Matrix v1.15

But there are reasons it isn't competing with discord, slack or teams. I would like to say a lot of that has to do with matrix.org not having a serious/good commercial play, but I think it's a lot more nuanced than that.

Matrix is sort of like Mastodon and Lemmy in its target audience and usage, and there is nothing wrong with that. But I think a lot of us wanted something like Bluesky but for chat apps.

Marketing and UI are very important. something like Signal can get away with being terrible at it because they were able to get publicity and marketing from snowden, politicians,etc... I even think Matrix is a better OMEMO/E2EE communication client than Signal. But having a good product isn't enough, the user experience needs to be competitive for the general public to join and things like branding and publicity are especially important for Matrix because a good product other people aren't using isn't usable for communication purposes.

Don't get me wrong, I know the matrix team is well aware of this and they try their best, but it seems for now at least they know their target audience and that audience is happy enough with it. I suspect in Europe at least they're going to do really well. Whatsapp and Viber are very popular east of the Atlantic. Matrix should focus on disrupting those. Having something like whatsapp numbers instead of full on user id's (or translating them) for example would help compete there.

Matrix is carving out a nice but they're developing it like it should be competing with the bigger/dominant players. I interact with very technical people that are into opensource, development, security, etc... and every single time, I am the first person they hear about Matrix from.

Okay, but they do that because they used those apps, and they did that because you released those apps and said the same thing you're saying now ("use our app, it's really cool"). Surely you can understand why someone who dealt with that is going to be suspicious of "this time for sure".

> However, because it's a rewrite, it doesn't quite have feature parity with the old apps, which are now over 10 years old

So people can either judge based on "legacy" apps that do more, or the shiny new app that does less. Again, surely you can understand why people might be disappointed with both of those.

There isn't any way to avoid being judged on your whole history.

I recently tried Element X. I will say the onboarding was better, although that comes with the caveat that I'm not sure how that would go if I didn't have another device at hand to verify with. And UTD errors have definitely decreased (across all clients). Apart from that, the UX is okay, but I don't see it as radically better than the old Element.

There has been a good deal of improvement in Matrix, which I appreciate and kudos are due to you and the team for that. But I think it's a bit of a stretch to make claims like Element X being "radically better" than any competitor. And, importantly, making grandiose promises like that increases the risk of losing trust if people's experience isn't absolutely stellar.

Most probably don't add it anyway because it's far from mandatory (I haven't created an account for some time, but I assume it's not part of the flow), so it probably wouldn't work out great in practice.

I'd very much like to disagree.

From the top of my head, in the past few years of using Element Web:

- Notification center is now gone.

- Room search is now only limited to official Matrix rooms.

- At peak it consumes ~2.2 GB of RAM.

- UI feels more sluggish by the day.

- Loading it now takes ~10 minutes.

- Using it as an IRC bouncer (to Libera) is now gone, which was what initially attracted me in the first place.

And I don't even use the voice / call functionality of Element Web.

I somewhat understand the reasoning behind the decisions, but I feel like they should have improved the UX first before working on the protocol itself.