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.
Signal on the desktop does work even if the phone client is off, FWIW. This might have been true at one point, or at least for other apps, but it’s no longer the case.
ETA: you can even use the desktop app without a smart phone, although the setup not for the faint of heart… Just illustrative of how you shouldn’t need a smartphone (at least, not one that’s even turned on more than once a week) for Signal to work on the desktop.
For some reason, adding a desktop client didn’t work for me, so I am stuck with Signal-cli. Good thing I don’t have to use Signal that much. Anyway, I think not having an option to register right in the desktop client is absolutely unacceptable.
Sounds like you might want to look into why the desktop client isn’t working, especially if you aren’t trying some strange, unconventional setup for getting it that way.