I have once tried Syphon but for an unknown reason it did not work for me really well.

Obviously there is a mistrust of the team toward the community, which makes them regard asking a question as attacking their product.

No other client seems feature-complete.

In my opinion it is because the team which implements the features to Element, including what to implement and how to do it, substantially decides the protocol itself as well. You would easily identify who both implement the protocol and review PRs.

If you guys are by any chance interested in how members of the community responded, please check out the comments added after the PR was closed: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/9240#issuecomment-1703060227 and below. You would be able to see the pent-up negativity toward the reluctant team communication. Check these two:

• https://github.com/vector-im/element-meta/issues/321#issuecomment-1140423589
• https://github.com/vector-im/element-meta/issues/339#issuecomment-1703873136 (Mind the screenshot!)

To me it shows well that the company thinks little of the importance of the communication between internal team members and external volunteers.

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The point is that project pretends as if it would welcome any contribution, while there seems to be in fact a lot of rules and guidelines which are not shared with the community. I’m not saying it would be deceiving, though.

Yes, I should have done that actually.

What you might missed is that there are some PRs merged without adding or changing a spec (as a experimental function), others rejected after long silence. I agree completely with you about the group effort, but at first you would need to create a group at first, where you could discuss with the community (or notify them) what to be implemented, improved, etc. The team has lacked that kind of effort, and most of the communication take place privately.

I am not the author of the PR but sympathetic due to the effort the author has put to the PR for a year, which at first received reviews from a member which let the author expect that it was going to be accepted with necessary changes somehow, only to be notified by another member that the new spec change should cover the area the author has worked. If there had been a communication channel which worked between the team and the community, this kind of miscommunications should have not happened in the first place.

This PR is just an example; there are other cases where the volunteers were not included in the communication.

You probably would be able to see the same kind of problem more clearly on the issue for the notification sound improvement, which do not require a spec and the design team has said they were working on implementation several years ago and ignored comments for follow-ups since then, which is obviously not a healthy attitude toward the community.

• https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/5891
• https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/4500#issuecomment-620942203 and https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/5891#issuecomment-965030052

Still, Element is not a community-owned project after all, so it is it might make more sense to fork it as you said. like Forgejo was forked from Gitea. There is in fact a fork of Element, SchildiChat.