ara4n / matrix-live-s1107.md
(Transcript of the audio of https://youtu.be/OyuqM7RbX5E, thanks to OpenAI's Whisper turbo model and some minor tweaks and fixups)
Hi everyone, and welcome to Matrix Live Season 11 Episode 7 where you are stuck with me, Matthew, Project Lead for Matrix. I guess I'm going to be wearing both Matrix and Element CEO hats in this week's recording and I will try to identify which hat I'm wearing at any given point.
What I wanted to talk about this week is that there is clearly a lot of unhappiness being expressed out there about Matrix and Element this week. I think we've basically seen a blog post a day, sometimes twice, ending up on the front page of Hacker News or Lobste.rs or wherever, where folks are expressing quite reasonable disappointment and irritation at where Matrix and Element are at the moment. And so I basically wanted to try to respond, so was thinking of putting out a blog post to try to articulate this a bit more coherently. But I haven't had a chance to put it together, so let's risk me improvising one off the top of my head now.
I mean the root causes of the feedback that we're seeing are basically, well, manifold, but one of the main ones that keeps coming up is this feeling that most people experience Matrix via using Element, and Element currently has two clients: two apps out there. One is the classic Element mobile app which hasn't been updated for two years now; the other then Element X which is obviously the rewrite that we've done over the last two/three years in order to have a much, much, much better platform to build on. However, the Element X apps have not got the full feature set of the Classic ones and so as several folks have pointed out, this means that you either have a choice of a stale app which has performance issues and UX issues and hasn't been updated really in a few years other than for security issues... or, an incomplete app.
