6 ms·

I'm happy to see that element found another potential revenue stream, but will people pay the 5$/month to unify their messaging? I don't know about others but

I'm happy to see that element found another potential revenue stream, but will people pay the 5$/month to unify their messaging? I don't know about others but it's not that much of a pain point for me, and I'm using all of the apps they mention - WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram as well as few others like IRC and Discord.

rglullis 5y ago
I have nowhere near the same reach and marketing capacity as Element, but if my experience running a managed hosting service [0] for Matrix (and other messaging/social media services) is anything to go by: individuals really don't care enough about that to the point of paying $5/month, but there is a growing opportunity for business that want to have some control over their communications. These bridges can be amazing if you want to have a chatbot, or a support desk that can put all their conversations in one place, etc, but to replace the mainstream apps it is too much of a tall order. At the moment the mobile clients have so many bugs that makes it hard even for me to go when offering support for my "customers", which at this point is just the couple dozen friends and family that I managed to rope into it. They don't even have feature parity with any of the competitors, so for end-users it's just easier to switch apps on their phone depending on who they want to talk and their will have a better experience doing so. I still use and support Matrix, but their clients still need to improve a lot if they ever hope to reach mainstream. I am focused now on another project [1], but when/if I ever get to work back on communick, I will pivot away from end-users and into SMB. [0] https://communick.com https://communick.com [1] https://hub20.io https://hub20.io
solarkraft 5y ago
If the available Matrix clients were not a pain to use I probably would.
- gtirloni 5y ago
  Exactly. The Element UI isn't the best selling point of Matrix right now and that would be a requirement for someone to switch from all those apps to Element.
encryptluks2 5y ago
Too bad they didn't spend the efforts on actually creating a decentralized protocol.
rkangel 5y ago
> I'm happy to see that element found another potential revenue stream, but will people pay the 5$/month to unify their messaging? As one data point, I probably would pay $5 a month just for that. Combining that with all the other Matrix goodness is a bonus.

rglullis 5y ago

I have nowhere near the same reach and marketing capacity as Element, but if my experience running a managed hosting service [0] for Matrix (and other messaging/social media services) is anything to go by: individuals really don't care enough about that to the point of paying $5/month, but there is a growing opportunity for business that want to have some control over their communications. These bridges can be amazing if you want to have a chatbot, or a support desk that can put all their conversations in one place, etc, but to replace the mainstream apps it is too much of a tall order. At the moment the mobile clients have so many bugs that makes it hard even for me to go when offering support for my "customers", which at this point is just the couple dozen friends and family that I managed to rope into it. They don't even have feature parity with any of the competitors, so for end-users it's just easier to switch apps on their phone depending on who they want to talk and their will have a better experience doing so. I still use and support Matrix, but their clients still need to improve a lot if they ever hope to reach mainstream. I am focused now on another project [1], but when/if I ever get to work back on communick, I will pivot away from end-users and into SMB. [0] https://communick.com https://communick.com [1] https://hub20.io https://hub20.io

solarkraft 5y ago

If the available Matrix clients were not a pain to use I probably would.

gtirloni 5y ago
Exactly. The Element UI isn't the best selling point of Matrix right now and that would be a requirement for someone to switch from all those apps to Element.

encryptluks2 5y ago

Too bad they didn't spend the efforts on actually creating a decentralized protocol.

rkangel 5y ago

> I'm happy to see that element found another potential revenue stream, but will people pay the 5$/month to unify their messaging? As one data point, I probably would pay $5 a month just for that. Combining that with all the other Matrix goodness is a bonus.