Element (Matrix) adds video/voice rooms(element.io)
element.io
Element (Matrix) adds video/voice rooms
https://element.io/blog/drop-in-drop-out-chats-with-video-rooms-and-a-new-search-experience/
88 comments
This uses plain Matrix events to negotiate a Jitsi call: It's an Element feature.
Surprisingly nheko seems to basically work, including spaces and encryption. I also heard Thunderbird 102 added fairly complete Matrix support, but it takes a little while to roll out to Linux distributions so I haven't tried it yet.
FWIW I use FluffyChat (Flutter) on Manjaro Plasma KDE and iOS which runs nice and perky. Has Spaces etc.
https://gitlab.com/famedly/fluffychat
https://gitlab.com/famedly/fluffychat
I can't figure out how to browse rooms in a Space using Fluffy. There appears to be no documentation. If you know how, I'd be much obliged :)
I use fluffychat and cinny. Yes, I might be missing out on newer features (threads, widgets, video rooms, etc). But at this stage I'm happy with what these clients offer.
First, can we please stop replacing every word in the dictionary with “experience”? https://youtu.be/nGHbOckpifw
Many of European states (including mine) are looking into ways of replacing Teams and Office 365. Video/voice rooms is a must have and this is a very important update for Matrix. Just updated Element and will be trying soon. :)
Many of European states (including mine) are looking into ways of replacing Teams and Office 365. Video/voice rooms is a must have and this is a very important update for Matrix. Just updated Element and will be trying soon. :)
> Many of European states (including mine) are looking into ways of replacing Teams and Office 365.
Can you explain why this is the case?
As a U.S. based user dealing with Government work o365 GCC High seems basically required. :/
I loathe Teams, but MSFT makes it hard to choose something else when it's included in all o365 tiers.
Can you explain why this is the case?
As a U.S. based user dealing with Government work o365 GCC High seems basically required. :/
I loathe Teams, but MSFT makes it hard to choose something else when it's included in all o365 tiers.
> Can you explain why this is the case?
Because Schrems II[1].
As an example, the city of Stockholm will stop using 365[2] (for the time being).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_II
[2] https://www-nyteknik-se.translate.goog/digitalisering/besked...
Because Schrems II[1].
As an example, the city of Stockholm will stop using 365[2] (for the time being).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_II
[2] https://www-nyteknik-se.translate.goog/digitalisering/besked...
I'm not GP but I'm guessing it's for data sovereignty reasons.
Microsoft is a US company subject to the CLOUD Act. The US Govt don't need to worry about this since the act was passed for their own benefit. Other countries do.
Microsoft is a US company subject to the CLOUD Act. The US Govt don't need to worry about this since the act was passed for their own benefit. Other countries do.
The US CLOUD Act is incompatible with the GDPR. The goals are the complete opposite and complying with both is extremely difficult, leading to several recent cases ruling that using Google services is likely illegal in the EU.
If you're into testing out different systems, Zulip with Jitsi is wonderful. The 'topics' feature is amazing.
This video rooms feature as well as the group call feature in Element are actually using jitsi I'm the background. Element also supports threads too.
I love zulip. It's great. But it is like not integrated with jitsi at all. All it does is give you a randomly generated room url on jitsi's servers.
And what more than that do we really need exactly?
Integration of the text chats at least.
You can have negative experiences, but this has not been noticed yet by PR heads.
Congrats to the element team for delivering the first decentralized messaging system that can be used in a modern context (open, full E2EE, hostable and not only text oriented)
Plus points for showing the world that you don't need a blockchain for this :-)
Plus points for showing the world that you don't need a blockchain for this :-)
> Plus points for showing the world that you don't need a blockchain for this :-)
Who said you did need it for this feature in the first place? I don't think anyone did.
Since no one suggested to use a blockchain for this particular feature, it is more likely that crypto supporters want to add crypto wallets in messengers which is what most competitors have already done, unlike Element. Notably Signal which still has a crypto wallet where I see many Signal fans getting extremely upset about that.
You better pray and hope that Element does not introduce a crypto wallet, just like what Signal, Session, Keybase has done.
Who said you did need it for this feature in the first place? I don't think anyone did.
Since no one suggested to use a blockchain for this particular feature, it is more likely that crypto supporters want to add crypto wallets in messengers which is what most competitors have already done, unlike Element. Notably Signal which still has a crypto wallet where I see many Signal fans getting extremely upset about that.
You better pray and hope that Element does not introduce a crypto wallet, just like what Signal, Session, Keybase has done.
Signal is not decentralized and I don't really see how it could compete with what matrix has to offer.
The Blockchain comment is a jab at all the "crypto messengers" out there like obsidian, echo, status and the like.
The Blockchain comment is a jab at all the "crypto messengers" out there like obsidian, echo, status and the like.
Not likely since the Matrix ecosystem seems to be open source even in practice, where outside development is accepted and encouraged. Disabling features is unproblematic.
The other systems you mentioned is either all proprietary or has limited source code availability where there's no practical way to fork it or develop it further.
The other systems you mentioned is either all proprietary or has limited source code availability where there's no practical way to fork it or develop it further.
> You better pray and hope that Element does not introduce a crypto wallet, just like what Signal, Session, Keybase has done.
That is not going to happen.
That is not going to happen.
>You better pray and hope that Element does not introduce a crypto wallet, just like what Signal, Session, Keybase has done.
Why? You can just not use it. I didn't even know Signal had those features, so I don't see how it can affect my life.
Why? You can just not use it. I didn't even know Signal had those features, so I don't see how it can affect my life.
Because it takes away development resources from actually useful things.
And f.e. taking the examples of Signal and Keybase, both their crypto wallets/implementations are about the most useless possible. Keybase b/c I know no one who actually uses it as a messenger and it uses stellar/lumens, Signal b/c it is apparently impossible in most countries to actually get tokens to load / unload your wallet.
Is this usable for a general public? They don't seem to mention anything about encryption.
I have played with Matrix on several occasions. I think one of the big promises was E2E encryption and as those who have worked in the area know it's not an easiy problem to solve. I have accounts on more than 1 homeserver. I have various keys in my password manager which I don't necessarily understand how they are used. I have old messages that I cannot decrypt, despite being sure that I have never lost any keys.
In summary: In my experience Matrix has not been an easy experience even for a user of gpg.
Here I am not asking how is this made secure and usable. I am just asking is this usable for anybody who does not even know what a homeserver is, would never understand what a key or fingerprint is and has no account yet?
I have played with Matrix on several occasions. I think one of the big promises was E2E encryption and as those who have worked in the area know it's not an easiy problem to solve. I have accounts on more than 1 homeserver. I have various keys in my password manager which I don't necessarily understand how they are used. I have old messages that I cannot decrypt, despite being sure that I have never lost any keys.
In summary: In my experience Matrix has not been an easy experience even for a user of gpg.
Here I am not asking how is this made secure and usable. I am just asking is this usable for anybody who does not even know what a homeserver is, would never understand what a key or fingerprint is and has no account yet?
The current video rooms implementation is powered by Jitsi, which optionally exposes E2EE for clients which support it (Element Web on Chrome and possibly Safari) via insertable streams and megolm crypto from Matrix. It isn't hooked into Matrix's key identity system though.
In the nearish future we'll swap it to use Element Call which now has native Matrix E2EE over native Matrix calling and works on all platforms: https://element.io/blog/element-call-beta-2-encryption-spati...
In terms of crypto UX being problematic in Element as a whole: yes, there is still work to be done to improve the UX, and we're very aware of it.
In the nearish future we'll swap it to use Element Call which now has native Matrix E2EE over native Matrix calling and works on all platforms: https://element.io/blog/element-call-beta-2-encryption-spati...
In terms of crypto UX being problematic in Element as a whole: yes, there is still work to be done to improve the UX, and we're very aware of it.
I've never heard of this and will be checking it out.
Have you cracked positional audio, ie letting people in the back sidebar convos (duck the main chat) or move around to have private convos?
Gaming has pulled this off, DayZ star citizen etc.
I've kicked around the idea of using some of these game worlds because they have positional audio and handle crowds way better.
It's the chat around the Watercooler that is the missing gap imo
Have you cracked positional audio, ie letting people in the back sidebar convos (duck the main chat) or move around to have private convos?
Gaming has pulled this off, DayZ star citizen etc.
I've kicked around the idea of using some of these game worlds because they have positional audio and handle crowds way better.
It's the chat around the Watercooler that is the missing gap imo
Yes, we already have spatial audio working in Element Call (see https://element.io/blog/element-call-beta-2-encryption-spati...) - so this will come automatically when video/voice rooms in element start using Element Call.
Nioce!
We're also working on the Third Room project which has virtual worlds with 3D positional audio built on top of the same tech as Element Call. It's still very early, but the project is up here: https://github.com/matrix-org/thirdroom
I have one question about this. I am self hosting element and i have set up jitsi for group calls and this feature. Works great but unfortunately my kiddo instance is public.. is there any way to secure it easily or make it only available to element?
Is that Jitsi closer to the new Jitsi Meet or the old Jitsi Jabber/XMPP ?
It’s an embedded version of Jitsi Meet.
What the assumed time frame for the switch?
And once it happens, will it be a standard feature of synapse to deploy your own voice/video server?
And once it happens, will it be a standard feature of synapse to deploy your own voice/video server?
I'm guessing it's about 1-2 months away. The hard bit is that we need to effectively have Element Call share the same matrix client as Element itself does, in order to embed Call into Element effectively. We call this matryoshka embedding, and it's looking promising to get it working in the next week or two, and then will need to actually update all three Element clients (Web, Android & iOS) to support it.
Obviously folks can also just click into a standalone Element Call to make it work (plus Hydrogen is also adding native Matrix calling).
Element Call doesn't currently need any custom server - it just uses your existing homeserver; Synapse, Dendrite, Conduit etc. However, it only scales up to 7-8 users - to go beyond that we'll need to add a SFU, which we're also working on.
Obviously folks can also just click into a standalone Element Call to make it work (plus Hydrogen is also adding native Matrix calling).
Element Call doesn't currently need any custom server - it just uses your existing homeserver; Synapse, Dendrite, Conduit etc. However, it only scales up to 7-8 users - to go beyond that we'll need to add a SFU, which we're also working on.
A MCU or a virtual apex could be better in order to ensure everyone hears the same thing. And a virtual apex combined with large events could also provide a decentralised persistence layer.
We're going for a hybrid SFU/MCU architecture - c.f. https://2021.commcon.xyz/talks/extending-matrix-s-e2ee-calls...
Thanks.
And thanks for all the great work as well.
And thanks for all the great work as well.
Any MSCs for the RTC part of the Element Call?
Element is still missing a way to turn off broadcasting read receipts despite being an allegedly privacy focused client as advertised on their website. It makes me think the maintainers are a little confused about privacy in some aspects.
No, it's just been a painful problem to solve. If you're interested, you can see the massive discussion around it at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/228.... The implementations have been around for a while, and as it happens we got to consensus on the spec discussion yesterday, and the PRs to enable it by default in Element Web and Synapse landed an hour ago:
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-js-sdk/pull/2524
https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/pull/22242
https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/13273
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-js-sdk/pull/2524
https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/pull/22242
https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/13273
I'm glad it's happening in that case.
Last i had checked a contributor had locked the issue discussion a year or more ago after losing an argument about an interim stopgap being useful to solve the immediate privacy issue. A story as old as the internet itself, that one. So at least that one contributor did not care about interim privacy which gives the obvious "we don't care" signal when not contradicted by anyone else.
Last i had checked a contributor had locked the issue discussion a year or more ago after losing an argument about an interim stopgap being useful to solve the immediate privacy issue. A story as old as the internet itself, that one. So at least that one contributor did not care about interim privacy which gives the obvious "we don't care" signal when not contradicted by anyone else.
Talk about a bleeding edge feature
Could we use matrix as identification for git issues, etc.? On self hosted git repos. Instead of github,gitlab,bitbucket.
Then you can communicate with all those self hosted repos without making accounts for every single one. And you could choose your software (gitea,gitlab,...)
Then you can communicate with all those self hosted repos without making accounts for every single one. And you could choose your software (gitea,gitlab,...)
You might be interested in following the Forge Federation project
https://forgefriends.org/blog/2022/06/30/2022-06-state-forge...
Very excited for Element to replace Discord as the de-facto chat software.
*group chat software
Why not chat as well?
The de facto default chat software is probably WhatsApp, or perhaps Telegram if your group of people lives in the german alternative scene (or, placed from germany, perhaps more eastern countries?).
But default group chat could well be Discord, not formerly Slack(?), any more.
But default group chat could well be Discord, not formerly Slack(?), any more.
They should definitelly add zulip thread model.
What's missing from the current threads implementation?
Strongly agreed
I wish I could upvote this more than once.
Threads as rooms?
Is this something that is built into Matrix somehow now or is really specific to Element?
FWIW it looks like a jitsi meet implementation. I'm not sure though
Yup it's on jitsi. They say they'll replace that with element call[1] soon(-ish)
[1] https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-...
[1] https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-...
I'm a little confused by this announcement; does this mean that I have to host my own Jitsi Meet server and that Element will connect to it, or does this new version of Element "bring its own" Jitsi?
I host my own instance of Matrix / Element Web, so this would be great if it's not too difficult to set up.
I host my own instance of Matrix / Element Web, so this would be great if it's not too difficult to set up.
Yes. You can point it at your own instance of jitsi or at a public open one. I'm currently hosting jitsi as well but still trying to figure out how to make it not publicly available while still being usable in Element.
I have configured my self hosted element web to point at my instance but if a user logs into the matrix home server with e.g. the element app it will still have the public element jitsi pre configured afaik.
Element is slow and resource heavy, I wonder how adding group video rooms will affect it.
I assume the audio/video stack runs on a different thread so not much.
It still suffers from a terminal case of Electron, but atleast it's not worse than it's comptetitors in this regard. Both teams and discord have an absolutely laughable click to photon time on anything but high end machines.
It still suffers from a terminal case of Electron, but atleast it's not worse than it's comptetitors in this regard. Both teams and discord have an absolutely laughable click to photon time on anything but high end machines.
Despite the Electronness, I think the UX of Discord is still much better than that of Element. There's just something off about the way element responds to interactions, I can't put my finger on it. I've noticed there have been some improvements made over time, but Discord is still much more fluent in the places where it matters.
Cinny, being very Discord inspired, also gets many of the Discord usability features right. With the way Cinny is developing I wouldn't be surprised if the two projects would eventually merge together. The lack of audio/video support is the most obvious flaw at the moment, but perhaps once proper Matrix voice is stable and implemented in Element we'll see some improvements in that area in Cinny as well.
Cinny, being very Discord inspired, also gets many of the Discord usability features right. With the way Cinny is developing I wouldn't be surprised if the two projects would eventually merge together. The lack of audio/video support is the most obvious flaw at the moment, but perhaps once proper Matrix voice is stable and implemented in Element we'll see some improvements in that area in Cinny as well.
Ran an instance of the reference implementation for a year or two and hadn't noticed resource consumption that much tbh. And this was for an organization with hundreds of members. Did something change in the past two years?
I think you’re confusing Element and Synapse. Synapse is the reference implementation, Element is the client. And it can definitely be a resource hog on some end systems but it seems pretty fine in general
nope, perf has improved a lot in the last 2 years (on web, at least). android and ios are still slower than they should be in accounts with large rooms, but there is a bunch of step changes on the horizon (called “sliding sync”) which should eliminate that.
I think a lot of the "element is slow" can be attributed for using the matrix homeserver. I personally notice it somewhat frequently that that one is quite slow, in comparison to a privately hosted one.
I do hope I'm not spamming you here but an acknowledgment would be appreciated.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026459
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32020929
Summary: element-desktop sluggish and freezing with accounts with large amount of rooms and history on Linux (consistent across devices, dists, and DEs). This is separate from a recent freezing issue which was fixed in v1.11.0.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026459
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32020929
Summary: element-desktop sluggish and freezing with accounts with large amount of rooms and history on Linux (consistent across devices, dists, and DEs). This is separate from a recent freezing issue which was fixed in v1.11.0.
Have responded at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32093491.
It was for me, too. I was subbed to dozens of rooms that I never used. I trimmed it down to about 10 rooms and it’s noticeably faster. Bulk deleting messages is still an absolute bastard (app hangs for days).
If it’s slow and resource heavy it’s consistent with every other competing app at least.
Checkout the Dino XMPP client.
I think you misunderstood my point, it was more a jab at the entire industry, but I do imagine it’s probably a difficult problem to solve.
I also have no interest in running thick clients. For all it’s warts, browser based clients leverage browser security which is something I value.
I also have no interest in running thick clients. For all it’s warts, browser based clients leverage browser security which is something I value.
Question: in the new video Rooms of Element (Matrix), can multiple users at the same time share both their screen and their video?
This is a feature of Whereby that in my personal experience is indispensable for pair-work. Besides Teams not being GDPR compliant, Teams imho is designed with the typical US hierarchical boss presents, workers listen-model and doesn’t cater for a cooperative model of sharing screens at the same time, like Norwegian Whereby does.
This is a feature of Whereby that in my personal experience is indispensable for pair-work. Besides Teams not being GDPR compliant, Teams imho is designed with the typical US hierarchical boss presents, workers listen-model and doesn’t cater for a cooperative model of sharing screens at the same time, like Norwegian Whereby does.
In Element Call, yes. In Jitsi (the current impl), no.
I have a question since you seem to be involved with element. Is it possible to make element list all users of a home server? Or is a custom identity server required for that? I think there used to be a project called mxisd which is now unmaintained...
This feature would be great to e.g. replace slack with matrix/element.
You can fiddle this option on your homeserver: https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/latest/usage/configurat...
Or if you don’t have a homeserver, invite all your users to a space so you can see them there.
Identity servers are generally just for looking up user by email or phone number (although mxisd did intercept some endpoints to add a user directory before synapse exposed the option above).
Or if you don’t have a homeserver, invite all your users to a space so you can see them there.
Identity servers are generally just for looking up user by email or phone number (although mxisd did intercept some endpoints to add a user directory before synapse exposed the option above).
Thanks for the reply :)
I've configured that setting but it still won't outright list all the users to a new user, although it will let them search for eachother.
I guess I could do it by automatically joining all users who register to a welcome channel, i saw that there's a setting for that in synapse.
telegram is still missing group audio conference, or group e2e chats of any kind
Telegram has group audio/video calls.
https://telegram.org/blog/voice-chats https://telegram.org/blog/group-video-calls
https://telegram.org/blog/voice-chats https://telegram.org/blog/group-video-calls
since last year? huh!
I only read about video sharing in a group, not every-user-to-every-user calls. Which easily eats up a lot of bandwith (, at least on the server if that is the place that pre-renders all video tiles together for lower network load in sum).
A new world Matrix.
I'm using an alternative client, but I see that that space is nowhere near keeping up with the features Element are pushing out. Mine doesn't even support spaces yet. I'd like to use a 'native' client (Linux/KDE person here), but there's not much choice (I never got the Neochat flatpak to work reliable for instance, on a variety of distros). So, one must basically go with the Element (web) client, which is not very light.
I have nothing but good words for the project btw, thanks and keep it up :)