguishable team chat apps like Slack, Discord, Mattermost, et al. In that case money to actually make the obvious fixes might be enough.
Sometimes good enough is good enough. Slack, Teams, Matrix, whatever, as long as you're meeting most daily driving requirements, everything else is maintenance and long tail quality of life improvement (imho).
What else are Teams users going to get out of Microsoft chasing an ever increasing enterprise valuation and stock price target with regards to their user experience? Email just works, make teams comms that just works and is mostly stable. Get off the treadmill of companies chasing ever more returns (which will never be enough) at the expense of their customer base. We have the technology.
I think the PowerSync [1] team is missing out on an opportunity to showcase their impressive data sync technology by building a minimalist Slack clone.
[1] https://www.powersync.com/
Yea, if you have to waste an extra 15 minutes per day due to bad UX who cares, it’s much better that you get the self-satisfied feeling of sticking it to “the man” (American big tech).
I mean it only adds up to 90 days of your life wasted over a 30 year career. European peoples time has a lower salary value anyways. UX doesn’t even matter that much, the political meme of the day is much more important.
Microsoft Teams already is already terrible UX, we have nowhere to go but up. Perhaps you are unaware, and if so, you should be thankful you don’t have to lose time using it. There are objectively better solutions available.
I too hate Microsoft teams but it can always get worse, you have no idea.
I'm in several Slack teams for non profits and professional orgs, Teams for a client or two, IRC and Matrix servers for digital archiving ops, Signal/WhatsApp/GroupMe/Telegram groups, etc. I have been in tech for 25+ years, I am familiar with the extremes. You are right, things can be bad, that is the point of systems engineering: to drive directionally towards continual improvement. Success is never assured, but throwing our hands up and giving up is not reasonable. Make a plan, work the plan. Default to action. Work is hard.
I recommend "Thinking in Systems" by Donella H. Meadows (ISBN13 9781603580557) on this topic [1]. It's ~$10 on Amazon as of this comment, and the PDF is easy to find with a quick web search.
[1] https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3737036W/Thinking_in_systems
Care to give me an example to satisfy my morbid curiosity? I have used a lot of really bad chat clients over the year and Microsft's rewritten Skype is one of only a handful worse than Teams. Teams is not the worst but it is on my top 3 or 5 worst of the 30+ chat clients I have used. I have heard Lynk also was really bad but I never used it. Microsoft certainly has some of the worst.
Element is bad but it is way better than Teams from my experience.
Matrix is so much worse than Team it will make your head spin. It suffers from design by committee to an unbelievable extent, and its various end-to-end security features are wonderful from a privacy standpoint but make things much much more complicated.
Having used both I think you are way too kind on Teams.
I've used both and written code to integrate into both. You never have to worry about, for example, losing access to all previous messages in your Teams channels if you get a new phone.
The key is the money.
I’ve used matrix for years, ran my own federated server for a while.
I’ve been critical of the user experience and issues with how it’s handled by the matrix team before but I acknowledge that by and large these problems can be fixed with money.
Big players need to put their big boy pants on and throw a couple coins from their farcically large coin purse and they can drive a stake through the wretched heart that is Teams.
And this is the part I hope Europe gets. They don't have nearly as much money to throw at Matrix as Microsoft can throw at Teams, but they do have massive resources, and I bet that since Matrix doesn't have many of the same shitty KPIs as Slack and Teams, those resources can go much further.
The lack of shitty KPIs is the main thing. Hiring 10 full time devs to work on Matrix would probably be more effective than 500 full time devs on Slack/Teams with most of them stuck on weird Product Manager goals and renaming things to Copilot 365 Teams with Copilot.
Are you saying that Microsoft is more wealthy than all of “Europe”? And surely you must mean the EU.
The money needed to improve matrix is nothing compared to what is already being spent on Microsoft products.
> Are you saying that Microsoft is more wealthy than all of “Europe”?
"In 2024, the EU spent €403 billion on research and development" [1]. In 2024, Microsoft spend $29.5bn on R&D [2]. So about 20 Microsofts makes up the entire EU's R&D expenditure.
Alphabet, meanwhile, spent $49.3bn on R&D in 2024 [3]. It earned $350bn that year. So it would be correct to say that Microsoft and Alphabet's revenues, alone, rival the total amount Europe spends on research and development. (Non-EU non-British spending is insignificant.)
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar24/
[3] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425...
Nah I'm just saying that Microsoft has more disposable money to throw at Teams than Europe has to throw at Matrix because Microsoft is a corporation that is choosing how to spend its money internally and Europe (or the EU, but why leave Switzerland, GB, etc. out of the fun?) would be funding an external entity in a (possibly?) new way.
I'm still learning how the EU applies grants to open source projects for specific feature sets, but I'm guessing that there's a lot of friction that could be removed.
And yeah, I agree that the money needed to improve Matrix is nothing. It's about getting organized and applying that money well.
To me Europe's push for digital sovereignty has the potential to reshape open source software's competitiveness around the world and in turn, Europe's.
I guess that the European Commission pays a lot of money to Microsoft in licenses. They could pay a fraction of those money to Matrix.
Microsoft may have money, but it certainly does not seem like it is being spent on Teams in an effective way.
France is leveraging Matrix in Tchap https://element.io/fr/case-studies/tchap (part of La Suite Numérique https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#products recently featured on HN).
Presumably there is funding or resources because of that.
France donates to the Matrix Foundation (which helps the protocol retain its neutrality and independence, and is very much appreciated), but doesn't currently financially support Element's dev as their upstream. We're trying to fix that though!
better this way than the other way, element doesn't support the matrix foundation enough
Element has put tens of millions of dollars into Matrix over the years and today provides hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of resources per year to support it.
Amandine (acting managing dir on the fdn) is preparing the public financial report of the Foundation which will have more details on this; it should be out in a few weeks.
I've always thought the really low bandwidth support they added a few years ago was to support the french subs. It matched all the requirements of VLF/ELF communications.
It wasn't France (and, ironically, it wasn't funded - it was mainly us showing off)
I don't know anything about Matrix. What makes it "far from perfect"? First priority of every business chat should be to move the conversation to something designed for the business concern at hand, because a chat app is a terrible place for it to live.
> It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads, AI, bloat, crap, etc is wonderful.
I think there are three main reasons it's not perfect yet:
1. Building both a decentralised open standard (Matrix) at the same time as a flagship implementation (Element) is playing on hard mode: everything has to be specified under an open governance process (https://spec.matrix.org/proposals) so that the broader ecosystem can benefit from it - while in the early years we could move fast and JFDI, the ecosystem grew much faster than we anticipated and very enthusiastically demanded a better spec process. While Matrix is built extensibly with protocol agility to let you experiment at basically every level of the stack (e.g. right now we're changing the format of user IDs in MSC4243, and the shape of room DAGs in MSC4242) in practice changes take at least ~10x longer to land than in a typical proprietary/centralised product. On the plus side, hopefully the end result ends up being more durable than some proprietary thing, but it's certainly a fun challenge.
2. As Matrix project lead, I took the "Element" use case pretty much for granted from 2019-2022: it felt like Matrix had critical mass and usage was exploding; COVID was highlighting the need for secure comms; it almost felt like we'd done most of the hard bits and finishing building out the app was a given. As a result, I started looking at the N-year horizon instead - spending Element's time working on P2P Matrix (arewep2pyet.com) as a long-term solution to Matrix's metadata footprint and to futureproof Matrix against Chat Control style dystopias... or projects like Third Room (https://thirdroom.io) to try to ensure that spatial collaboration apps didn't get centralised and vendorlocked to Meta, or bluesky on Matrix (https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean/, before Jay & Paul got the gig and did atproto).
I maintain that if things had continued on the 2019-2022 trajectory then we would have been able to ship a polished Element and do the various "scifi" long-term projects too. But in practice that didn't happen, and I kinda wish that we'd spent the time focusing on polishing the core Element use case instead. Still, better late than never, in 2023 we did the necessary handbrake turn focusing exclusively on the core Element apps (Element X, Web, Call) and Element Server Suite as an excellent helm-based distro. Hopefully the results speak for themselves now (although Element Web is still being upgraded to use the same engine as Element X).
3. Finally, the thing which went wrong in 2022/2023 was not just the impact of the end of ZIPR, but the horrible realisation that the more successful Matrix got... the more incentive there would be for 3rd parties to commercialise the Apache-licensed code that Element had built (e.g. Synapse) without routing any funds to us as the upstream project. We obviously knew this would happen to some extent - we'd deliberately picked Apache to try to get as much uptake as possible. However, I hadn't realised that the % of projects willing to fund the upstream would reduce as the project got more successful - and the larger the available funds (e.g. governments offering million-dollar deals to deploy Matrix for healthcare, education etc) then you were pretty much guaranteed the % of upstream funding would go to zero.
So, we addressed this in 2023 by having to switch Element's work to AGPL, massively shrinking the company, and then doing an open-core distribution in the form of ESS Pro (https://element.io/server-suite/pro) which puts scalability (but not performance), HA, and enterprise features like antivirus, onboarding/offboarding, audit, border gateways etc behind the paywall. The rule of thumb is that if a feature empowers the end-user it goes FOSS; if it empowers the enterprise over the end-user it goes Pro. Thankfully the model seems to be working - e.g. EC is using ESS for this deployment. There's a lot more gory detail in last year's FOSDEM main-stage talk on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkCKhP1jxdk
Eitherway, the good news is that we think we've figured out how to make this work, things are going cautiously well, and these days all of Element is laser-focused on making the Element apps & servers as good as we possibly can - while also continuing to also improve Matrix, both because we believe the world needs Matrix more than ever, and because without Matrix Element is just another boring silo'd chat app.
The bad news is that it took us a while to figure it all out (and there are still some things still to solve - e.g. abuse on the public Matrix network, finishing Hydra (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Keu8aE8t08), finishing the Element Web rework, and cough custom emoji). I'm hopeful we'll get here in the end :)
God speed and thank you for your work. We need a professional world without the hellish Teams-Slack duopoly.
Best of luck to you and the team! I really, really hope it's successful :)
Have you considered raising capital?
yes, Element is venture-funded, which is where much of the money came to build all this in the first place - see the bottom of https://element.io/en/about.
[dead]
This does not bode well. Matrix is honestly not good, as someone who has tried to use it. It's slow, janky, often unstable, and poorly standardized.
My suggestion: https://threema.com/en/products/work (hosted) or https://zulip.com/ (OSS self-hosted).
I've been running a Matrix homeserver for a couple of years now and I've never had any issues with it. Not saying Matrix is perfect, but it is not as bad as you are making it out to be either.
Have you never run into any issues with encrypted chats not syncing properly between different clients, or messages not getting transferred correctly between users on different homeservers because of federation issues? Or matrix clients attempting to do some action, spinning for a bit, and then failing with an error message with no details? Or searching for rooms not working correctly and the UI not being able to clearly tell you what is actually going on with the search? I set up a Matrix server relatively recently and these were all issues that came up pretty much immediately.
While I don't doubt your experience, I've been running Conduit[0] for a while now to great success (a lot simpler to configure than Synapse).
I don't think it's a fact that Matrix is not good. For MS Teams? It's pretty close to a fact.
0 - https://conduit.rs
Zulip is phenomenal. Cool and unique concept, clean and snappy UI. I have no idea why it's not more popular. (Network effects and an unfamiliar layout, I suppose.)
I see the comments that say Matrix has improved a lot, so maybe it's fine now, but yeah, when I tried it previously it sucked. Weird UI was my chief complaint, but more importantly it didn't seem like there was a proper concept of organizations, in the sense of Discord or Slack servers? With roles, channels, even silly things like custom emojis. Matrix at the time seemed like just an SMS group chat replacement, I have no idea why people recommended it for organizational use. Maybe it's improved since.
When did you try it? Both Matrix the protocol and implementations like Element X have improved immeasurably over the last year or so.
It's been more than a year, and Element X does honestly look a lot better. But it's been mobile-only for years. And if I'm correct, the desktop/web clients still require you to use embedded Jitsi. And what about non-Element clients?
As a user, I just need stuff like this to be standard, and work for every participant regardless of what client they use.
Element Desktop/Web (and Element X) use Element Call for proper encrypted group VoIP/Video these days rather than Jitsi - since Sept 2024. Meanwhile we're busy upgrading Element Web to use the same rust-sdk engine as Element X (although this will take a year or so).
In terms of non-Element clients... I can't really speak for them, but I hear really good things about Cinny for folks who want a more Discord-like experience on desktop, and we livecoded an Element Call integration for it at the Matrix Conference in October (hopefully it merged). I think FluffyChat also may support the new MatrixRTC calling too.
Element X is in some cases still a downgrade from Element. For instance there doesn't seem to be a way to create local key backups anymore. Also, that calls between Element and Element X are incompatible means both apps need to be installed in order to receive calls from all contacts.
Still, I love Matrix and hope that these issues will be resolved in time.
Manually importing/exporting keybackups is on the todo list (albeit towards the bottom). Supporting legacy calls is not (unless someone contributes it); the intention is to converge asap on native Matrix group calls.
This cannot be overstated. It used to be a pile of trash, now it's quite decent (but with lots of room for improvement).
You will always say that.
Probably, but much like the sitar player's sitar in Moulin Rouge, I aim to only speak the truth :)
Threema: proprietary, outside EU
Zulip: lacks encryption, interoperability
Threema is Swiss, which is a regional EFTA member. It's end-to-end encrypted and the clients are open-source.
Zulip has client-server encryption, which is fine if you control the server.
Threema is still vendor lock-in.
Wasn’t Threema sold this week or something?
https://comitiscapital.com/news/comitis-capital-announces-th...
Not sure what / if that changes anything, but presumably it will… sometime…
Why would they need encryption? Does the european commision have anything to hide?
Chat control for thee but not for me?
It works faster & better than Signal Desktop.
Genuinely surprised at this - I've never heard of signal desktop not being fast, or good. Works a1 for me.
If you start to have higher message volumes, Element Desktop handles syncing on first launch much more gracefully than Signal Desktop.
Signal Desktop is having its db corrupted every other time I launch it, and wants me to reconnect to the phone. The UX is OKish.
Your storage is dying, any Electron based app will lose its database in this scenario.
yeah, it's fine for me - probably as good as an electron app can get (def not good as a true native app but it's def better than having to use my phone...)
That's not a high bar.
Personally I've found Matrix significantly more user friendly than Threema work. Zulip I haven't used in anger so I can't comment on that but I've seen a few places that even open source they charge per user for things like notifications. Not ideal IMHO. There should be an option to replace notifications with a separate service.
It's hard to find a decent service that ticks all the boxes but I do sincerely hope that the EU can support Matrix to bring it up to the standard that we all deserve.
> Mobile notifications for organizations with up to 10 users
Why does the self-hosted edition have this restriction? If the software is truly OSS, the limit could be trivially patched. But this kind of restriction just does not inspire much confidence in the project to be honest.
Because mobile notifications require integration with operators and cost money.
This is not about the ones that are pushed over IP, this is about mobile push.
Mobile notifications do not require outside operators. UnifiedPush / ntfy is FLOSS, and allows for a single background connection for multiple apps / notification channels. It can also be self-hosted (and I do!)
This puts the operational costs (number of devices and notifications) on whomever is running the server - and because of how valuable metadata is, I expect them to be run in-house by governments
Well I guess you can do the same with zulip, redirect notifications somewhere else that is. Never hosted zulip, but it should be more or less staightforward when hosting it yourself, the 10 free looks like a limit when using their endpoint, not universal.
It doesn't require operator involvement, you can just integrate with FCM and APN?
FCM and APN are the operators
Can you be more specific about your criticisms? I have gripes about Matrix, but your assessment doesn't match my experience.
Sounds like something Europe would love.
Related, the internall messenger for NATO also uses Matrix. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41781762
Someone once said to me, be very careful about negotiating with leverage… when you twist someone’s arm, they’ll say, “I’ll remember that. You may have won this one, but I’m gonna win the next one.”
Sadly, the US has done this to ourselves… all this arm twisting and strong-manning is coming home to roost.
It’s not clear that patchwork EU government back offices migrating off Teams will hurt US tech, but long term, in aggregate, this is going to be a headache for American tech.
EU can’t out innovate US tech, but they can make it harder to dominate their markets.
I hope you're right! I mean, at the level of personal relationships I fully agree[0]. However, institutions tend to be forgetful.
[0]: Someone once said to me something very similar to what you quoted: "Be nice to people. People will remember you. And they will gossip if they don't like you and you have wronged them. It's much easier to ruin your reputation with a single action done to a single person than to build up a good one."
> EU can’t out innovate US tech
why not?
Okay not today but China was known as the cheap copier and is now the innovator.
EU labor laws, and fractured internal market.
Do you really believe that?
If so, I think the onus would be on you to prove it, not me.
Or, more importantly, if you really think the EU will be a tech powerhouse, shouldn’t you be writing checks to their startups left and right?
Because I think that would be the revealed preference here. I’m guessing you’re not heavily invested in EU tech companies, right? Because that would say a lot about your true beliefs.
> Sadly, the US has done this to ourselves… all this arm twisting and strong-manning is coming home to roost.
No it's not. This is theater to give the impression that they are "getting the orange buffoon". They'll be back in short order, and even if they aren't, it'll just be an insignificant blip on a financial chart somewhere, not even big enough to warrant someone's attention. They did similar things in Trump's first term, and came back groveling.
Maybe, and you might be right. These might be one-off posturing things from the EU.
Sure, a few back office shifts to OpenOffice aren’t a big deal today, but I’m worried about where we are in 10, 20 years. There is no EU tech competition to us today, but who knows… tomorrow is a new day.
A lot of the worlds actual problems are not about innovation but correctly using existing technologies and making the right investments in the needed infrastructure.
zulip seems to me like it would be a better solution to me (open source, self hostible, familiar paradigm, etc), but then again, I think _anything_ would be better than teams... so more power to them!
France’s government uses Matrix. Presumably a nice perk to be able to talk to them via federation
I'm not sure if it ended up being used this way, but if I recall correctly, when that was being initially implemented, federation was actually a core feature: different agencies / municipalities / etc could have their own servers and control their own data and accounts, but inter-agency conversations and rooms would be well-supported, along with each agency retaining a copy of the rooms on their own servers.
Germany (government and armed forces) and NATO also use it.
Germany?? I can’t imagine unless they’re using it to send pictures of signed and stamped printed and scanned letters
Germany doesn't universally use it but its used in germany, for example for healthcare.
so Matrix doesn't have self hostable open source options?
https://github.com/element-hq/ess-helm (aka ESS Community) is Element’s FOSS distro fwiw.
It's incredible in the first place that companies want people use those kind of terrible and useless software, and that people accept using it.
talking about Teams, right? O:-)
Hoping this succeeds. If it does, it could inspire similar moves in Japan too.
The real issue is that there is no easy-to-self-host complete enough solution. We do not have something go install-able, pio-able, without a gazillion of deps web-app who offer:
- a direct call UI
- a chat UI, with optional group chats
- a simple web site to be used as a wiki-like tool to share textual stuff + common media, storage internally managed
We have anything to do all of the above, but all very complex, spread across many different projects, fragile, hyper tedious to set up etc.
Help me here
Why can’t a company in the EU make a secure video/voice chat app?
There’s are EU companies that make teams alternatives:
https://euroalternative.eu/alternatives/microsoft-teams
Even if those don’t work SAP, Dassault, etc… make massively complex software and services across multiple verticals and could trivially ship a competitor
Element’s topco may be UK based for now, but the vast majority of our business and footprint is in the EU - https://element.io/en/about. All but one of our mobile app team is in the EU for instance (and when we started, the UK was too :|)
Why reinvent the wheel when there are already open standards like Matrix or XMPP that can be adapted to your use case?
Matrix isn’t a 1:1 replacement for teams
Depends on what features of teams you use, since it kind-of became an "everything" app
Teams minus the bloat and bugs?
Explain
...thank god?
> Why can’t a company in the EU make a secure video/voice chat app?
What makes you think they can't?
Microsoft's corporate edge isn't merely the product, it's also an army of sales, entrenched corporate markets/clients, lock-in, etc.
You could have a better version of their product and still get eaten alive.
In the Netherlands, a lot of government systems aren't procured from the Microsofts of this world. There are a lot of middle men (consultancy agencies) involved that over the years have helped build a strong ecosystem with lots of expertise around Microsoft and related suppliers.
So indeed, it's not like you can just replace a software product (or service) by some EU or open alternative. And there are huge vested interests.
Same in Germany. I think in any European country.
And don't forget Copilot! ;-)
One major issue is system management:
Installing another app, such as Signal, on your personal computer is one thing. On 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 computers, installing it, configuring it, changing settings, updating it, backing it up, locking down settings from user changes (such as retention) - all that requires special tools to do it efficiently at scale. Without the management tools, no way that bit of IT can be used.
The most common tool by far is Microsoft's Active Directory and Group Policy, which has the best compatibility with Windows and with Microsoft applications, including Office. If AD/GP is already deployed, imagine the burden of deploying a second tool to your 1K/10K/100K computers, setting up the server, learning to use it ... you're not doing that for one application unless it's very valuable. The exception is a tool bundled with the application for its own management, but that's going to have to be efficient to deploy, learn, and use to be worthwhile.
Therefore, for many organizations, any application must be effectively managed by AD/GP, which requires the application's developer to create AD/GP management components.
Do Matrix, Signal, or any other application have system management tools?
The french government recently did: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
Zoom came along with a securre video/voice chat, sure it's American, but it was by far the world leader
Microsoft then used its monopoly in office tools to push Teams to everyone
You can't compete with a trillion dollar company offering your product as a bundle your clients already pay for, even if your product is better. Even VC money runs out eventually
Zoom has long been the most unsecure video/voice application.
Remember how they installed an open web server on people's computers which could be accessed by anyone through the web?
https://infosecwriteups.com/zoom-zero-day-4-million-webcams-...
Apple had to step in and patch it for them:
https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/10/apple-silent-update-zoom-a...
Or when they sent your chat data to Facebook?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/zoom-ios-app-sends-data-to-f...
How it was discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703000
Or when Zoom was leaking private information?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/zoom-leaking-email-addresses...
Or do you remember how those geniuses rolled their own crypto?
https://citizenlab.ca/research/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypt...
Or maybe you remember that Zoom has the ability to listen in in real-time on meetings held on their platform?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55372493
To be fair, Microsoft already had Skype (for Business) and NetMeeting before that. It's not like they were new to that market. NetMeeting existed for more than a decade before Zoom even came into existence.
Zoom had COVID-19 play in it's favor, that's about it.
Skype for Business is the VoIP component for Teams, now. Sharepoint is the file service for Teams, too.
Basically, Teams is a front end for a bunch of old Mircosoft cloud services... plus chat. Actually more than one chat as teams channels chat is a separate tech stack from private chat. It used to be much more monlothic and then the Sharepoint people got their hooks into it.
Jitsi
Formerly - skype
Matrix
There is Wire with HQ in Berlin, Germany.
https://wire.com/en/
The idea of the likes of SAP spinning up a new product quickly and painlessly seems like a joke.
In defense of SAP, their product really is built to be configurable for every use case under the sun.
I mean German police is using Palantir.
There is nothing magic about Palantir, especially not about the subset of Palantir that the German police uses as we have stricter data privacy laws.
You might think that would be a strategic risk not worth taking especially with the US getting more hostile towards Europe but here we are.
Why? Honestly I don't have a good answer other than well the whole system is rotten, corruption, lobbyism, take your pick.
Microsoft Teams is such a low bar, that anything else is probably an upgrade.
Teams takes like 4 min to boot on my work laptop.
When they launched the "new" one they proudly showed the improved boot time...
I don’t know how Teams even got the approval to be released. It must be so embarrassing to be Satya and be forced to use this shitty piece of software.
I can’t believe that software of this quality is used so widely. Market competitive forces are not able to do their thing unfortunately.
Slack costs new money. You’re already paying for teams if you use office/ms365/etc.
That’s all many companies need to see in their purchasing decisions. It’s not just “is slack better” but “is it enough better to pay out“
It's because of the licenses mostly. If you buy e.g. business standard or business premium or whatever you want to make the most of it. Hey, there is a free chat app included, and it integrates so well with the rest of m365!
(Also most people don't know that you can still use a KMS with/for office 2024. You don't need M365.)
errr market monopoly forces are doing their thing … the point is that only a govt can force eg an OS + APP anticompetitive monopoly provider to split up into multiple companies
I felt the same way when I was forced to use Word over Wordperfect, and Powerpoint over Harvard Graphics
I'm surprised Mattermost doesn't get more love generally, it's fully oss isn't it? https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost
I think Mattermost lost a lot of instance admins' trust when they recently decided to update the server to limit access to old messages without good reason. On self-hosted instances!
https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271
That's a shame, I interviewed there once, decided not to take it but it was one of the few places I could have seen myself working at, they seemed like decent folks trying to build something worthwhile.
Mattermost's license statements are confusing and contradictory.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861331
No. It's not fully OSS.
it’s also not decentralised (unless you bridge it to Matrix), nor end-to-end-encrypted. or standards based.
To be fair, why would you care if your internal organization or company chat is decentralized?
If you work with lots of other entities who want full control over their own comms (e.g. other governments, other departments, other EU entities like European Parliament and Council, the UN, NATO, etc) then decentralisation or federation is a big deal.
In the public sector it's basically a requirement: it's bananas if your country's critical infrastructure ends up dependent on some a product effectively controlled by another country (e.g. Teams) - and you obviously want to be able to communicate with other govt entities rather than being stuck in an island.
Then it's a natural extension to the private sector - although for now, it feels more folks are on the "nobody got sacked for using Teams" train.
The article said secure communication with other EU bodies was a use case.
Anything “sovereign” should decouple the protocol from the client software IMO, which isn’t possible with Mattermost.
Well there's always Matterbridge. If you don't have complicated workflows to replicate (and even then) you can just replicate to XMPP, Nextcloud or whatever.
Can someone that uses Matrix compare it to Zulip? Which would have been my "obvious" choice.
Is it functionally comparable, discussion threads and all? Or is it much closer to something like Discord?
Matrix is a decentralised encrypted chat protocol on which you could build something like Zulip, except decentralised and end-to-end encrypted.
Element is the actual app being trialled here, which feels more like Slack and/or Signal than Zulip. The point is that you get something you can selfhost while also interoperating with other deployments… while also encrypting the data end-to-end with Signal protocol.
I'm sure you could do some of Zulip's features on top of Matrix.
But for what it's worth, as Zulip's lead developer, every time I'm looked at whether we could have built Zulip on top of Matrix, it just feels impossible to me. And a big part of it is the architectural decisions Matrix made to support a decentralized E2EE social network, which are not required for a self-contained chat system like Zulip or Slack (which can still be bridged with other chat systems). Permissions enforcement, performance, and lots of other details really benefit from the more focused goal, where we've explicitly decided we're not building a generic distributed network architecture and are not competing with WhatsApp.
That said, I think it's great that we have multiple OSS chat systems with different strategies that are targeting different collections of niches!
I will never understand why so many organizations entrusted the communications fabric of their organization to Microsoft and SalesForce Cloud services over the last decade. If an organization can succeed in escaping Teams or Slack to Element/Matrix, that's great, even if it's a use case where Zulip would be a better end-user experience for their requirements.
Yeah I would love to see a new professional application based on Matrix, Element is buggy, other apps lacking too.
> Element is buggy
Someone should tell the CEO/CTO of Element
Speaking as the CEO/CTO of Element... the classic Element apps on mobile were buggy, thanks to being a ~10 year old codebase with no shared code between platforms and effectively the 1st generation Matrix client. Which is why we replaced them over the last few years with Element X, with all the heavy lifting shared between iOS & Android via matrix-rust-sdk (effectively a 3rd gen Matrix SDK).
That said, 70% of our users haven't got the memo yet - we'll do a hard-upgrade when the remaining missing features in Element X (Spaces & Threads) are fully out of Labs.
Meanwhile, Element Web is lagging behind Element X - but we're now in the middle of an incremental in-place upgrade (not a big-bang rewrite, thank goodness) to use matrix-rust-sdk - see our talk from FOSDEM last Sunday for the details: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/DZJVTS-an-element-web...
> That said, 70% of our users haven't got the memo yet - we'll do a hard-upgrade when the remaining missing features in Element X (Spaces & Threads) are fully out of Labs.
This isn't users not getting the memo yet, this is users being faced with an unfortunate choice between a buggy, slow client and a new client that doesn't implement important functionality like Spaces and Threads.
Can i ask why is Element Classic even available on the Google Play Store? If you want people to move away from this?
I've only started my Matrix journey, in the form of writing bots using the matrix Python library. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, as the Matrix protocol could be really impactful.
When Element X first launched, the goal was for it to cover the personal messenger use case. This worked just fine for some people, but for many, feature parity with the old apps and parity with the web experience was a hard blocker.
Both Spaces and Threads are about to land, and there are other lower-profile features that also need rounding out. We would expect full parity by April this year. At which point migration should be an obvious choice.
He said Element X missed Spaces & Threads.
I’m excited to watch the talk. I’m generally critical of Matrix, but that’s because I want it to succeed. Lately I find you’ve been doing a lot of things right, so I hope you keep going!
It’s very cool and inspiring to see the CEO posting here. Keep up the amazing work!
Arathorn is the CEO. I bet you knew that. At the time I write this your comment is grey. Maybe context was missing; or they think you're snark.
I assumed it was because people here are constantly telling Arathorn that Element (not ElementX) is slow and buggy, and that when they last tried the default server (circa 2019 or so) is was buggy and full of rough edges
He's (in my mind) always positive, open, and willing to admit the shortcomings of the platform he shephards... but damn does he deal with a lot of undeserved criticism (and deserved criticism, where applicable)
Federation can feel like "just a feature" but the E2E encryption (also in group chats) is a reason for Matrix to exist and a big reason why it's so slow.
It's so slow because it's so badly designed as a protocol, E2E isn't really the problem (the slowness is roughly equivalent for non-encrypted rooms)
"Slow" in what sense? Development? Because I self host a Conduit server and I don't ever notice messages being slow. It would be hard to notice anyway, as in a group chat people usually take some time to type in their responses.
The sync between large groups used to be slow because of amount of data, but Element X and "sliding windows" were rolled out to help with it.
AFAIK, the public Matrix server used to be slow because of a heavy load (I think), but on my self-hosted instance that's not a problem at all.
The experience of using Matrix involves a lot of sluggishness at various points in the client - waiting to decrypt messages or properly sync keys, waiting to join a room or for room search to load - these are the things that have been salient to me using multiple matrix clients with a freshly-spun-up server within the past month.
I more mindfully played a bit with my Element (web UI), and Element X (Android), and while there might something to it, and I suspect the e2e encrypted data model will always lead to some extra work required. Element seems a bit sluggish. However Element X on my Android seems butter smooth.
And event the slower Element seems far better than Discord that I'm forced to use, where I can't even scroll history without the whole thing stuttering.
> on which you could build something like Zulip
I hope that at some point a focus of the Matrix project will become why this isn’t being done. A better developer experience would supercharge the ecosystem, IMO.
Matrix should be the default for anyone building a chat app, but for some reason it’s not.
They are different, and the biggest reason is (I suspect) that a Zulip workspace is self-contained while a Matrix server is able to federate with other Matrix servers.
Other European institutions are also adopting Matrix, so federation may turn out to be an important feature.
Matrix has threads. So does discord, but discords UI around them basically renders them functionally useless.
Anyway, the first goal listed in this project was to move to European sovereign solutions so Zulip failed at the first hurdle.
Given the (lack of) speed of European bureaucracy, this is likely more a reaction to the US sanctioning the ICC than the more recent Greenland saber rattling, but you'll probably see more of this in the future.
I wouldn't say Discord threads are useless - I do wish the UI made them more obvious, but I'm in many discord chats that use threads all the time.
Matrix has threads in a sense, but in this very thread the project lead is talking about how the new, ostensibly less buggy and more performant flagship client does not yet fully support them.
> Anyway, the first goal listed in this project was to move to European sovereign solutions so Zulip failed at the first hurdle.
Element Creations Ltd and The Matrix.org Foundation CIC are UK companies.
Element Software SARL and Element Software GmbH however are not. In practice I believe it's Element Software GmbH providing the European Commission deployment of ESS. (Both are owned by the UK topco, but at the current rate we might flip one of them to be the topco instead).
Subsidiaries mean nothing. Microsoft have EU subsidiaries also. And might means might not.
The UK is in Europe. Brexit didn't float the country out several hundred miles.
The Declaration for European Digital Sovereignty defined digital sovereignty as the EU and its Member States' ability to act autonomously and to freely choose their own solutions, while reaping the benefits of collaboration with global partners, when possible. The UK is not the EU or a member state.
Part of Russia is in Europe. Do you believe Russian products were considered?
And this comment chain adds what exactly?
It’s pretty obvious why the UK is considered more European than the US, and equally obvious too why Russia is not considered in that tent.
Pretending it’s not just so you can disagree with a comment adds nothing and is an example of why HN is so often a tedious place.
The EU's definition of digital sovereignty included collaboration with global partners. It is obvious why UK companies could be considered more reliable global partners than US or Russian companies. A muddled concept of European was not needed to explain it. If where an open source solution was developed mattered even.
* open source
* don’t suck (too much)
* no planned rug pulls
* not infested by US or Chinese spyware
Are there any?
Only Matrix.
And XMPP. Which probably will remain a better Matrix than Matrix ever will be, the venture capital put aside, that is.
If nothing else this puts the spotlight on alternatives to Teams/Slack, which will increase adoption, and should increase pressure to improve (as far as that goes...)
I've not liked Slack for FOSS projects (it's not IRC, it has problems with moderation enforcement), and NOBODY likes Teams.
As I've said before, Matrix really is the only viable open source solution for in-company communication.
Every other solution (Zulip / Mattermost / whatever) is too risky, they could easily bait-and-switch you like Gitlab did, by moving important features to different tiers, or engage in other shenanigans afforded by the open core model.
Matrix has a bad reputation because it used to be downright terrible (first time I tried it, in like 2018-2019), but is a lot better now.
Correction: Zulip is 100% open-source software, and has been for a decade now. (I lead the Zulip project). Zulip's protocol, which is used for client/server communication by all major clients, has extensive documentation including the complete change history for the last several years on https://zulip.com/api/ and https://zulip.com/api/changelog.
As far as I know, there is no mechanism through which Zulip could bait-and-switch a customer that Element could not also do. And I think that as a practical matter, it would be a lot easier for a new team to pick up developing Zulip if the Kandra Labs team were to disappear than the similar question for Matrix/Element.
The core reason is that Matrix is far less simple and self-contained than Zulip. I've talked to multiple groups who tried to build apps on top of Matrix and found it too difficult. https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/giving-up-on-element-and-matrixorg... may be a useful third-party reference.
This isn't to say Matrix is bad. It's just targeting a different niche. Matrix was designed around the requirements of a global social network, where you want to be able to keep writing in channels even in event of a network partition. As a result, Matrix is far more complex and less self-contained than a Zulip server is. If you are doing internal communications with some external guests, you are far safer from technical risk with a robust self-contained system like Zulip than something like Matrix that is also a social network.
Zulip's goal is to be the best way to do complex work, focused on replacing tools like Slack, Teams, and Discord, without the ambition to support a social network, and that changes a lot about the architecture and what we can do in terms of performance and focus on the human experience.
The complexity associated with Matrix comes from wanting to build a multivendor ecosystem around an open standard, the decentralisation (and federation) to avoid building islands and then implementing things like multi-device e2ee and VoIP in such a context.
However, it is exactly these properties that make it so appealing to an organisation like the EC as they pursue digital sovereignty.
The goals of Matrix have nothing to do with being a social network. You could theoretically build a social network on top of Matrix (Matrix essentially syncs JSON in real-time), but I'm not aware of a project with traction, and more to the point, those projects are not relevant to this discussion. Yes Matrix is resilient to network partitions (that's a good thing for a messenger!), but that seems entirely orthogonal to your point on social networks.
Finally, I don't think it's fair to draw a comparison between the relationship between Kandra Labs and Zulip vs Element and Matrix. Yes Element is a major player in the Matrix eco-system having originally formed to hire the Matrix founding team, but since then many Matrix vendors have sprung up and if Element were to disappear tomorrow Matrix would continue. In fact, this is the whole purpose of having an independent Foundation, which in turn encourages multiple vendors to operate side by side.
XMPP has been around for way longer, has proven that it actually works, and has a reliable community behind it, with no VC-funded hype.
If they can't pass chat control- Simply adopt something full of holes but seems reasonable.
I think the intention was never to get their communication audited (potentially via poor security), but ours. You know, to protect the children and all that.
What?
Defs worth a go, I'd say. Have tried it - still warming to it tbh
It's good to start somewhere, but as a reminder, it's the same European Commission that:
1. runs on Microsoft software that it buys from Fujitsu UK that HN crowd knows from the UK Post scandal
2. Has multi-billion euro digital initiatives and a puny single-instance public Gitlab with a handful of shamefully incomplete "projects".
3. Tells everyone that they have their own AI helpers while actually renting LLMs from Azure.
They also sometimes forget to clean their shoes after walking in from the street.
But at least this thing they will hopefully get right and maybe in the longer term they'll be able to break the lock-in on those other things as well.
Don’t hold your breath.
Agreed. Hope sets you up for disappointment and all that but still, better than nothing at all.
So on balance, would we say this is bad for the US?
I don't really care if it's good or bad for the US as a whole; I care whether or not it's good for free software communication apps. I'm an American citizen and I own MSFT in my index funds just like lots of other people do; but I'd also rather run a free software chat app than Microsoft Teams.
The U.S. government has long looked out for U.S. companies, even to the point of staging coups (e.g. United Fruit Company). The Trump administration has been threatening direct invasions while also levying tariff's and other actions when other countries try to enact taxation or legislation of American tech companies operating in their jurisdictions. U.S. tech execs have applauded and lined up to bend the knee. Now they're finding out that their products are replaceable.
The replacements aren't perfect, but an injection of new users and funding could allow them to improve rapidly. Meanwhile, American companies like MS and Google seem determined to enshitify their products and force AI adoption because they're financially entangled with OpenAI.
Is this bad for the U.S.? It depends on how fast Americans smarten up. MS needs to start putting their products first again. Meta needs to stop relying on their government links to coerce other jurisdictions into accepting utterly irresponsible products that cause social harm while producing no tax revenue to mitigate that harm. All Americans need to stand up to their government and force it to back down from imperialist aggression.
The U.S. and U.S. software have lost international trust and are now losing out to competitors because of it. Those competitors no longer need to be better or cheaper. Just trustworthy. It is possible to mitigate this loss of trust with prompt action, but every delay causes permanent harm. The world is watching.
an open-source app built on an open protocol would be great for everyone, not just the EU (assuming the app doesn't suck, of course).
Dreambroker
Good luck. The only reason I use teams is because it’s free.
[flagged]
lol good luck