from Hacker News

New Element Web and Desktop apps

by maelito on 9/23/25, 3:44 PM with 58 comments

• by jchw on 9/25/25, 10:16 PM

  I'm nervous. They stopped working on the Dendrite home server, which does not support sliding sync. They stopped working on the sliding sync proxy, which uses an old version of sliding sync that is no longer supported by Element X. Element X requires sliding sync. There is no way to migrate data from Dendrite to Synapse or Conduit, either. It kinda seems like they're creating a situation where we inevitably have to lose a bunch of data. I get that Dendrite was never stable, but the documentation made it seem like 1. It was the future, 2. It was lighter weight than Synapse, 3. It would work just fine for small home servers.

  I don't really think Element or Matrix gives a damn, either. Well, I get that there's no money to extract from the community, or at least not much, but still, all of this leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and makes me think that we all should've probably just stuck with XMPP. But then again, I never self-hosted XMPP, so maybe it is just as dreadful.

• by dcre on 9/25/25, 9:35 PM

  "We’ve also removed the duplicative meta-spaces (People, Favourites). Filters are the new foundation — more flexible, more future-proof, and built for growth."

  As a heavy Element user for work, I have long hated this in Element X iOS and now I have the pleasure of hating it in Element web. Everyone at my job is mad about the remove of these "duplicative" metaspaces. Here's a GitHub issue about it: https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/issues/30849

  I am a UI dev and I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but after using Element for nearly 5 years, it really does feel like the user experience only gets worse over time. It is really sort of amazing.

• by noident on 9/25/25, 4:41 PM

  Does this depend on sliding sync and their standalone authz server like Element X does?

  I'd love to use Element X, but Element abandoned the form of SSO my community depends on, and I don't really have an appetite to spend 12 hours of my free time standing up sliding sync, a separate auth server, migrating my users to the separate auth server, spending hours explaining to everyone that their credentials live in some other place now, and then migrating my custom server admin software to use OpenID connect. Oh well.

• by dawidpotocki on 9/26/25, 4:24 AM

  On the "Space" sidebar I used to have a button list rooms outside of any "Space" and a button to list only DMs.

  Now I still have the button to list rooms outside of any "Space" but now instead of a DM button I have "Home" which mixes both DMs and rooms outside of any "Space" so I need to click on that and then the "People" filter (which doesn't save so I can't just click it once and be done) to get rid off the rooms that I already have a dedicated button for.

  You sure succeeded in removing duplication. Two buttons that did two different things caused so much duplication!

  Now I will have to create a "Space" to add those "space-less" rooms so that they don't show up in Home.

  Oh and on upgrade I had no button to view DMs at all as I disabled "Home" before but you didn't force re-enable it for people upgrading.

  Message search on Element X Android when?

  EDIT: Also the filters hide under another button when your sidebar is too small and if you expand it then it can take up even 6 lines.

  EDIT: And now also noticed that favourites don't stay at the top, truly useless, thanks.

  EDIT: Why is room sorting method global now… I used to have spaces with different sorting… the location of the button to change the sorting hasn't even changed so it still feels like if it was local to the space. Good UX.

  EDIT: Since I ended up complaining so much, might as well say that the sidebar having the same colour as the chat panel is pretty ugly and makes the whole application blend in more when the chat should be the main focus. Also expanding the spaces is still terrible as it expands the space part of the sidebar and it is annoying to have to toggle the sidebar back, I don't want the sidebar to take 1/3 of my screen.

• by codedokode on 9/25/25, 6:09 PM

  > Meanwhile, the company appears to have begun quietly phasing out the classic Element app in favor of Element X, even though it still misses crucial features like threads and spaces, besides the less important things like widgets, grouping by priority, and live location sharing.

  I didn't even know such "important" features exist, and never needed them.

  > Whenever you log on from a new device, you have to cross-verify the device using either a secret key or, more comfortably, another device that has already been verified.

  If you have a laptop and a smartphone, you need to verify the device once, doesn't look complicated. And most smartphones are probably backdoored anyway so you should not be using matrix there.

  > Matrix was never good.

  Web version of Element allows sending messages, files and calls, and they actually work. That's already better than many open-source projects including Jabber.

  Although I must I admit, I see a warning that I need to "verify this session" in a web client, but no meaningful way to do it. Also web client annoys and distracts me by messages like "Chats have a new look". What's the point of showing this popup? If they have a new look, everyone will notice without any popups. Stop copying worst features of commercial software.

• by NetOpWibby on 9/25/25, 4:31 PM

  This is interesting timing because I self-host a Matrix server (Conduit) for some friends and we were lamenting the dearth of good apps. I'm currently using Cinny as a Safari app on desktop and PWA on my phone, and Element.

  The new Element design is nice.

• by stevenicr on 9/27/25, 5:20 AM

  I am about to embark on my 8th attempt to install matrix / synapse / element in a fresh debian box.

  I have succeeded 3 times to varying degrees (never got the extra things added like better moderation or custom stickers I think it was) -

  I just did a quick ddg search to see if there are current docs on doing this setup.

  Last time I remember running into docs that said these are old docs being archived, but no new docs available.

  I spent a number of days in the chat trying to hone in on the small errors in homeserver yaml and going back and forth trying to get nginx or caddy to do that basic things it needs to.

  I'm sure there were other weird things.

  My quick scans of the search results and stuff on element saying its old, use pro element (with no links to pro element, which I finally found, - now has me out trying to learn how to use Kubernates or whatever - so another detour to other places to learn things before getting to 'is it possible to install this thing on current debian today'.

  before I can even get to seeing if the install info is updated or complete these days.

  I'd love it if someone that writes docs there could watch somebody try to install this thing, and all the going back and forth and searches and 20 different websites and tutorials from so many different places to do things to make it work.

  It's worth it, but it's a lot of moving parts to get started,

  and the moderation - that was 10 times easier with RealChat system Eugene released to the world 22 years ago.

  Still there's nothing better self hosted that I have found.

• by yaky on 9/26/25, 4:13 AM

  Does this update break calls? I recently set up coturn along with Synapse, but found out that ElementX cannot call Element and now requires Element Call (whatever it is).

  As a small self-hoster, the pile of growing services (that I presume are/will be de-facto required) that come with Synapse is not a good outlook.

• by ezst on 9/25/25, 4:47 PM

  Seems heavily inspired by MSTeams

• by vinyl7 on 9/25/25, 5:45 PM

  Should add a link to the main site from the blog on the mobile layout

• by yeasku on 9/25/25, 4:53 PM

  The back button does not work on my phone, android.

• by deafpolygon on 9/25/25, 9:05 PM

  > We’re dialling down the drama (yes, that red !) and turning up readability

  Kind of sad that this is touted as a 'feature' in 2025.

• by BoredPositron on 9/25/25, 4:44 PM

  A little bit of slack here, a little bit of teams there and a smidge of discord. Really not sure about it.

• by binaryturtle on 9/25/25, 5:22 PM

  I noticed it yesterday and I have to say I hate it. The "Peoples" section seems to be entirely gone (it's now intermingled with rooms in the "Home" section). You no longer can see favorite/ normal/ low priority DMs or rooms in proper order at once. E.g. in Spaces I had my one or two favourite rooms at the top in a separate section; now it's somewhere messed up in the middle with the normal priority stuff. You constantly have to fiddle with the space-wasting bubble buttons to find stuff.

  No idea how that is supposed to improve things really. Why is it always necessary to break user's muscle memory with this types if extreme "improvements"?

  I'm still trying to find out where to manage my Sessions in the newer Element versions (I have to keep a very old one around to do that).

• by BrenBarn on 9/25/25, 6:34 PM

  I don't really get why they're spending their time on this kind of window dressing.

• by jasonvorhe on 9/25/25, 4:09 PM

  The only design issues I ever had with Matrix was the protocol design. This is lipstick on a pig.