4 ms·

Holy crap, the Matrix/Riot teams have been busy! Congrats on the progress, it's very exciting to watch. Although I have a Matrix account I have had trouble gett

Holy crap, the Matrix/Riot teams have been busy! Congrats on the progress, it's very exciting to watch. Although I have a Matrix account I have had trouble getting friends/family to switch with me (mostly non-technical folks, and Signal was much stickier for them), it might be time to convince them to try again. Thanks to you and the team for all the hard work!

mikro2nd 6y ago
Interesting. I've turned quite a number of non-technical friends/family into Signal users, just by telling them, "Here's the messaging app I'm using if you want to talk to me..." without mention of encryption until they're already hooked. Uniformly comments have been favourable concerning ease-of-use and quality of voice/video calls (at least compared to what they're already used to -- generally Zoom or Skype), and several of them have pushed it out to their networks in turn.
- KAMSPioneer 6y ago
  Oh definitely, my experience is similar. Sorry if I was unclear: by Signal being "stickier" than Matrix I meant that I've had better luck getting friends to continue using Signal than continue using Matrix. So far, anyway.
- SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
  Ease of use is the big elephant-in-the-room issue for Matrix. The only way I've found to join a room is the `/join` command. There's a GUI search, but it doesn't work. Users have to pick their identity provider, their home server, etc. Lots of choices, scary messages, and generally annoying to set up. Services that depend on someone who is technically inclined setting things up never become widespread outside technical communities. If users pick an unreliable server to connect to, or there's a network split, things break, just like IRC does. There are several clients, all slightly different. It's up to the user to pick which one they want, when they've never used any of them and just want something to work. It's better than IRC, but that bar is so low you'd have to bury it to get any lower.
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    The GUI search should work fine these days. (It was broken about 6 months ago due to the room lists getting too big, but was fixed in https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/6019 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/6019). It's true you have to pick a server to use, but we try to provide decent defaults (although it's true matrix.org has been overloaded recently). We're trying to simplify onboarding via P2P Matrix - by default, you'd start off entirely P2P, and only pick a server if you want to 'anchor' your account somewhere. I have a feeling you may be going off outdated impressions here; we've been desperately trying to improve UI/UX (as per https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing-is-here/#what-else-has-been-going-on-in-riot https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing... and https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing-is-here/#what-s-next https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing...).
    - SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
      I last used it for the recent (Thursday, April 30th) Rust Zurich meetup. I've got it installed via apt, and updated to riot-web version: 1.6.0 olm version: 3.1.3 Search didn't find the room. /join did. Also it just took me over a minute to find the version number, because the client settings are hidden in a dropdown menu under my user name, not in the gear icon (tooltip "settings") on the upper left or the hamburger menu that says explore, and even in the right dropdown it's under "settings->help & about" instead of just under "help" where the "about" box has lived in every single program since the '90s...
      - Arathorn 6y ago
        Well, if search didn't find the room, it sounds like a plain old bug. (Or was the room marked ex-directory?) If you can file details at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues we'll dig into it. And noted, in terms of the version number being in the wrong place on Riot/Web.
    - folex 6y ago
      Awesome work, thank you for that! Keep it up! :)

mikro2nd 6y ago

Interesting. I've turned quite a number of non-technical friends/family into Signal users, just by telling them, "Here's the messaging app I'm using if you want to talk to me..." without mention of encryption until they're already hooked. Uniformly comments have been favourable concerning ease-of-use and quality of voice/video calls (at least compared to what they're already used to -- generally Zoom or Skype), and several of them have pushed it out to their networks in turn.

KAMSPioneer 6y ago
Oh definitely, my experience is similar. Sorry if I was unclear: by Signal being "stickier" than Matrix I meant that I've had better luck getting friends to continue using Signal than continue using Matrix. So far, anyway.
SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
Ease of use is the big elephant-in-the-room issue for Matrix. The only way I've found to join a room is the `/join` command. There's a GUI search, but it doesn't work. Users have to pick their identity provider, their home server, etc. Lots of choices, scary messages, and generally annoying to set up. Services that depend on someone who is technically inclined setting things up never become widespread outside technical communities. If users pick an unreliable server to connect to, or there's a network split, things break, just like IRC does. There are several clients, all slightly different. It's up to the user to pick which one they want, when they've never used any of them and just want something to work. It's better than IRC, but that bar is so low you'd have to bury it to get any lower.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  The GUI search should work fine these days. (It was broken about 6 months ago due to the room lists getting too big, but was fixed in https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/6019 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/6019). It's true you have to pick a server to use, but we try to provide decent defaults (although it's true matrix.org has been overloaded recently). We're trying to simplify onboarding via P2P Matrix - by default, you'd start off entirely P2P, and only pick a server if you want to 'anchor' your account somewhere. I have a feeling you may be going off outdated impressions here; we've been desperately trying to improve UI/UX (as per https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing-is-here/#what-else-has-been-going-on-in-riot https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing... and https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing-is-here/#what-s-next https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing...).
  - SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
    I last used it for the recent (Thursday, April 30th) Rust Zurich meetup. I've got it installed via apt, and updated to riot-web version: 1.6.0 olm version: 3.1.3 Search didn't find the room. /join did. Also it just took me over a minute to find the version number, because the client settings are hidden in a dropdown menu under my user name, not in the gear icon (tooltip "settings") on the upper left or the hamburger menu that says explore, and even in the right dropdown it's under "settings->help & about" instead of just under "help" where the "about" box has lived in every single program since the '90s...
    - Arathorn 6y ago
      Well, if search didn't find the room, it sounds like a plain old bug. (Or was the room marked ex-directory?) If you can file details at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues we'll dig into it. And noted, in terms of the version number being in the wrong place on Riot/Web.
  - folex 6y ago
    Awesome work, thank you for that! Keep it up! :)