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Well if you can, then why aren't they as good as Telegram, and why should I be holding my breath for their UI / UX to suddenly improve? Matrix has been around f

Well if you can, then why aren't they as good as Telegram, and why should I be holding my breath for their UI / UX to suddenly improve? Matrix has been around for almost as long as Telegram. I don't use either so I don't really care. I just don't expect a consumer service with subpar UI to win market share solely on technical merits.

rglullis 4y ago
- smallerfish 4y ago
  Not OP, but that's not a fair statement. Checking the box of ideals doesn't mean that open source software is off the hook in having to compete on features. Regular users do not give a rat's ass about source code being open; it's an extremely abstract concept if you're not in the field. All they care about is free as in beer. Matrix can either target the niche demographic of the highly technical, or it needs to level up on usability to reach a wide audience. The number of people who have tried LibreOffice, Gimp, etc is probably orders of magnitude higher than the number of actual daily users. If these software applications were businesses, their exec teams would have been fired many times over for the atrocious churn. Free as in beer is an excellent foot in the door, but it's wasted time and again by huffy developers who don't know how to create good UX and who won't open the door to good product people who want to help out.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    > Checking the box of ideals doesn't mean that open source software is off the hook in having to compete on features. No one said that. > Regular users do not give a rat's ass about source code being open Open source or not, they should care about reliability, avoiding lock-in, abusive practices from monopolistic players, privacy... > If these software applications were businesses, their exec teams would have been fired many times over for the atrocious churn. If these applications were business, you'd also have to look at Cost of Customer Acquisition, at how much is being spent on marketing, you'd also have to see how much your developer team is being compensated, how much they are getting in shares, etc. If the investment is zero, the ROI from FOSS will be by definition infinitely superior to closed solutions. What I am trying to say is: TANSTAAFL. OP's seems to not care about his freedoms, so he is willing (like many others) to trade it away for the convenience brought by closed solutions. So it is no surprise that a FOSS project (which has no way to monetize the user to finance its development) will lag behind. This will only change when people start covering some of this difference and start supporting FOSS projects directly.
    - throwamon 4y ago
      > they should care about [...] And there's your problem. Regular users do not give a rat's ass about your shoulds. In addition, for example, I've never seen any serious UX bugs in Telegram, and I've seen many in Element. Regular users care waaay more about that than some vague notion of "reliability".
      - rglullis 4y ago
        > your shoulds They are not mine. It's not my data that is being mined and it's not my business that can disappear if WhatsApp goes offline. Yeah, I'm fully aware that people generally don't care about any of that. Lots of people also don't care about their eating habits, the effects of their economic actions, etc, etc. But if they don't want to face the bad consequences of their choices, they should.
        white_dragon88 4y ago
        Therefore the idea will continue to flounder indefinitely, used by a microscopically small user base representing a microscopically small niche of the market. In effect it doesn’t exist and has negligible impact on the bigger picture. But at least you get to feel like you did the right thing, right?
        rglullis 4y ago
        > Therefore the idea will continue to flounder indefinitely, used by a microscopically small user base. I have no control over what others do. The only power I have is over my own choices. > But at least you get to feel like you did the right thing, right? I am more concerned about not doing the wrong thing (if I can avoid it) then any display of righteousness. In the case, no one is forcing me to use WhatsApp, so if I can avoid being a participant in something that I believe to be hurtful to me and others, I will. The inconvenience is a small price to pay.
        TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
        Just as FOSS should produce high quality, usable, popular, free software. But it doesn't. Your shoulds look an awful lot like a tribal affectation which the FOSS community uses to exclude non-technical users. It doesn't matter if the exclusion is conscious (I suspect it isn't) or deliberate (likewise.) The point is the exclusion happens. Self-evidently and empirically. Outside of the technical community FOSS might as well not exist. If you actually want people to use FOSS you need to stop shoulding potential users and start making software that satisfies their needs in obvious and delightful ways. Security and privacy are important but secondary features. And access to source code trails at the end of the list. It's of zero interest - and even less use - to non-technical users.
  - oakpond 4y ago
    I think you're right, but perhaps more aggressive marketing already helps a lot. I'm not a marketing person, but for example, take advantage of these kind of events to let people know that Matrix's network is impossible to go down like this because it works like e-mail. Reiterate the point that Whatsapp is part of Facebook's network. So, your Whatsapp account is under Facebook's control just like your Facebook account. Matrix accounts work like e-mail addresses. You choose a provider for your account, and you can always choose a different one without losing access to the network. Present these kinds of talking points to the actual mainstream. Advertise on Youtube, go on TV... maybe people care less about the UX than we think.
rakoo 4y ago
It won't surprise you that to improve a product, you need people working on it. In a capitalistic society you need to pay them to do that. Telegram sits on the billions of its founders and doesn't need to make revenue, they have money. What company with an infinite supply of money (and, thus, developers, managers, QA, interviewers) are building a Matrix client and can afford to have as many people working in it ?
- Arathorn 4y ago
  Element funds a lot of Matrix work, and we have a large team working on both Matrix, Element clients, Matrix hosting, and our various customer projects (around 100 people). And while Element has taken longer than I’d like to improve in terms of UI/UX, it is definitely getting there - cf https://element.io/blog/an-unrecognisable-improvement-elements-new-design-is-here/ https://element.io/blog/an-unrecognisable-improvement-elemen... etc.
  - rakoo 4y ago
    Oh, I didn't mean to say no one is working on the Matrix ecosystem. The reason Matrix is where it is today is thanks to you guys. But I don't think you can say you have as many resources and as many people working on it as Telegram, and you're solving a problem 10x more difficult than what Telegram does.
- nikitaga 4y ago
  Of course, I see that. But open source projects routinely manage to meet technical expectations while failing specifically at meeting UI / UX expectations. That makes sense for unfunded projects because most developers are not good designers, and designers don't have a culture of contributing to open source, but for a project that pays (some of) its developers, it's their choice how much to pay developers vs designers vs managers, and they are responsible for the way in which they allocate their limited resources. I recently had to move my open source project's chat from Gitter to Discord, not because we like Discord or "don't care about open source" but because everyone is so damn tired of Gitter's terrible UX that it became the overriding concern. Matrix bought Gitter two years ago, and I kept waiting, hoping that they would improve it, but they did literally nothing to it except connect it to Matrix within a couple months – and even that doesn't work well, with Matrix users still unable to respond in threads. I assume there is a good reason for that. I'm not here to judge, only to point out that this "good reason", whether it's lack of funding or priorities or whatever – won't change anytime soon, so I won't be holding my breath anymore.

rglullis 4y ago

smallerfish 4y ago
Not OP, but that's not a fair statement. Checking the box of ideals doesn't mean that open source software is off the hook in having to compete on features. Regular users do not give a rat's ass about source code being open; it's an extremely abstract concept if you're not in the field. All they care about is free as in beer. Matrix can either target the niche demographic of the highly technical, or it needs to level up on usability to reach a wide audience. The number of people who have tried LibreOffice, Gimp, etc is probably orders of magnitude higher than the number of actual daily users. If these software applications were businesses, their exec teams would have been fired many times over for the atrocious churn. Free as in beer is an excellent foot in the door, but it's wasted time and again by huffy developers who don't know how to create good UX and who won't open the door to good product people who want to help out.
- rglullis 4y ago
  > Checking the box of ideals doesn't mean that open source software is off the hook in having to compete on features. No one said that. > Regular users do not give a rat's ass about source code being open Open source or not, they should care about reliability, avoiding lock-in, abusive practices from monopolistic players, privacy... > If these software applications were businesses, their exec teams would have been fired many times over for the atrocious churn. If these applications were business, you'd also have to look at Cost of Customer Acquisition, at how much is being spent on marketing, you'd also have to see how much your developer team is being compensated, how much they are getting in shares, etc. If the investment is zero, the ROI from FOSS will be by definition infinitely superior to closed solutions. What I am trying to say is: TANSTAAFL. OP's seems to not care about his freedoms, so he is willing (like many others) to trade it away for the convenience brought by closed solutions. So it is no surprise that a FOSS project (which has no way to monetize the user to finance its development) will lag behind. This will only change when people start covering some of this difference and start supporting FOSS projects directly.
  - throwamon 4y ago
    > they should care about [...] And there's your problem. Regular users do not give a rat's ass about your shoulds. In addition, for example, I've never seen any serious UX bugs in Telegram, and I've seen many in Element. Regular users care waaay more about that than some vague notion of "reliability".
    - rglullis 4y ago
      > your shoulds They are not mine. It's not my data that is being mined and it's not my business that can disappear if WhatsApp goes offline. Yeah, I'm fully aware that people generally don't care about any of that. Lots of people also don't care about their eating habits, the effects of their economic actions, etc, etc. But if they don't want to face the bad consequences of their choices, they should.
      - white_dragon88 4y ago
        Therefore the idea will continue to flounder indefinitely, used by a microscopically small user base representing a microscopically small niche of the market. In effect it doesn’t exist and has negligible impact on the bigger picture. But at least you get to feel like you did the right thing, right?
        rglullis 4y ago
        > Therefore the idea will continue to flounder indefinitely, used by a microscopically small user base. I have no control over what others do. The only power I have is over my own choices. > But at least you get to feel like you did the right thing, right? I am more concerned about not doing the wrong thing (if I can avoid it) then any display of righteousness. In the case, no one is forcing me to use WhatsApp, so if I can avoid being a participant in something that I believe to be hurtful to me and others, I will. The inconvenience is a small price to pay.
      - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
        Just as FOSS should produce high quality, usable, popular, free software. But it doesn't. Your shoulds look an awful lot like a tribal affectation which the FOSS community uses to exclude non-technical users. It doesn't matter if the exclusion is conscious (I suspect it isn't) or deliberate (likewise.) The point is the exclusion happens. Self-evidently and empirically. Outside of the technical community FOSS might as well not exist. If you actually want people to use FOSS you need to stop shoulding potential users and start making software that satisfies their needs in obvious and delightful ways. Security and privacy are important but secondary features. And access to source code trails at the end of the list. It's of zero interest - and even less use - to non-technical users.
- oakpond 4y ago
  I think you're right, but perhaps more aggressive marketing already helps a lot. I'm not a marketing person, but for example, take advantage of these kind of events to let people know that Matrix's network is impossible to go down like this because it works like e-mail. Reiterate the point that Whatsapp is part of Facebook's network. So, your Whatsapp account is under Facebook's control just like your Facebook account. Matrix accounts work like e-mail addresses. You choose a provider for your account, and you can always choose a different one without losing access to the network. Present these kinds of talking points to the actual mainstream. Advertise on Youtube, go on TV... maybe people care less about the UX than we think.

rakoo 4y ago

It won't surprise you that to improve a product, you need people working on it. In a capitalistic society you need to pay them to do that. Telegram sits on the billions of its founders and doesn't need to make revenue, they have money. What company with an infinite supply of money (and, thus, developers, managers, QA, interviewers) are building a Matrix client and can afford to have as many people working in it ?

Arathorn 4y ago
Element funds a lot of Matrix work, and we have a large team working on both Matrix, Element clients, Matrix hosting, and our various customer projects (around 100 people). And while Element has taken longer than I’d like to improve in terms of UI/UX, it is definitely getting there - cf https://element.io/blog/an-unrecognisable-improvement-elements-new-design-is-here/ https://element.io/blog/an-unrecognisable-improvement-elemen... etc.
- rakoo 4y ago
  Oh, I didn't mean to say no one is working on the Matrix ecosystem. The reason Matrix is where it is today is thanks to you guys. But I don't think you can say you have as many resources and as many people working on it as Telegram, and you're solving a problem 10x more difficult than what Telegram does.
nikitaga 4y ago
Of course, I see that. But open source projects routinely manage to meet technical expectations while failing specifically at meeting UI / UX expectations. That makes sense for unfunded projects because most developers are not good designers, and designers don't have a culture of contributing to open source, but for a project that pays (some of) its developers, it's their choice how much to pay developers vs designers vs managers, and they are responsible for the way in which they allocate their limited resources. I recently had to move my open source project's chat from Gitter to Discord, not because we like Discord or "don't care about open source" but because everyone is so damn tired of Gitter's terrible UX that it became the overriding concern. Matrix bought Gitter two years ago, and I kept waiting, hoping that they would improve it, but they did literally nothing to it except connect it to Matrix within a couple months – and even that doesn't work well, with Matrix users still unable to respond in threads. I assume there is a good reason for that. I'm not here to judge, only to point out that this "good reason", whether it's lack of funding or priorities or whatever – won't change anytime soon, so I won't be holding my breath anymore.