Having just struggled through verifying keys on multiple devices, that video makes me really happy, for a lot of reasons. Particularly, it's a nice bonus-surprise to see the E2E search and Pantaliamon as generic tools that 3rd-party clients can hook into, because there are a few communities where I'm thinking about putting together very narrowly-focused custom clients.
And I just installed RiotX and it shows reactions correctly!
Hopefully comments like this aren't too exhausting. There's two sides of it, one of which is all the stuff to complain about. But the other side is that stuff like Pantaliamon is really cool -- it means if I want to build a custom chat client with weird features, I can have decent encryption for free without having to worry that I'm doing something horribly insecure. The bridges are still getting polished, but similarly, they're also amazing because bridges allow me to make very forward-facing, future-proof decisions about where I want to host communities and I know that I won't have to abandon existing members that are on platforms like Discord.
The core project is just really exciting, it addresses all of these problems that I've had in the back of my head for a long time. There's this wonderful feeling where you're constantly annoyed about something and feel like there's nothing you can do about it, and then one day you find out that not only does someone else feel the same way, but they're actually fixing it. And even more than that, just finding out that it is actually possible for those problems to be fixed; that there's going to be a point in my future where that happens.
So there's admittedly a lot of impatience there, but it's coming from a very hopeful place, and I hope it isn't discouraging.
IIRC, apps that stay alive in the background have to use that persistent notification. It doesn't happen if you can rely on push notifications, though. I do not use google services (f-droid version), so I was expecting to see that, but do you see it as well if using them?
Note that you can hide the notification by long-pressing it.
On E2E, search is now implemented, as is totally revamped verification and cross signing and fixed key sync, as per https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/matrix/
Communities are a trainwreck but next up to get fixed in the coming months.
Thanks for sticking with it; we’re catching up as fast as we can...