* You hear of interesting room on another room and you wish to join it. You
touch the name wishing to get into there? What happens instead? You will get
an error message [cannot rejoin an empty room](https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/issues/1066).
* I hope that doesn't annoy you and you wish to hear the workaround of
running `/join #room:example.net` by hand instead.
* This may be a bit more rare one, but if you share rooms with bots, you may
notice that on Element Web they are more gray than people. [Element iOS just never got messages from bots being rendered differently](https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/issues/882).
* I may again be a bit weird, but I wish to have [timestamps for all messages visible all the time](https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/issues/524),
but Element says no. They exist on Web, not on iOS. Same if you [wanted to see seconds](https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/issues/3901)
* I almost forgot, but the [new spaces](https://element.io/blog/spaces-the-next-frontier/)
just [don't exist on iOS](https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/issues?q=label%3AA-Spaces+),
should you attempt to join or be invited to one, you will get a banner
saying that they aren't implemented yet and you cannot accept or reject
the invite unless you open Element Web to do that.
And that is probably enough of annoyances with Element iOS, I hope the
situation will improve in foreseeable future there due to
[Matrix exploding with Element securing $30M funding to revolutionise the app’s usability, build out major new features, expand in the enterprise market and take Matrix fully mainstream!](https://element.io/blog/element-raises-30m-as-matrix-explodes/)
# You mentioned privacy?
Yes, privacy is a big reason why Matrix is advertised and the lack of it is
a fact you agree to by using Matrix or getting bridged to Matrix (which is
out of scope for this blog post as it involves other protocols too much,
whether you know Matrix or not).
As with the internet in general, the most safe assumption is that once you
post something it's there forever. It may be encrypted in a private Matrix
room or it may be public in a public room, but it will most likely be there
forever.
Matrix does support [history retention if you are advanced enough to enable it](https://brendan.abolivier.bzh/matrix-retention-policies/),
this assumes [your homeserver explicitly enables it as it's not default](https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/ba5287f5e8be150551824493b3ad685dde00a543/docs/sample_config.yaml#L481-L484)
and as your room is hosted on every homeserver that has users in your room,
have a single homeserver that hasn't explicitly enabled it and the room
history never goes away. (If I am wrong, [please contact me](/discuss) as
I have one private room where history goes away after 7 days, but another with the
same configuration (nowadays 31 days though), which I can scroll as far back
as I want.)
*Technical note: sorry about calling reference homeserver implementation issue
as a Matrix protocol issue.*
You may say that this requires you to trust the homeserver admin anyway and
that is true, I wish people could trust each other and even if someone
modified their Synapse to never remove anything or had a client logging
everything, they wouldn't throw that history to people who don't want to see it.
Speaking of removals, once you remove a message [it will be stored in the database for server admins for 7 days](https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/ba5287f5e8be150551824493b3ad685dde00a543/docs/sample_config.yaml#L456-L461) which is fine for me, but if [this message happened to be media instead of text, it would never be removed](https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/1263) and should you have copied link to the media, it would keep on working
and if you changed the homeserver address in your copied link, it would still
keep on working. Is this something you expect from a private protocol? I don't, or I didn't before getting familiar with Matrix. There is also an [alternative proposal about this](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/2228).
*By the way Synapse is still a reference homeserver implementation and not
Matrix protocol itself, so sorry about that for anyone technical reading this.*
Do you use different names in different contexts? Like your Full Name in
professional context, a nickname somewhere else and maybe what will be your
real name after gender transitioning or even have a diffferent name in direct
chat with your partner? [Congratulations, whatever is your latest room-specific name is public, same with your potential avatar](https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/5677).
*Synapse didn't become Matrix protocol itself by the way, there are still other implementations!*
This issue does have a potential solution [an API planned for room specific details (2015)](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/545)
and what I am hopeful about in the future [open pull request specification for space specific profiles](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/3189),
unless it just moves the issue to a different level.
I think that was my biggest complaints on Matrix (or Synapse itself), that
don't involve other protocols and I have personally experienced. My notes
for this blog post include [Matrix not having real contacts list](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/2228),
but they didn't occur to me and I guess it has been doing fine enough without
implementing those.
If any of these issues is a dealbreaker for you or you don't want to hear
a bad word about Matrix, you may be wondering what is the perfect flawless
solution? I don't know, personally I don't think it may not exist and I don't
want to enter discussing compromise solutions or other protocols in this post
at all. This list also wasn't complete on what issues I have with Matrix
(and so close to the end I don't want to dig for references) and I have
specific wishes that no protocol offers (at least not consistently,
such as using multiple names and knowing which name I am using where or managing
50 different rooms with same operators everywhere, but [that may get answered by Matrix](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/2962).)
You may wonder was it nice of me to write so negative blog post. I find it
and now I have finally done it, a bit over half an year late,
spending a bit over an hour to it and I feel better after getting these problems
out of my head and maybe they weren't so big after all. Up to you.
Lastly I apologise to you-know-who-you-are for not titling this post "undefined",
or even M.UNKNOWN (which I would have imagined to be one of the issues for me to write about, but
I don't remember seeing it in a long time, so maybe the situation is improving.
Feedback? I have [a discussion room in many apps](https://mikaela.info/discuss),
or you can find me from a lot of the linked issues and there is also [issue tracker for this site](https://github.com/Mikaela/mikaela.github.io/issues).
* [Changelog, also known as git commit history](https://github.com/Mikaela/mikaela.github.io/commits/master/blog/_posts/2021-08-03-matrix-perfect-privacy-not.md)
