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The Matrix Trashfire

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Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#71

Post by rglullis »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #31
rglullis wrote: post #17

Ok, now do XMPP. Or Signal, but with the added requirement that you want to run your own server.

I find that XMPP interoperability (terrible as it is) is still just miles ahead of Matrix. For all intents and purposes Element controls the protocol and despite that I almost constantly find friction communicating the client for Android and the desktop Electron-based client. With 3rd party clients it is a nightmare.

When https://siskin.im/ is seriously touted as the best iOS client for XMPP, you already lost 50% of the market share in the US. And if you don't have any usable app for 50% of your users in one of the most important markets, you can not really claim "interoperability", can you?

Don't get me wrong, it would be great if more people were using XMPP. Now that I am more involved in the Fediverse space I'm learning how many wheels are being reinvented and XMPP has already solved. If more people learned about https://movim.eu I'd be able to shut off Communick and move on to do something else to do with my life, but the reality is that XMPP failed to achieve critical mass because it never had someone to complete control the protocol.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#72

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #69
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old wisdom in the US, is that if you have "Quality" in your job title, your career is over. At the Japanese company that I used to work for, it meant that you were one of the most powerful people in the corporation, and was a sought-after adornment. Different strokes, and all that...

I always give the power to my QA team to block any release no matter what and to give higher priority to tickets than product manager. If CEO wants to override, I cover them and take the blame. This is not a guarantee that there will be no bugs in production, but it saved us a few times.

The Japanese testers were the best I'd ever seen.

They never reported a "NotABug." They could back up every report, and give exact reproduction steps.

They found weird, obscure corner cases, and that was by hand (they hated automation tools).

They had 3,000-line Excel spreadsheets. If even one of those rows failed, the whole shooting match (like an entire product line) could come to a halt (so that meant they had to cross their t's, and dot their i's).

They seldom had "opinion-based" reports, and, when they did, the report was presented by the manager, after long discussions.

The company I worked for, was renowned as one of the highest-Quality optical corporations in the world.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#73

Post by LeonB »

skywhopper wrote: post #66

Fantastic writeup. I’m a little confused by the screenshot with the caption “Servers marked as vulnerable, unavailable and with profanity in their name.” In the screenshot, three things are highlighted: labels for “Vulnerable”, “Unavailable”, and the server name “cyberfurz.chat”. Is “cyberfurz” supposed to be profanity?

I had a hunch … so I opened a German to English translator and put in the words

Cyber furz

In English:

Cyber fart

Every day is a school day!

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#74

Post by rglullis »

the_third_wave wrote: post #70
rglullis wrote: post #17

Ok, now do XMPP. Or Signal, but with the added requirement that you want to run your own server.

Running an XMPP server is dead simple, just install Prosody and make few simple edits to the configuration and you're set. It hardly takes any resources (32 MB resident on my server) so it can happily live on whatever server you're already using. You will want to add some records to your domain to make it all run smoothly but this is well-documented and even works fine on free DNS providers like Namecheap and Cloudfl…

Ok, now go try to convince your 70 year-old father, who is using iOS, to join you and to use it as your primary means of conversation.

I'm not being facetious. Try that, and then try doing it with Matrix/Element. Tell me which one do you end up with.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#76

Post by IanCal »

influencer3000 wrote: post #65
solarkraft wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lastly I think comparing an open source project like Matrix/Element to Publicly traded corporations like Slack or Meta, is not fair. If we want to "win" (reach similar/higher adoption), we need to at least come close. It's not easy work, but not doing it and leaving the product that so much good work has ready gone into unusable for a vast number of people would be a bummer.

Not sure we want to "win". If endusers want apps "to just work" without "paying up", then I would recommend them to stay with Whatsapp. That kind of users aren't worth the hassle if they have no money. I personally have better relationships with people that enjoy learning something new, and coming up with solutions for issues themselves, eventually contributing to the ecosystem.

> I personally have better relationships with people that enjoy learning something new, and coming up with solutions for issues themselves, eventually contributing to the ecosystem.

Then we should add deliberate errors in the signup process and encourage the community not to talk about them so there's a definite right of passage.

> I personally have better relationships with people that enjoy learning something new,

Here's another perspective. I love learning new things. But this is making me learn the internal product releases of a chat app rather than, say, what the different lions represent in the dance I watched on Chinese new year.

Or worse, you're making me learn what the split is between matrix the spec, matrix the hosted server, the matrix foundation, element the business, element the hosted service, element the app and the other element the app - rather than pretend to be an imaginary creature called a meep with my daughter.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#77

Post by upofadown »

hiq wrote: post #54
upofadown wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big usability issue with Signal is that it has a dark pattern that leads to most users using it without verifying that they are actually talking to who they think they are talking to. If you do verify a particular contact's identity it involves comparing a 60 digit decimal number. The 7 emojis seen in the linked article are arguably better but a short decimal number would have been good too and would have elimina…

> If you do verify a particular contact's identity it involves comparing a 60 digit decimal number. Why wouldn't you scan the QR code instead of doing that?

You can if both devices are phones and you are physically in the same location. Otherwise, the user is expected to be able to do that.

In any case, the user won't have the faintest idea of why they have to do that, so they won't, which in a sense makes this moot.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#78

Post by MattJ100 »

rglullis wrote: post #74
the_third_wave wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running an XMPP server is dead simple, just install Prosody and make few simple edits to the configuration and you're set. It hardly takes any resources (32 MB resident on my server) so it can happily live on whatever server you're already using. You will want to add some records to your domain to make it all run smoothly but this is well-documented and even works fine on free DNS providers like Namecheap and Cloudfl…

Ok, now go try to convince your 70 year-old father, who is using iOS, to join you and to use it as your primary means of conversation. I'm not being facetious. Try that, and then try doing it with Matrix/Element. Tell me which one do you end up with.

Did you try it? What were the pain points?

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#79

Post by nottorp »

influencer3000 wrote: post #29

While it's never fun to receive negative feedback, it'll only help to improve the product. Still, I run Matrix servers since inception of the project (10 years now \o/), and for an experienced system administrator this is not something difficult to do. If you think running a Matrix server is difficult, you are probably not the intended audience: running an IRC server, an email server, or some other server, is mostly…

> Matrix is a communication protocol, and it is not intended to be touched by end-users.

So what is "intended to be touched by end users"? I can't figure that out either from the article or the comments here.

Assume I can (and actually have) run an irc server, but I haven't set up Matrix for the last 10 years.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#80

Post by LeonB »

skywhopper wrote: post #62
crimsoneer wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll happily admit the Element/Element X migration they're currently on is silly and unhelpful, but the point being if they'd just gone to the Element home page, or download the actual Element app instead of the X one, it would have perfectly happily registered them to Matrix.org by default and everything would have been just fine.

You’re missing the point. He’s following a reasonable user flow. If he went to the wrong place in the beginning, that confusion itself is a problem that the Matrix community needs to address.

100% agree.

The user should fall into the “pit of success” — no matter where/how they first enter the pages of matrix or element … it should be natural that they end up at the correct getting started for them.

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