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European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

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Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#181

Post by legulere »

jaredklewis wrote: post #174
legulere wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UX is a problem that is almost immune to money Usability testing seems like something where you can get better UX with a lot of money: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-testing-101/

Oh I doubt it, unless you have that person with vision to interpret the results of the usability testing and turn them into a single cohesive design. Good UX comes from someone that has deeply internalized the problems a piece of software is solving for users and the constraints on those users. Most startups do this without usability testing by doing things like sales or customer support. Anyway, IME usability testin…

I don't disagree with you that you need to have a singe cohesive design vision based on solving for users. But I think that certainly usability testing can lead to even better results and is mostly constrained by cost.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#182

Post by jeltz »

legulere wrote: post #181
jaredklewis wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I doubt it, unless you have that person with vision to interpret the results of the usability testing and turn them into a single cohesive design. Good UX comes from someone that has deeply internalized the problems a piece of software is solving for users and the constraints on those users. Most startups do this without usability testing by doing things like sales or customer support. Anyway, IME usability testin…

I don't disagree with you that you need to have a singe cohesive design vision based on solving for users. But I think that certainly usability testing can lead to even better results and is mostly constrained by cost.

For sure. But without a cohesive vision throwing money at it can only make it worse if it does anything at all.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#183

Post by jeltz »

pembrook wrote: post #115
toomuchtodo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Teams already is already terrible UX, we have nowhere to go but up. Perhaps you are unaware, and if so, you should be thankful you don’t have to lose time using it. There are objectively better solutions available.

I too hate Microsoft teams but it can always get worse, you have no idea.

Care to give me an example to satisfy my morbid curiosity? I have used a lot of really bad chat clients over the year and Microsft's rewritten Skype is one of only a handful worse than Teams. Teams is not the worst but it is on my top 3 or 5 worst of the 30+ chat clients I have used. I have heard Lynk also was really bad but I never used it. Microsoft certainly has some of the worst.

Element is bad but it is way better than Teams from my experience.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#184

Post by jeltz »

viccis wrote: post #165
toomuchtodo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Teams already is already terrible UX, we have nowhere to go but up. Perhaps you are unaware, and if so, you should be thankful you don’t have to lose time using it. There are objectively better solutions available.

Matrix is so much worse than Team it will make your head spin. It suffers from design by committee to an unbelievable extent, and its various end-to-end security features are wonderful from a privacy standpoint but make things much much more complicated.

Having used both I think you are way too kind on Teams.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#185

Post by troyvit »

parchley wrote: post #89
troyvit wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is the part I hope Europe gets. They don't have nearly as much money to throw at Matrix as Microsoft can throw at Teams, but they do have massive resources, and I bet that since Matrix doesn't have many of the same shitty KPIs as Slack and Teams, those resources can go much further.

Are you saying that Microsoft is more wealthy than all of “Europe”? And surely you must mean the EU. The money needed to improve matrix is nothing compared to what is already being spent on Microsoft products.

Nah I'm just saying that Microsoft has more disposable money to throw at Teams than Europe has to throw at Matrix because Microsoft is a corporation that is choosing how to spend its money internally and Europe (or the EU, but why leave Switzerland, GB, etc. out of the fun?) would be funding an external entity in a (possibly?) new way.

I'm still learning how the EU applies grants to open source projects for specific feature sets, but I'm guessing that there's a lot of friction that could be removed.

And yeah, I agree that the money needed to improve Matrix is nothing. It's about getting organized and applying that money well.

To me Europe's push for digital sovereignty has the potential to reshape open source software's competitiveness around the world and in turn, Europe's.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#186

Post by viccis »

jeltz wrote: post #184
viccis wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix is so much worse than Team it will make your head spin. It suffers from design by committee to an unbelievable extent, and its various end-to-end security features are wonderful from a privacy standpoint but make things much much more complicated.

Having used both I think you are way too kind on Teams.

I've used both and written code to integrate into both. You never have to worry about, for example, losing access to all previous messages in your Teams channels if you get a new phone.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#187

Post by neiljohnson »

tabbott wrote: post #163
cue_the_strings wrote: post #136

As I've said before, Matrix really is the only viable open source solution for in-company communication. Every other solution (Zulip / Mattermost / whatever) is too risky, they could easily bait-and-switch you like Gitlab did, by moving important features to different tiers, or engage in other shenanigans afforded by the open core model. Matrix has a bad reputation because it used to be downright terrible (first time…

Correction: Zulip is 100% open-source software, and has been for a decade now. (I lead the Zulip project). Zulip's protocol, which is used for client/server communication by all major clients, has extensive documentation including the complete change history for the last several years on https://zulip.com/api/ and https://zulip.com/api/changelog . As far as I know, there is no mechanism through which Zulip could bait…

The complexity associated with Matrix comes from wanting to build a multivendor ecosystem around an open standard, the decentralisation (and federation) to avoid building islands and then implementing things like multi-device e2ee and VoIP in such a context.

However, it is exactly these properties that make it so appealing to an organisation like the EC as they pursue digital sovereignty.

The goals of Matrix have nothing to do with being a social network. You could theoretically build a social network on top of Matrix (Matrix essentially syncs JSON in real-time), but I'm not aware of a project with traction, and more to the point, those projects are not relevant to this discussion. Yes Matrix is resilient to network partitions (that's a good thing for a messenger!), but that seems entirely orthogonal to your point on social networks.

Finally, I don't think it's fair to draw a comparison between the relationship between Kandra Labs and Zulip vs Element and Matrix. Yes Element is a major player in the Matrix eco-system having originally formed to hire the Matrix founding team, but since then many Matrix vendors have sprung up and if Element were to disappear tomorrow Matrix would continue. In fact, this is the whole purpose of having an independent Foundation, which in turn encourages multiple vendors to operate side by side.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#188

Post by neiljohnson »

Flere-Imsaho wrote: post #155
Arathorn wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as the CEO/CTO of Element... the classic Element apps on mobile were buggy, thanks to being a ~10 year old codebase with no shared code between platforms and effectively the 1st generation Matrix client. Which is why we replaced them over the last few years with Element X, with all the heavy lifting shared between iOS & Android via matrix-rust-sdk (effectively a 3rd gen Matrix SDK). That said, 70% of our use…

Can i ask why is Element Classic even available on the Google Play Store? If you want people to move away from this? I've only started my Matrix journey, in the form of writing bots using the matrix Python library. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, as the Matrix protocol could be really impactful.

When Element X first launched, the goal was for it to cover the personal messenger use case. This worked just fine for some people, but for many, feature parity with the old apps and parity with the web experience was a hard blocker.

Both Spaces and Threads are about to land, and there are other lower-profile features that also need rounding out. We would expect full parity by April this year. At which point migration should be an obvious choice.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#189

Post by dpc_01234 »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #152
dpc_01234 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Slow" in what sense? Development? Because I self host a Conduit server and I don't ever notice messages being slow. It would be hard to notice anyway, as in a group chat people usually take some time to type in their responses. The sync between large groups used to be slow because of amount of data, but Element X and "sliding windows" were rolled out to help with it. AFAIK, the public Matrix server used to be slow b…

The experience of using Matrix involves a lot of sluggishness at various points in the client - waiting to decrypt messages or properly sync keys, waiting to join a room or for room search to load - these are the things that have been salient to me using multiple matrix clients with a freshly-spun-up server within the past month.

I more mindfully played a bit with my Element (web UI), and Element X (Android), and while there might something to it, and I suspect the e2e encrypted data model will always lead to some extra work required. Element seems a bit sluggish. However Element X on my Android seems butter smooth.

And event the slower Element seems far better than Discord that I'm forced to use, where I can't even scroll history without the whole thing stuttering.

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