The 2025 Matrix Holiday Special
11 points by arathorn
11 points by arathorn
Anyway, things overall feel more positive than they have for years.
Sadly, my user community feels at this point like things will never improve and we should be looking at some other system. 2025 brought an absolutely atrocious series of changes to the way the Element web and desktop clients manage the list of rooms and direct messages. It used to merely be clunky, and is now for many people totally unusable.
It doesn't really matter how much the foundation or protocol improves if the flagship client tools drive users absolutely bonkers.
We’re reintroducing room list sections fwiw (in fact it’s already landed in the Aurora rust-sdk test jig). Sorry that the new room list was that negative; personally it doesn’t feel too bad, but clearly ymmv.
I have been very pleasantly surprised with Delta Chat. The onboarding experience is on par with the proprietary IM systems that rule the world. It's just it's confusing for geeks that it's based on email, but it's really its own thing and it seems to work very well.
I was dismayed to find out recently that there's nothing on the English Wikipedia about Delta Chat/chatmail. And even more dismayed while trying to create a page to struggle to find coverage in "significant" media. I wrote to my fav tech outlet to see if they give it a try- I would encourage people to try Delta Chat because I feel it's a hidden gem.
+1 for Deltachat I'm looking forward to this talk at fosdem next year https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/TV7GCC-autocrypt_2_post-quantum-cryptography_and_reliable_deletion_forward-secrecy/
because some Element users are still stuck on the Classic app, unaware that Element X exists.
Or you know... maybe because Ele X is downgrade and not upgrade for the users? Maybe we will get threads next year finally...