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The Matrix Trashfire

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Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#141

Post by DecoySalamander »

rglullis wrote: post #71
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

> 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

Could you elaborate? From screenshots it looks like any other chat app and branding isn't offensive.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#142

Post by rakoo »

rglullis wrote: post #17

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

I did it no later than Yesterday:

- Install Conversations on Android - In a prompt, there's a "create an account", I create one (it's with conversations.im) - I have an account - At this point there's a slight confusion between "what discussions are happening" and "what discussions do you know about", but I manage to find a room to a discussion I'm interested in - Get in, see the messages

The experience is definitely 100x nicer

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#143

Post by rakoo »

rglullis wrote: post #60
rapsey wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i.e. moving the goalpost fallacy.

My goal is "let's have a communication protocol that is secure, enables applications with modern features on all major platforms and is not controlled by any single entity ". If not for the last point, I'd be using WhatsApp just fine. But because of it, Matrix/Element is currently the best we have. Is it great? Absolutely not, but it is the best we have at the moment, and to call it a "trashfire" without putting thin…

Interestingly Delta Chat kind of fits the bill thanks to their investigation of webxdc, i.e. mini apps that run entirely within the chat and never connect to the outside world, only with peers in the chat: https://webxdc.org/

I can't say if this is the future, but I like it taking another direction. Taking a few steps back, this model solves a lot of problems with a very easy UX for beginners: shared calendar, shared expenses, shared notes can all happen inside your chat, which is naturally the place where you already share stuff with people, but now it can be more without any server installation or anything.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#144

Post by aaronbrethorst »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #72
ivan_gammel wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you have any insights into why desktop and mobile software from these companies is so universally horrible? I’m thinking of Canon’s remote tethering tools, Fuji’s instax and remote control apps for iOS, and Epson’s scanner software.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#145

Post by rakoo »

yaky wrote: post #117
MattJ100 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you try it? What were the pain points?

Not the person you asked, but here are some pain points asking my relatives (30s and 60s) to switch: "WhatsApp works fine, I talk to you on there already" (in reality, via a Matrix-WhatsApp bridge) "Who am i going to talk to on there?" (Me?) "I don't want to install another app" (but installing ad-laden Viber is fine...) "I cannot share pictures to Element so I sent it to you through [iOS] Messages" (well, Element re…

All of this is absolutely valid, but none of this is specific to the XMPP/Matrix ecosystems

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#146

Post by dingnuts »

linuxandrew wrote: post #95
crimsoneer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not only are they actually very closely linked, in that Element operates matrix.org, but to a new user (told to try Matrix -- what is this Element thing?) there's no difference.

I onboarded a family member onto my Matrix server with FluffyChat as the client. This person is a power user, fairly technical, yet still refers to the chat as "FluffyChat" and although I've explained several times that choosing FluffyChat was maybe a mistake and they should use Element, it never seems to really click that multiple clients are possible.

And really, they aren't possible. They have different subsets of features.

If you want to see a trash can fire, just try to follow the discussion for adding custom emoji to Matrix: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/195...

it's been going on for years. It's a feature the competitors have had for half a decade, as long as this discussion has been ongoing. I've been watching this issue for half a decade thinking "surely they'll decide on something" but mostly all I've been convinced of is this: Matrix is design by committee in all of the worst aspects and at every level of design. If anything gets done at all, it's a convoluted mess, and it's a miracle that it even happens.

I wish community software developers would focus their attention.. somewhere else.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#147

Post by justin_oaks »

IanCal wrote: post #18

This kind of process is extremely valuable and should be done by devs more often. Start from the start and follow whatever your application tells you to do . Note down when it doesn't tell you where to go or what to do. You'd be surprised by just how many things you do automatically while working because you know the little tricks and things to get by, and that wording doesn't necessarily match what the app requires…

If you're trying to make a good onboarding user experience then you should do your onboarding testing with people who've never seen the product before, not devs or QA. Once people are familiar with the product (devs, QA, and anyone who has used it before) then they're "tainted". They'll remember the weird way that they had to work around an issue, and that'll just end up being "the way it is" rather than something to fix.

I've read that a strategy for this is create an ad and pay people $50 to come in and try to use your software. Tell them to do something in your software and see what they get hung up on. The worst UX problems will be hit by nearly every user.

As simple as that is, none of my employers have ever done this. The closest was one of the bosses asking his wife to try out the software.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#148

Post by hiq »

upofadown wrote: post #138
hiq wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Otherwise, the user is expected to be able to do that. If you're not in the same location, you can long press the code in Signal and "compare to clipboard". > 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. I think that's a generic remark about this though, that applies to all messengers AFAIK. Whether that's a 4-digit code and 60.

I am not sure how you would get the 60 digits from the other person in your clipboard. My point is that users should have the chance to know what they are doing. There seems to be a tendency to deliberately keep them in the dark. A 4 digit code is objectively more usable than a 60 digit code.

If verifying these digits make any sense, that means you already have a trusted channel you rely on to communicate these digits. You would use that trusted channel to transfer these digits. How do you want to communicate them?

> A 4 digit code is objectively more usable than a 60 digit code.

It's more usable, but that would assume synchronicity (like a TOTP) or something else to be secure, while the 60 digits do not AFAICT. So there's a usability tradeoff. You can't truncate a hash function and assume it's just as safe. They could add more options on top of the current one though.

Overall I think the intersection of pairs of users who:

* want to verify their safety numbers

* have very infrequent physical contacts

* would struggle to use another trusted channel to communicate their safety numbers

is small enough for this not to be a priority for Signal.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#149

Post by rglullis »

DecoySalamander wrote: post #141
rglullis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

> 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 Could you elaborate? From screenshots it looks like any other chat app and branding isn't offensive.

At best it can be described as a "hacker's idea of a functional mobile app". The UI is crude, antiquated and not at all following the Apple guidelines.

I'm not saying that I can do better, but I can bet that if you show it to 100 iphone users, 98% would not be interested in having it as their main messenger app.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#150

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #144
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you have any insights into why desktop and mobile software from these companies is so universally horrible? I’m thinking of Canon’s remote tethering tools, Fuji’s instax and remote control apps for iOS, and Epson’s scanner software.

I don't want to get into slagging these folks, but I feel your pain. In a big way.

Hardware != software.

Hardware companies have a really difficult time, understanding this. They insist on running in-house software projects as waterfall-based-measure-twice-cut-once-never-accept-a-bug-count-greater-than-0.

Anything different is "bad quality cowboy."

It can be difficult. I rapidly learned not to use the word "agile," within earshot of many senior types.

This applies to US hardware companies, as well as Japanese ones.

Most folks, hereabouts, seem to think of me as an unbearable, retentive, snob, but my former managers would often think of me as an undisciplined, reckless, slob.

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