Crosspost: https://feddit.de/post/8502102

Element for Android doesn’t support searching in encrypted channels and I think you can’t use E2EE in the browser at all(?), plus basically every other client has even more drawbacks when it comes to E2EE.

My team recently tried RocketChat, but E2EE is obviously an afterthought for that project as it has even more limitations than non-Element Matrix clients (no searching, no pinning, no file upload, no edit, etc.). Plus Jitsi integration seems to be buggy right now (at least on my Windows installation).

What else is out there that’s not on my radar? Is Matrix with Element really the best option right now? Is there no project that puts E2EE above all else?

Edit: Should be self-hostable and (FL)OSS.

  • @[email protected]
    2•11 months ago

    There definitely was some feature in Element Web that didn’t work and told me to use Desktop instead, unless I’m imagining things now.

    It’s search.

    Even in Element, last time I checked, search was incredibly half-baked and mostly useless.

    I know you don’t want to use Signal, but it actually has searches that function.

    • onoEnglish
      1•11 months ago

      Back when encrypted search was being developed for the Electron app, I think someone had it working in a standalone browser as well. Perhaps that was with the help of a browser add-on; I don’t remember for sure. I suspect github.com/t3chguy would know, as he seems to be active in discussions of that feature. It might be worth asking him about it.

    • @[email protected]
      0•11 months ago

      You cannot compare Signal to Element at all.

      Like, at all.

      Signal has no search for Groups, there are no public groups or channels. Signal has a monopole server that is supposed to be OpenSource but nobody can run their own one.

      • @[email protected]
        0•11 months ago

        Strange reply.

        • Read the post, the use case doesn’t require public groups.
        • Read the messages above, I was talking specifically about search
        • Does this mean that Telegram (the messaging app) is closer to Element (the Discord-like app) than Signal (the messaging app), because it has channels?

        Etc

        • @[email protected]
          0•11 months ago

          Yes, search on Signal is fundamentally less complex than on Element because there are no Groups or Servers to search.

          You are talking about searching in local messages I guess, which is unrelated and should work everywhere.

          Telegram, Signal and Element are 3 different products. Signal is very restricted but encrypted. Telegram is way less restricted, the desktop client is somewhat standalone but has no encryption which is bad. Element is way more complex and allows encrypted and unencrypted.

          • @[email protected]
            1•11 months ago

            More weird assertions.

            Signal has groups.

            And I asked, is “Telegram (the messaging app) is closer to Element (the Discord-like app) than Signal (the messaging app), because it has channels?”