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This is crux of the problem with their take-off. A few weeks ago I set up a personal Matrix homeserver and when my non-technical partner asked me what I was wor
by chrysoprace 7y ago
This is crux of the problem with their take-off. A few weeks ago I set up a personal Matrix homeserver and when my non-technical partner asked me what I was working on I didn't even know where to start. She is not computer-illiterate by any means, but being outside the industry, a concept such as federation is completely foreign.
Even trying to explain federation to my work colleagues who are in the industry is difficult, because it is such a fundamental shift from the normal web infrastructure.
- cvwright 7y agoI usually just tell people that Matrix works like email. You have your server, and it relays messages back and forth to other people’s servers for you.
- mandelbrotwurst 7y agoDo they understand that or do they just hear email as Gmail, say "oh, ok" and go on with their lives?
- cvwright 7y agoI think most people still understand that you can email people on different systems - Hotmail, work accounts, school accounts, etc.
- mandelbrotwurst 7y agoThey do, but what I think they might not understand is that there is a protocol behind it all that at least theoretically allows for anyone to run their own server without a third party, which I think is the aspect of e-mail that you're trying to call attention to, no? Part of the point that I'm trying to make is that e-mail as it stands today - with the majority of messages going through the servers of a single corporation - isn't all that decentralized in practice. When you mention e-mail to the layperson without additional explanation, what they have in mind is a fairly centralized system.
- cvwright 7y agoTo be fair, Matrix as it stands today isn't very decentralized either. The dev team reports that their big matrix.org server has something like 40k monthly users. And while there are a ton of tiny little personal homeservers out there, all the action is really happening on matrix.org.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mandelbrotwurst 7y agoAh, fair enough then. I suppose in this case I may be the one misinterpreting your analogy!
- mxuribe 7y agoThis struggle is real! I, too, still get surprised when trying to explain to my work colleagues - who are in the tech industry also. Even when i can get some modicum of understanding from them, they rarely see the point of it all...they're almost totally brainwashed - i see no better term for it than this.