Element is broken

Aug 1, 2024

I have been a Signal user for many years and am reasonably happy with it. But soon my son will be of an age where he will also get a smartphone and I will have different requirements than I do for myself. For example, I want a messenger whose server I can host myself and which is not linked to a telephone number. Also I want to keep him away from Telegram and WhatsApp groups for as long as possible.

For this reason, I installed a Matrix (Synapse) server again after a long time and created three accounts. And of course I want to use Element. But after a few days I just can’t understand the following things:

  1. No aliases are possible for contacts. Either my name is “Stefan Ritter” or my name is “Papa”. In our case, “Papa” is of course fine, but as soon as I want to reach contacts outside the family, that would of course be rubbish. Is it really that difficult to implement? Are Spaces and emojis really much more important?

  2. There is no possibility to adjust colours. In contrast to Signal (where this is possible to a limited extent), it is much more difficult to distinguish who has written what in Element. And again: is that so difficult to implement?

  3. This stupid piece of software has 2 sidebars! Who came up with the stupid idea of making them unhideable?

  4. I can sort my contacts and rooms by activity or alphabetically. The funny thing is: Element doesn’t remember this for 3 minutes!

  5. On iOS, I’m used to taking a photo, pressing “Share” and selecting an app. Why the hell is Element not showing up? Well, because of…

  6. You can search for rooms and specify a server for them. If you now think that you will be shown rooms on this server: nope. Rooms on completely different servers appear in rows.

  7. Multiaccount! Come on, it can’t be that I have to install Fluffychat at the same time.

  8. It doesn’t even remember its position and size O.o

In conclusion, I can only say that although Element is usable, development is focussed on completely absurd things. Why don’t you first make a good messenger with useful functions before you start building in some bullshit?

Rant over.

Back…