I have tired using both of these messengers on a fresh, live booted system by utilizing AppImages and by building via the AUR.
However, neither is able to communicate with external servers.
In the case of the Element messenger, errors are thrown prior to full initialization saying that it can not reach a name server and offers to take me to the web version instead (which does work).

I was able to fix this issue simply by regenerating locale on my system. Now the AUR build works. AppImage still fails but as long as I have a working messenger all is good.

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