Which project is it?
element. based on matrix
Wait…element is only text and voice correct? It doesn’t support video calls? Esp group ones. Please correct me if I’m wrong but used matrix proto a while ago…back then it didn’t even support file uploads. Again, correct me if I’m wrong. Tbh, matrix protocol is pretty good how much I’ve used it
I just googled “open source teams alternatives” and Mattermost seems to be much better.
Element does support video calls. I had one with my friend a few months ago
Bruh I use that on the daily, and it works great.
It’s hard to get people to move from what they know and use to something else. If you moved them to Google, they’d say it’s shit. Same for Zoom. They all do some stuff better than others.
Element is perfectly servicable. They’re using Element Pro which is billing itself as built for government. The first problem is they called it pro, which sets expectations higher than they should be. It’s not going to make them go WOW this is so much better at first glance.
Trying to onboard a gigantic number of people is going to be difficult for a system that doesn’t already have a gigantic number of people on it. I can only imagine how rough the system is at the moment, but it’ll work out.
As long as there’s a web version so I don’t have to install another stupid client, i’m ok with it.
I found element quite alright compared to teams, honestly. I wish the EU actually invested money in matrix to make it better instead of just using the base and building a bunch of stuff on top of it.
Most accurate description of Element I’ve ever heard to be honest. It’s literally just Discord, with all of it’s bloat, but with a protocol that wants to have “security” bolted on. And all of the security related dialogs have race conditions in them. Actually, not just in Element, all clients, even nheko and fluffychat, have race conditions in the fucking security dialogs. All of my devices are just unverified now, I just gave up.
XMPP at least functions reliably, if you ignore all of the protocol extensions and use it like IRC with images of course.
Tox supermacy! Though the main and only good Android client got archived. But like, whatever. Fuck phones anyway.
what security dialogs? and what race conditions? do you know what that means, or are you just throwing around words?
if you mean the “verify your new device” dialog, yeah, it has a problem. it won’t appear most of the time on clients that were not open when you sent the verification request from the new device. I don’t know why, and this is not comfortable, but then I can start verification from a device I already have, and it will work. or I can also just fill in the password from my password manager, which you surely have too.
but I haven’t seen other problems with it recently.
XMPP at least functions reliably, if you ignore all of the protocol extensions and use it like IRC with images of course.
which does not even have a bolted on security that way.
Though the main and only good Android client got archived.
calling element classic good is a bit of a stretch. it was very slow.
if you mean the “verify your new device” dialog
That series of dialogs and pretty much everything else, including “verified devices” menu. Also, apart from race conditions it’s often just desync. Like, right now for me, nheko and Element say everything is unverified but fluffychat says everything including itself is verified.
Not Element Classic, I meant aTox (Tox for Android). It still functions, though.
Yeah I gave up on Element/Matrix too, for other reasons.
First of all the clients don’t work for shit and every update breaks something IME, got tired of that. Also for all of my normie friends and family it was “too hard” to use, I disagree, but regardless what good is a chat app if I have nobody to use it with? Further, the one friend I did convince to join also joined the public Ras Pi room, and some dickhead posted CP in it, he saw, and then I had to explain “no, this isn’t a ‘pedo app,’ that is spam and they get banned,” and I’m gonna be real I don’t want to have to do that again and I can’t in good faith recommend my mother use a goddamn app that very possibly could spam her with CP.
So, I moved to Delta Chat. Fixes all those problems, no complaints. Easy to use, easy onboarding, no discoverability, just chats.
Tox did their own insecure crypto and got roasted by the Wireguard dev, now they are apparently rewriting it.
I agree that Matrix is complex but personally never had issues with key verification. Just try to restart it, maybe on the other device?
Tox did their own insecure crypto and got roasted by the Wireguard dev
Everyone does crypto in their own way and roasts each other. On a quantum physical mathematical psychological level unidentified flying object Yugoslavia UFO something something. I only really believe stuff in relation to exploits when there’s a demo.
Yeah but XMPP sounds so techy you know… /s
I bet that if someone scraped together the bare minimum and found a catchy name it’d be the winner easily.
Et-tu-Brutus would slay IMO.
Yeah but XMPP sounds so techy you know.… /s
the trick is to not mention XMPP to the end users. if they dig deep in the app settings they can find it out, but otherwise all that end users need to know is just, download the app named conversations, and use this domain and username. the domain could likely be hidden from them by deep linking, and sending the link in a company email. then they just need to log in as anywhere else.
https://astrachat.com/ paid XMPP. It claims the US army, apart from a few other government entities around the world, use it. I find this funny because this implies someone integrated Grok into XMPP.
Also, the old name for XMPP is Jabber. That sounds less techy, you know.
Jabber, now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time…
I bet that if someone scraped together the bare minimum and found a catchy name it’d be the winner easily.
element is much lighter weight, my god wgat fuck are you even dreaming up about, discord is fucking unresponsive and horrible to use, I do agree that the device verificstion still barely works sometimes, and you can also just use a different a client, as far as web clients go cinny is really good honestly, cinny is fast and responsive it even feels almost native, which compared to garbagecord is a night and day difference in usability beyond DOING ALL OF THIS WHILE USING LESS RESOURCES, for android Schildichat Next is my choice
element is much lighter weight
Here, the webapps are measured via the very scientific method of Firefox about:processes, doesn’t even account Firefox itself which is like 760 megs (decimal MB or MiB? I am not sure) if I were to believe it.
On amd64, loonix with glibc and all that crap, zero memory pressure (assuming I am reading “shared” correctly in htop which I assume to be libraries like glibc and glib):
- Discord: starts at 800 megs, garbage collects down to 704 to 710-ish (overburned CD size?); turning on/off equicord doesn’t affect it much
- Element: 367 mystery units after clicking around for a while, 341 unfocused
- Nheko: 362 MiB, 201MiB shared (probably with Firefox, can’t close cuz I am typing here rn)
- Dino: 334MiB, 116 shared (probably with Firefox)
- Mumble (random server with a long text greeting and nobody in voice): 169MiB, 130MiB shared.
- random forum with a bunch of emotes and table decorations (for comparison sake): 69 meters (NICE)
- qwebirc (1 server): 61 megs
- Weechat (6 servers): 65392 bytes, out of which 33396 shared (with system daemons I am guessing).
- Toxic: 44648 bytes, out of which 0 are shared. Plus ~90000 for Alacritty (65160 shared when multiple).
lmao
Honestly I don’t know why the majority don’t just use something like teamspeak. I still use 3 point something version and it still works. Do I really need to see you on my screen? Like does that add anything or are we pretending to be futuristic?
I spend half my day in meetings with colleagues, partners and clients and it adds a lot.
If the other person is speaking in a language where you are not native / fluent, seeing their mouth helps. I’m experimenting with AI-based live transcription (eww, AI, slop, I get it) but it only works real time with English at the moment.
If you are explaining something you can see if they are following, if they are skeptical about certain claims, etc. Many cultures are very conflict-averse and won’t challenge you directly, or even ask for clarification.
And for me personally it helps me remember the person much better, and remember what we talked about last time when I see the face again.
I’d argue that is the opposite of futuristic, it helps our primitive brains work as they are used to.
I’m experimenting with AI-based live transcription (eww, AI, slop, I get it) but it only works real time with English at the moment.
the real problem there is not AI slop, but if you are basically uploading their voice to a company. if you are doing it locally, I would say fine. LLMs are better (not flawless) with translation than facts.
It runs locally on my laptop, no upload anywhere, no recording either. I would be fired in an instant otherwise.
EDIT: It’s a forked version of this project, in case anyone is interested: https://github.com/pasrom/meeting-transcriber
It adds speaking to a new face in a corporate environment.
I guess? Okay this is kind of a mean take on it, from my experience, with having managed a company of over 300–which is tiny, if you would stfu and fill out your sheet and send me an email, I would prefer that. I already did your background check and dive.
I know this isn’t a very “professional” take but that’s how it’s always been for me. The amount of parties and alcohol is really the surprising part.
But how are you going to decide who’s gonna get promoted by skin color? And when are you going to see those people squirm in front of you? Checkmate.
/s
If they were gaming at work, maybe teamspeak would make sense.
I think the voice codecs work really well on teamspeak. Discord is a really heavy mess. Teams is… no thank you.
The angle I was focusing on is something that’s light and can be used anywhere.
But come on… the irony… Teams vs Team Speak?
Voice calls aren’t the issue. Teams isn’t just for calling
I’m really not sure if absolute shit is a notch above or below Teams.
Teams is negative.
Shit is negative.
Absolute shit is positive.
Therefore absolute shit > teams.
Qed.Absolute shit is positive.
THE absolute shit would be positive. Absolute shit is negative. Absolutely.
Absolute value, including of a negative number, is always positive.
PRETTY sure that the people evaluating a Teams alternative aren’t doing so using mathematical terms 😄
Okay, hear me out: what if you click on a contact in your contact list and start typing a message, but instead of writing in the message field, it instead focused a random contact in your contract list whose name starts with the last letter you typed. Anyone? People love this feature, right?
I’m not too convinced FLOSS devs are mentally flexible enough to implement all of the glory of MS Teams.
My favourite: It says you have an unread message. It won’t tell you where. You need to go hunting for it.
We could spend the rest of our lives trying to make a search function less useful than what Microsoft puts in every single one of their apps. Fucking up a search bar is the new fucking up an instant messenger.
Tbf, the MS Team’s search hasn’t failed me yet. Unlike outlook which wouldn’t find an email when searching for the exact subject line, even while I have the email open in another window just to be sure I’m not hallucinating how bad the search is.
My favorite feature is when there is a message in a chat you are already looking at and you have to click out of it and back in before the notification will go away
I get this on FB’s Messenger, it notifies me that there’s a new message in the thread. Yes, it’s my message, the one I just sent, thanks Meta, I’m aware of it.
You’re underselling it! Sure, what you discribe would be a nice feature, but what makes it truly great is the combination with a slow and unresponsive UI. It’s thought provoking genius!
Did it register the click or do I have to try again? Maybe I should meditate to fully harvest the value of this 0.5s Zen moment, because it also might just take much longer this time? Does a tree fall, when there is no one to witness it? Does a click matter if it is inside Teams?
I thought that was just me! My second favorite feature is that a full 75% of my notifications in a day are Facilitator bot messages, which I need to repeatedly click out of and into to clear.
I love the feature where I paste something into an email, and then it stops me typing by popping up a useless menu.
My second favourite is the one where you’re typing, and suddenly it starts treating all your keypresses as shortcuts and deleting things. I love that.
And don’t even get me started on Outlook search. I can no longer find any emails, even by typing in the things that were on them.
But hey, at least an admin can fuck it all up from one place!
The problem with windows and by extension microslop software is that the UI was made when computers were 1,000,000 times slower than they are today.
that’s not even true. they are trying to follow the latest tech giant design trends making everything with huge gaps, rounded corners and huge memory usage, and the ui lagging more than anything 20 years ago
As a senior software person, I can tell you that that is absolutely not the problem.
It’s never refactoring, pushing useless crap and vibe coding. On the top of my head.
What? Teams updates its UI so often it feels like with every update they move buttons around just to fuck with the user. Even outlook has been updated to a somehow even shittier UI. If I had a choice I’d choose the UI from the 1000000 times slower era because at least it was functional.
I was mostly referring to the semantics of the windowing, not application layout.
How about the feature where you get a notification that someone said something in a group chat but if you click on the notification it opens the private chat with that person instead?
Or the one where you enable recording a meeting and only after the meeting does it tell you that it couldn’t actually save anything to OneDrive so there’s no recording? That’s some advanced UX engineering right there.
Or the one where it hides less used “applications” and decides that the only ones it should hide are the chat and the calendar. Not everyone can come up with that.
Or how it shows a banner telling you to update even if your client is company-managed and especially if you’re using their web client.
FLOSS can’t hope to compete at that level.
What about freezing and locking the whole system ~45 minutes in a meeting every time? Or hear me out, lets display the content of the window in the centered rectangle that takes 15-20% of window and it can be resized down but not up?
For me: When using the teams app on my work laptop, something prevents the clock multiplier in my processor from working correctly - it’s locked to 600-800MHz (according to the performance tab in the Taskmanager) and everything is very sluggish. As soon as I exit the meeting, it will jump back up to several GHz as it should…
Oh yeah? But is their customer service also an essential blend of AI and dog shit?
Checkmate, europoors.
*europeons was so close and yet you missed the mark.
I’m not sure how to feel about someone thinking I coined that term…
Wasn’t thinking that, I just think Europeons is the far superior pun. Speaking as a Europeon, of course.
It’s far superior, but it may need a hyphen. Otherwise most USians won’t recognise the pun and will just think that’s how Euro-peons spell it. Which is only hilarious until the new spelling is an official US variant.
US? Do you mean Magastan? The banana republic between Mexico and Canada?
I thought it was Magadishu
Oh god, please let me wake up back in the sane timeline…
Tell that to American conservatives. Can’t parody stupidity smartly.
“You said you needed it compatible with Teams.”
Hey kids, try this neat trick:
during a Teams meeting, mention a very esoteric product 2-3X .
Within a week, someone will email you an offer to buy that product.
Unfortunately, LinkedIn patched that infinite money glitch in the latest Business Douchecanoe firmware update.
Lol. They were cloning absolute shit to begin with. So if anything this is a compliment to devs capability
Whooosh
meh, as I understand the alt is an open source project so it maybe terrible but it’s a terrible that can be pressured to fix
More likely an amalgamation of several open source projects glued together with a bunch of proprietary stuff for Cisco hardware, desk phones, some weird PBX system and so on…
So they’re replicating Teams even more closely than we suspected?
We are and I’m hating every minute of it.
Hard to imagine it being worse than teams.
Nah, it’s probably going to be an abandoned project with 10+ merge requests in line with no one to review them - if it isn’t already.
Brother, the article is talking about Element Pro.
My friends all go on and on about how much element sucks and yet I have zero problems with it, it’s confounding to me
I can’t imagine element sucking more than teams. Teams generates suicidal ideation every hour
Lol element got horrendous ux. It almost made me go to alternatives like revolt/stoat.
Luckily I found sable and it’s pretty great
It’s alright? What’s wrong with it?
I’m using both web and android version. There are some things that I don’t like, but they are nothing compared to fuxking teams.
No channel sorting
Which psychopath sorts channel/contacts?
Discord mods. It contributes to a sense of place, it makes people feel like the channels are rooms. It’s very important for giving a community its own unique vibes.
Element feels soulless because the channels are always changing order. It feels ephemeral and artificial. Discord feels solid.
I use Sable with Matrix and it is SO much better than Element.
If it is abandoned, then they can fork it and fix the issues easy.
Backed by the EU?
The Commission introduced Element Pro
Ufff. Matrix/Element is rough. I tried moving my friends there and everyone bailed on me.
Self-host Fluxer instead, EU!
Matrix is fine with an alternative client. I use Commet, and it’d pretty much serve as a total replacement for Discord for me if not for the fact that nearly none of the communities I’m in are bridged there.
Agreed. Comment is good. I really like Sable too. Element isn’t “bad” but it never felt good either.
Rough in which way?
fluxer
I mean there is ‘rough’ and there is stutters while scrolling the main page like it stutters on the site that you linked.
I like element but it’s not nearly as lightweight and user-friendly as I would like it to be.
I assume we talk about the desktop client here.
lightweight
my brother in Christ, Discord and Teams both need like 2x the RAM so don’t talk to me about that.
user-friendly
Idk left side has contacts and groups, right side chat. What exactly is not user-friendly there?
my brother in Christ, Discord and Teams both need like 2x the RAM so don’t talk to me about that.
I don’t compare a hot-dog to a pile of dog poo and say “it’s good food”.
Idk left side has contacts and groups, right side chat. What exactly is not user-friendly there?
- slow to load up
- long sync times
- high battery drain for mobile users
- room concept, as opposed to contact chats
- electron app sucks donkeyballs - wastes lots of screen space where no chat is displayed
- options way too hard to find at times (like how to add existing rooms to a space)
- no online/offline status of contacts
- trust model with device verification is unintuitive for non-techie users (admitted this one has improved with the emojis years ago and with cross-device certification)
I could probably find a bunch of more reasons if I thought longer about it. These are all issues that don’t keep me from using the app, but they are severe enough that I can’t convince non-techie friends to use element as a messenger. For matrix, there are superior messengers for sure, albeit those are then limited in functionality.
I don’t compare a hot-dog to a pile of dog poo and say “it’s good food”.
Then what is your definition of lightweight? A command line chat app?
slow to load up
literally loads within 3s
long sync times
maybe if you didn’t open it for a year yes, otherwise it’s in the sub-second area
high battery drain for mobile users
Mine is <1% for the last day. If you don’t setup proper push messaging which then requires the app to constantly wake up - yeah than it might be a problem.
room concept, as opposed to contact chats
How exactly is this a problem?
electron app sucks
Teams is also using Electron Microslop Edition
options way too hard to find at times (like how to add existing rooms to a space)
Just go into the settings and you will find 99%
Moving a room to a space has nothing to do with options and is a very uncommon task.
no online/offline status of contacts
ok guess you last used Element 5+ years ago?
- https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/3026
- https://spec.matrix.org/v1.3/client-server-api/#presence
- https://patrick.cloke.us/posts/2023/12/15/matrix-presence/
trust model with device verification is unintuitive for non-techie users
Yeah e.g. Whatsapp and Signal have the exact same problems expect when you keep some (sometimes not encrypted) backup somewhere.
I’m gonna pile a few on (I’ve mentioned them elsewhere in this thread, but…)
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Those aforementioned “rooms?” Element took the ability to search them away but you could still join if you knew the room addr (search may be back now), why? Because of the HUGE CP spam problem those rooms had (have?). I’m not pushing an app that could possibly show my mom that shit.
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Onboarding is atrocious, I had to set it up for everyone I tried it with myself, the normies cannot figure it out. "They should get good,” yeah I agree, but they aren’t gonna, so your move.
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It pisses metadata to any server you federate with. If you self host a contained ecosystem, maybe, but if you federate with matrix.org (as you almost have to do), the ex AMDOCs employees who started it as an AMDOCs project before breaking off to form The Matrix Foundation get more info than I’m comfortable with considering their history of spying on telecommunications.
Ok I admit some of that isn’t UI issues… still bad.
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Doesn’t sound like a technical issue, but a social one
There are also technical issues. I tried to use Matrix Element with my partner a couple years ago and it stopped working multiple times and we gave up on it. Even when it “worked” half the time notifications didn’t.
Yeah Java is also slow because back in 1999…
Try Element X please
I tried element X, it also stopped working on me like element regular did, and like this other poster complained about.
My friends also bailed on it because it wasn’t working (as did I) and I’m not about to say “no guys some random lemmy user says it’s good now.” They’ll reply “what the fuck is lemmy and why switch back from Delta Chat while it’s working so well?”
Also there’s NO way I’ll be able to convince the one who saw the CP spam in the Raspberry Pi room to go back, and there’s no way I’m gonna recommend to my parents and shit that they use a chat app that very likely could spam them with it (not likely they’d find the public rooms, still not taking the chance.) I don’t really need to be known as “the guy recommending the CP app,” personally.
And I had to basically set it up for every contact I was able to convince, meanwhile when we switched to Delta Chat I just sent the invite link and they made accts and bam, no problem, and now the recent update made that even easier because instead of just defaulting to nine.testrun.org it picks a few relays at random, so now I don’t even have to set up multi-relay for them (aside from the contacts I got on before this update) next time I see them in person.
I believe the correct term is “shite”, to be spoken with a thick accent lol
Honestly surprised they didn’t go with NextCloud Talk.
