Comment by Arathorn
9 hours ago
Matrix is a decentralised encrypted chat protocol on which you could build something like Zulip, except decentralised and end-to-end encrypted.
Element is the actual app being trialled here, which feels more like Slack and/or Signal than Zulip. The point is that you get something you can selfhost while also interoperating with other deployments… while also encrypting the data end-to-end with Signal protocol.
I'm sure you could do some of Zulip's features on top of Matrix.
But for what it's worth, as Zulip's lead developer, every time I'm looked at whether we could have built Zulip on top of Matrix, it just feels impossible to me. And a big part of it is the architectural decisions Matrix made to support a decentralized E2EE social network, which are not required for a self-contained chat system like Zulip or Slack (which can still be bridged with other chat systems). Permissions enforcement, performance, and lots of other details really benefit from the more focused goal, where we've explicitly decided we're not building a generic distributed network architecture and are not competing with WhatsApp.
That said, I think it's great that we have multiple OSS chat systems with different strategies that are targeting different collections of niches!
I will never understand why so many organizations entrusted the communications fabric of their organization to Microsoft and SalesForce Cloud services over the last decade. If an organization can succeed in escaping Teams or Slack to Element/Matrix, that's great, even if it's a use case where Zulip would be a better end-user experience for their requirements.
Federation can feel like "just a feature" but the E2E encryption (also in group chats) is a reason for Matrix to exist and a big reason why it's so slow.
It's so slow because it's so badly designed as a protocol, E2E isn't really the problem (the slowness is roughly equivalent for non-encrypted rooms)
"Slow" in what sense? Development? Because I self host a Conduit server and I don't ever notice messages being slow. It would be hard to notice anyway, as in a group chat people usually take some time to type in their responses.
The sync between large groups used to be slow because of amount of data, but Element X and "sliding windows" were rolled out to help with it.
AFAIK, the public Matrix server used to be slow because of a heavy load (I think), but on my self-hosted instance that's not a problem at all.
The experience of using Matrix involves a lot of sluggishness at various points in the client - waiting to decrypt messages or properly sync keys, waiting to join a room or for room search to load - these are the things that have been salient to me using multiple matrix clients with a freshly-spun-up server within the past month.
> on which you could build something like Zulip
I hope that at some point a focus of the Matrix project will become why this isn’t being done. A better developer experience would supercharge the ecosystem, IMO.
Matrix should be the default for anyone building a chat app, but for some reason it’s not.
Yeah I would love to see a new professional application based on Matrix, Element is buggy, other apps lacking too.
> Element is buggy
Someone should tell the CEO/CTO of Element
Speaking as the CEO/CTO of Element... the classic Element apps on mobile were buggy, thanks to being a ~10 year old codebase with no shared code between platforms and effectively the 1st generation Matrix client. Which is why we replaced them over the last few years with Element X, with all the heavy lifting shared between iOS & Android via matrix-rust-sdk (effectively a 3rd gen Matrix SDK).
That said, 70% of our users haven't got the memo yet - we'll do a hard-upgrade when the remaining missing features in Element X (Spaces & Threads) are fully out of Labs.
Meanwhile, Element Web is lagging behind Element X - but we're now in the middle of an incremental in-place upgrade (not a big-bang rewrite, thank goodness) to use matrix-rust-sdk - see our talk from FOSDEM last Sunday for the details: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/DZJVTS-an-element-web...
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Arathorn is the CEO. I bet you knew that. At the time I write this your comment is grey. Maybe context was missing; or they think you're snark.