I really sympathise with this point of view, but when it comes to messaging with family and friends, I just don't really care. Matrix seems to want to be an IRC replacement rather than a one-to-one / small-group chat app. That's fine, but often not what I want. Teaching my mother in law to use Signal: Install. Accept permissions. Choose a PIN. I can send you messages. You can see your friends who already use Signal.…
I am heavily against switching from WhatsApp to Signal, but you have very good points, and I think Matrix should take note of these points. Technically Matrix can yield a very similar user experience to Signal, but there has to be more focus on actually doing it if it wants to be considered as a serious player in the same space as WhatsApp and Signal.
> I am heavily against switching from WhatsApp to Signal,
I'm curious - what are your arguments against the switch?
Moments of recognition reading this. A couple of weeks ago at virtual FOSDEM I was trying to work out how to join the FOSDEM chatrooms using the Android app formerly known as Riot.im (now Element.io). And I couldn't work it out - I gave up completely. I'm an actual programmer and heavy IRC user!
I actually felt that the instructions weren't that clear if you were joining via the app. I incidentally did join some of the rooms after the actual conference, but FOSDEM could have provided more instructions beyond "sign up on our server and use the web client" - the main Android App client, and most popular server are hardly niche. And many people already have that setup. I did eventually work out how to find the…
The provided instructions would have allowed people to use it but the criticism of the ux remains
I really sympathise with this point of view, but when it comes to messaging with family and friends, I just don't really care. Matrix seems to want to be an IRC replacement rather than a one-to-one / small-group chat app. That's fine, but often not what I want. Teaching my mother in law to use Signal: Install. Accept permissions. Choose a PIN. I can send you messages. You can see your friends who already use Signal.…
Seems like something that can be solved with a more streamlined client focused on usability. Consider the difference between setting up a custom domain on mxroute compared to just opening a gmail account. Both user experiences are possible on the email protocol.
Personally I think we've been in something of a dark age for open protocols to our detriment, as oligopolistic companies have increasingly used walled gardens to manipulate or dominate. I'd like to see that trend reversed and protocols like this succeed. Maybe with the rise of the patron model we can actually sustainable fund people who do the work of maintaining these protocols.
Yes but email also used to be fragmented and walled garden'ed back in the early days of networking. Chat is still in its infancy as a technology. We are still trying to figure things out: what's the minimal necessary feature set? What should a server API provide to clients? And a myriad of behavior/feature/privacy questions that different messaging systems handle differently, for example: what happens when I leave a…
ICQ came out in 1996, AIM in 1997, and MSN in 1999. I don't think it's fair to give the people working on this a pass by saying this is a new problem - working products have been shipping for over 20 years. Some of the devs working on Signal and Matrix were probably born after ICQ was released. The reality is that all of these systems, including email, tend towards becoming walled gardens. Otherwise you end up with t…
The problem is not in which year it started but whether the feature set is stable enough to be standardized - see my questions in the original comment. And that's just a few of them.
I wish that the author had spent more time really thinking about _why_ communication has moved away from email, or why XMPP/IRC never really caught on despite being vastly older than these app competitors (hint: it is because they are federated, and so making sweeping changes to the protocol/client in the name of UX becomes intractable.) It is _very_ frustrating that the internet has had messenger fragmentation since…
Isn't the fact neither XMPP nor IRC are e2e-encrypted a factor in them catching on? Nobody wants to use a messenger that's public, or that with a single centralised compromise/hack could make all their messages become so. To me that disqualifies them as even being potential solutions to the problem. Matrix has significant usability issues in its currently-available form(s) - but it at least meets the most basic of re…
XMPP lost popularity long before the public became (unhealthily) obsessed with encryption.
The problem with WhatsApp and Signal is that even though it's e2e, it uses your phone number as id which is the least privacy friendly id they could have picked.
It’s also impractical for digital nomads like myself who don’t use phone numbers at all. I haven’t used Signal, but what do I do if every X months I have a new phone number? Will it still work if I swap SIM cards?
I really sympathise with this point of view, but when it comes to messaging with family and friends, I just don't really care. Matrix seems to want to be an IRC replacement rather than a one-to-one / small-group chat app. That's fine, but often not what I want. Teaching my mother in law to use Signal: Install. Accept permissions. Choose a PIN. I can send you messages. You can see your friends who already use Signal.…
If your mother in law can't even pick a username and password, how will she shop on Amazon, sign up with Google, book a flight? Most other mobile apps require you to sign up for an account too. And it bypasses the big problem of having to use your phone number (though you can already add it if you want for people to easily find you!)
In regards to the UX of Elements, I think it's not great either but it's not the only matrix client. That's the great thing about Matrix.
I wish that the author had spent more time really thinking about _why_ communication has moved away from email, or why XMPP/IRC never really caught on despite being vastly older than these app competitors (hint: it is because they are federated, and so making sweeping changes to the protocol/client in the name of UX becomes intractable.) It is _very_ frustrating that the internet has had messenger fragmentation since…
I have an alternative view to offer here, because this to me sounds like you are leaving out a significant part of mobile messenger evolution.
Back when Smartphones weren't a thing most phones had JavaME, and the most popular networks for chatting were MSN, ICQ, AOL and others. I'll focus on ICQ specifically here because it's what's been popular where I live. It had been a messenger for people with computers, but then suddenly everyone started using it with an unofficial JavaME client Jimm. Literally every person with a phone, even though it was a complicated thing to do - you had to register on the ICQ website using a computer, build or download a pre-built Jimm for your phone (you had to cater it to the hardware, because phones had been very different back then from model to model) and log into ICQ from your phone. Most cellphone stores offered "Jimm setup" as a service for people who couldn't do it themselves. The reason for such popularity? SMS limitations made it very expensive to have long chats on the go, and ICQ demanded so little traffic that you could use it for a fraction of SMS costs. And of course, as most multi-clients at the time, Jimm had full XMPP support, after all ICQ, AOL and MSN were little more than slightly customized XMPP at the time. So switching to any other XMPP server was pretty trivial.
Anyway, this lasted for a long time, and then, sadly, a smartphone "revolution" happened. People started getting smartphones left and right, and unlike JavaME phones they were much, much worse for ICQ, XMPP or any other similar network. See, a JavaME phone was perfectly capable of maintaining connection to ICQ servers in the background, without draining your battery life too much. It was seamless, most phones at the time allowed for at least one app to run in the background at all times. But once Android and iOS came along - suddenly a phone had to either be sleeping all the time or had empty batteries in a few hours, and that was awful news for protocols that relied on continuous connection, like ICQ did.
The only smartphone that played nice with these protocols that I know of is N900.
Sadly this, and this thing only killed XMPP, ICQ and others for an average person. If it wasn't for these protocols not playing well with smartphones, I have 0 doubts XMPP would be king right now.
I really sympathise with this point of view, but when it comes to messaging with family and friends, I just don't really care. Matrix seems to want to be an IRC replacement rather than a one-to-one / small-group chat app. That's fine, but often not what I want. Teaching my mother in law to use Signal: Install. Accept permissions. Choose a PIN. I can send you messages. You can see your friends who already use Signal.…
+1 Also about Matrix, the confusion when the client app doesn't have the same name as the protocol is so unfriendly for the non tech-savy users.
This is the thing about multiclient protocols. You don't look for SMTP in the app store either :) The whole point is having multiple clients so they can't all have the same name.
Having said that, the 'default' app constantly changing their name (Vector -> Riot -> Element) is super annoying. I thought Riot was a stupid name (living in a city that regularly sees riots), but don't really get what was wrong with Vector in the first place :P