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The Matrix Trashfire

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Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#91

Post by danpalmer »

raziel2p wrote: post #84
danpalmer wrote: post #14

I've never used Matrix, directly. However I use Beeper all day every day, via their iOS, Android, and macOS clients. Beeper (not the iMessage app, but their previous and continuing multi-network app) is pretty great. I get one consistent UX across all chat networks I use. Sometimes the networks drop out, but rarely due to Beeper issues. Beeper is essentially a Matrix homeserver, plus a bunch of hosted Matrix bridges,…

Depends on how you define "Matrix", I guess. The technology is undoubtedly great, but it also needs to sell itself as a (standalone) product if it wants to catch on.

But Matrix isn't a product. There are companies building products on it, such as Element and Beeper, and as far as I can see the latter are doing a perfectly good job of selling themselves.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#92

Post by raziel2p »

danpalmer wrote: post #91
raziel2p wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on how you define "Matrix", I guess. The technology is undoubtedly great, but it also needs to sell itself as a (standalone) product if it wants to catch on.

But Matrix isn't a product. There are companies building products on it, such as Element and Beeper, and as far as I can see the latter are doing a perfectly good job of selling themselves.

That may be technically correct, but reality is if Matrix wants to catch on (large scale) as a concept, it needs to act as a product in some way. Even if that just means having a good landing page guiding users on how to sign up on a server, install a client, and connect the two - and making sure that this always works.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#93

Post by noirscape »

Honestly, the matrix documentation is a total mess in general.

The protocol is from what I can tell pretty cleverly designed/usable as a casual chat app (even if it leans heavily towards IRC esque design), but actually figuring out how to use it is somewhere between "wisdom of the ancients" and actually impossible. A lot of very relevant information is stored in old documentation that is currently marked as outdated on the site but has no updated equivalent.

The bad apps and onboarding only hamper it further.

It's still baffling to me that the best way to actually administer a selfhosted matrix homeserver (specifically, synapse, the reference homeserver) is to do a database hack to promote a user to an admin and then use an external PWA hosted on GitHub[0] so you can actually do basic moderation actions without having to resort to using curl.

[0]: https://awesome-technologies.github.io/synapse-admin/

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#94

Post by dale_glass »

LeonB wrote: post #73
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!

It's not German, it's a furry instance with some 90s flavor.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#95

Post by linuxandrew »

crimsoneer wrote: post #26
bowsamic wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that the official Matrix Mastodon account as well as the "Matrix Director of Program Development" agree with his assessment with the Mastodon account agreeing that it is a "trashfire" makes me sceptical of your suggestion that he was manufacturing these issues.

I mean, Element and Matrix are 2 separate entities, which is kind of the key problem with all these efforts - there have been plenty of posts about how hard it was to join a Mastodon instance, or creating 2 accounts etc. That said, the Element/Element X migration is a mess. But if he'd just gone to the Element website and clicked "get started", it would have just worked.

> I mean, Element and Matrix are 2 separate entities

Separate but they work closely from what I gather. New Vector develops Element/ElementX and has seats on the Matrix.org board. Element is the Matrix.org flagship client.

I do appreciate that Matrix.org has its own foundation and I don't mean to disparage New Vector in any way, but they are undeniably closely linked. I'm not sure if Matrix would survive without New Vector.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#96

Post by croes »

master-lincoln wrote: post #51
Attrecomet wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author tried the exactly one client that was available from element in the app store. Hard to fault him for that.

Well, they tried to use an open source ecosystem by finding an app in a store where devs need to pay to get their apps in. Maybe not the best combination

What do you think non IT people would do?

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#97

Post by thibaultamartin »

noirscape wrote: post #93

Honestly, the matrix documentation is a total mess in general. The protocol is from what I can tell pretty cleverly designed/usable as a casual chat app (even if it leans heavily towards IRC esque design), but actually figuring out how to use it is somewhere between "wisdom of the ancients" and actually impossible. A lot of very relevant information is stored in old documentation that is currently marked as outdated…

Indeed the documentation generally needs much more love. In an ideal world, every single page of the documentation would have a person in charge of keeping it up to date.

We're a rather small team on the Foundation side and lack the personpower to do so.

We're in the process of listing what documentation we need and what we need to update. This will be the foundational work to apply to Google Summer of Docs and for individual tech writers to apply to grants like NLNet (who doesn't usually fund "large" organisations like us) to help us out.

I'm also adding instructions on how people can step in and contribute to the docs if they have the time and desire to do so: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/pull/2155

We're doing our best with our limited resources, but I'm confident we can improve the situation eventually!

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#99

Post by rglullis »

haltcatchfire wrote: post #16

We used Matrix for a couple of years at my company, but got kicked out from their managed hosting due to the new requirement of 50+ seats. The years we've been using it has been more of tolerating its flaws than a pleasant user experience. We migrated to Slack and was blown away of how It Just Works.

If your company ever considers going back: https://communick.com/services/matrix

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#100

Post by maelito »

hiq wrote: post #50
maelito wrote: post #44

I'm talking daily with friends on Element. Most of them don't work in tech, but are quite comfortable with computers. It's ok. Most bugs concern threads. But it's one of the only chat apps that enable threads, so I'm ok with that, threads are absolutely needed in my opinion. Signal conversations can become such a mess because of that. ElementX lacks threads, but apart from that is refreshing. Looks more like a chat a…

> Signal conversations can become such a mess because of that. The workaround is to create new groups, even if that's with the same set of people. I even have groups with just another person and myself, e.g. for specific projects. In my experience that works well enough, also because if something is longer-lived, I'll put it in a shared doc instead.

But I won't create a new group to for example talk about a video.

That's what I just did with a friend : share 10 messages about a video.

We're 4 in the group. 2 of them might never be interested by the talk about that video. It's completely unpractical to create a new group to just talk about that.

Then you need to either close or leave the group. No problems with threads, it's created with a click and finishes by lack of new messages.

It's just what happens in real life : people move around 2 meters when they want to talk about something in particular, and other people can either ignore, either join the ephemeral group.

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