Same experience here but i feel like Element is slowly getting worse. It is starting to use popups for everything and its becoming so annoying my friends are slowly leaving.

Verify this, is this you that.

I think partly its because i am not always on latest version of Synapse so the self-updating clients expect slightly different backends but uff.

It feels like Moxie is right with his anti federation argument. Call me stupid but i am really trying to keep it together but i still cant tell why some of the popups show up or why some sessions of my friends wont decrypt and they show gibberish.