Riot is now Element

If you dislike the new name, branding, or user experience, instead of arguing over why or why not it is a good decision, I'd encourage you to get yourself involved and be that change.

Before the rebrand, or even any talk user experience and design from Element (Riot), I didn't want to wait and started working on a privacy centric matrix client that focused on branding and user experience. I managed to get E2EE working by myself within a month using the Matrix provided encryption library.

https://syphon.org

https://github.com/syphon-org/syphon

For the record, I don't think Element is a bad name. Regardless of the name itself, this is a massive leap forward for their branding. The user experience seems to have been cleaned up dramatically in the new versions of their iOS and Android apps.

Wow, this is slick. I'm sure there's a lot of work to be done, but how far along is cross-signing at this point?

it's next on the list after group E2EE is stable along with key import/exports

Speaking of branding, Dart isn't the best brand either. I mean anyone interested in it would search for Dart language. Just like anyone interested would sarch for Element matrix.

I tried your client with my own synapse instance but couldn't login, no error message. I click the question mark to search for instances, click use my instance, fill in username:instance.tld but nothing happens.

It works with RiotX.

Is your "<synapse_domain>/.well-known/matrix/client" set up?

I just tried this on Android from F-Droid. I couldn't get past the login page, unfortunately. Bitwarden popped up to auto fill the form, but it didn't work. I tried typing my credentials manually, but it was rough because of the weird quirks with the text boxes. Why does the carat jump to the last character after every keypress? It made it nearly impossible for me to correct a typo. My password is pretty long, which royally confused the password input field. After a certain number of characters, it just stopped displaying anything. It also does not respect my system preference of not displaying the most recently typed character unmasked. Finally, after all that, I clicked login and the button just changed to a spinner forever.

I realize this is alpha quality software, but to claim to be focused on user experience and have such horrible UI issues does not give me any confidence, sadly.

I've addressed these problems you listed in version 0.0.19 but getting updates to the F-Droid store is a very slow process. The next F-Droid release will have auto updates enabled with the F-Droid team, so those and future issues should be fixed relatively quick from that platform.

Regardless, thanks for trying it out.

Edit: feel free to post issues like this directly to the project in github if you decide to try it out again

I assume so, I mean it took a while to get it right so that Riot would work. But now both Fractal, RiotX, the old Android app and Riot-web work fine.

We can continue this in the Issues I guess. I noticed there was a planned improvement for error snackbars in the login so that would solve half of the issue. But I found no other issue with problems logging in open right now.

There is currently a snackbar in the login for errors. Just signed out and typed in a wrong password to make sure I didn't break anything. However, I am on version 0.0.19. If you downloaded the app from F-Droid, you're on the first public build. I'm still trying to get another update out from the initial release.

I've added a new ticket linking back to this comment and I'll look into the issue. I have several people using Syphon with their own homeservers successfully so I'm thinking the problem has to do with a silent error that's unrelated. Thanks for the feedback though and feel free to respond in the github issue itself.

In many respects, Syphon is a good name. Short (two syllables!), memorable, reasonably easy to write and set to become easy to search for.

And yet you've failed.

It's not just that siphoning something off has shady connotations already in general usage[1], but that in tech reporting specifically, it's referring to the mass exfiltration of data:

"How Facebook Was Able to Siphon Off Phone Call and Text Logs"[2]

"StrandHogg 2.0 can also hijack other app permissions to siphon off sensitive user data, like contacts, photos, and track a victim’s real-time location."[3]

"Perhaps the most sinister of them all is an attack designed to siphon off your organisation’s data, otherwise known as data exfiltration."[4]

"Data exfiltration is how hackers siphon out valuable intelligence from a business."[5]

"Report: Chinese Hackers Siphon Off ‘Massive’ Amounts of Undersea Military Data"[6]

To name a messaging app like that might almost seem like overt cynicism to casual observers.

I'm surprised nobody else has pointed this out. What is it that I have missed?

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/sipho...

[2] https://newstalk1290.com/how-facebook-was-able-to-siphon-off...

[3] https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/26/strandhogg-malicious-apps-...

[4] https://www.csa.gov.sg/gosafeonline/go-safe-for-business/sme...

[5] https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2017/10/02/dns-exfiltration/

[6] https://threatpost.com/report-chinese-hackers-siphon-off-mas...

PS: Nice graphics on your website, very pleasant to look at and built with diversity in mind–but what the heck is the dude looking at the black circle supposed to signify? I'd get rid of that one. To be very frank, it appears to be something vulgar to me. O;)