I'm wearing a Matrix T-Shirt right now and can't disagree much about the experience not being great.
There are a million clients because the official one has horrible UX and everyone thinks they can make a better one.
I wish. My experience is that there are few clients and a lot of them have similarly ... beginner-unfriendly UX due to the SDKs, the protocol itself and cultural factors (there seems to be a good amount of "this is good enough"/"you don't actually need that" hubris in the community).
Matrix, besides XMPP, is the only federated chat protocol with any kind of traction, so I figure that it makes sense to invest in improving it rather than building something new. Ideally using it would be a no-brainer choice for delivering chat apps: Why would you invent something new when you could use a protocol that already exists and already has a vast ecosystem of libraries and users? That's where I wish it was, reality unfortunately looks quite different.
Why would you invent something new when you could use a protocol that already exists and already has a vast ecosystem of libraries and users?
Unfortunately that's exactly what Matrix did, and people keep repeating the same mistake. Just this week, i was seeing a new federated IM protocol whose main selling point is "not XMPP/Matrix":
If only these Matrix/Tinode people spent their energy on making a decent XMPP client, Discord would not even be born. Alas, my interpretation is it's a hard-sell to investors to make a client for an existing network and these devs want to put bread on their tables.
i mean it is also totally fair enough to just make another version of something that already exists for the sake of it, making things is fun and that's a good enough reason imo.
personally i'm really not a fan of the "x already exists so everybody should always use that and nobody should ever spend time making a different one" school of thought that seems to be so prevalent here. i just think it goes without saying that if their thing isn't obviously better and easy to adopt, it probably won't gain any traction.
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I'm wearing a Matrix T-Shirt right now and can't disagree much about the experience not being great.
I wish. My experience is that there are few clients and a lot of them have similarly ... beginner-unfriendly UX due to the SDKs, the protocol itself and cultural factors (there seems to be a good amount of "this is good enough"/"you don't actually need that" hubris in the community).
Matrix, besides XMPP, is the only federated chat protocol with any kind of traction, so I figure that it makes sense to invest in improving it rather than building something new. Ideally using it would be a no-brainer choice for delivering chat apps: Why would you invent something new when you could use a protocol that already exists and already has a vast ecosystem of libraries and users? That's where I wish it was, reality unfortunately looks quite different.
Unfortunately that's exactly what Matrix did, and people keep repeating the same mistake. Just this week, i was seeing a new federated IM protocol whose main selling point is "not XMPP/Matrix":
https://github.com/tinode/chat
If only these Matrix/Tinode people spent their energy on making a decent XMPP client, Discord would not even be born. Alas, my interpretation is it's a hard-sell to investors to make a client for an existing network and these devs want to put bread on their tables.
i mean it is also totally fair enough to just make another version of something that already exists for the sake of it, making things is fun and that's a good enough reason imo.
personally i'm really not a fan of the "x already exists so everybody should always use that and nobody should ever spend time making a different one" school of thought that seems to be so prevalent here. i just think it goes without saying that if their thing isn't obviously better and easy to adopt, it probably won't gain any traction.