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There’s a surprising amount of negativity in here. Matrix is great for me. I’m happy to see the improvements. I’m also happy to hear the team is approaching sus

There’s a surprising amount of negativity in here. Matrix is great for me. I’m happy to see the improvements. I’m also happy to hear the team is approaching sustainability. Matrix isn’t perfect but it has only improved in the 5 years I’ve been using it. I’m looking forward to what they can do in another 5 years.

godelski 1y ago
I think HN just tends to be negative, though it seems to be getting more negative. I think a lot of people don't understand that finding problems is easy. Fixing them is hard. Which yes, you need to identify first but criticize, don't complain. But it's funny because anytime someone talks about Signal lots of people point to Matrix as "better". I'm not going to do the reverse because they solve different problems, which is okay. Besides, we should have a diversity of platforms, competition is good and there's no one size fits all. Biggest problem is people thinking there should be one superapp. I'm pretty confident people are mostly forming opinions to justify their decisions rather than speaking from informed points of view. My evidence is that these platforms solve different problems. Personally, I don't use matrix other than occasionally playing around. But I'm glad it exists and want it to keep existing
- WhyNotHugo 1y ago
  Competition can be good, for example, if we had new clients for existing federated IM protocols. But Matrix brings fragmentation more than anything else: a brand new protocol that's slowly re-inventing what we already had. Matrix clients don't really compete with existing ones for open (or closed) protocols, they exist in an entirely new sphere. I don't think this is a net positive; the general ecosystem has finite manpower, the more we fragment it, the less each protocol gets. In the end, we have a new federated IM protocol which doesn't bring many new things to the table, but we still don't have any reliably easy-to-use clients.
  - tcfhgj 1y ago
    > But Matrix brings fragmentation more than anything else: a brand new protocol that's slowly re-inventing what we already had. We certainly didn't have decentralized rooms before
bigstrat2003 1y ago
Same. Some friends and I use Matrix for keeping in touch, and I've been quite happy with it. I find that it just works and gets out of our way.
v3ss0n 1y ago
When compare to Zulip , Matrix usability is nothing close to that.
- lrvick 1y ago
  Zulip lacks end to end encryption and decentralization so they are not remotely comparable.
  - tabbott 1y ago
    If you're doing consumer chat with friends and family, I'd recommend Signal over Matrix or Zulip. For a community: A lot of communities want anyone in the public to be able to join their spaces and read their channels. For that use case, E2EE makes the chat system slower and less usable, with limited security benefits over using web standard encryption. What E2EE may protect you from is a malicious server operator reading the organization's messages. If the server operator is a leader in the organization already, that person may already be directly a recipient of all the interesting messages anyway. The practical benefit I see for E2EE in Zulip is mainly for Zulip Cloud or other settings where a third party is hosting the Zulip server for you. As for decentralization, a self-hosted Zulip server only talks to external infrastructure for sending notifications (Emails, mobile push) and to implement user-controlled features (E.g., outgoing webhooks). The Zulip API is fully documented, easy to understand and implement, and has community-developed clients. Maybe you're thinking of federation? Matrix has fancier mirroring functionality, which can be important if your use case requires sharing dozens of channels with dozens of other servers. But Zulip is supported by Matterbridge and has various nicer mirroring integrations for sharing a channel with another server on various protocols. But I don't know of many use cases where the usability of the core chat system isn't far more important than the usability of federation features.
    - lrvick 1y ago
      Signal is a non starter. Never had an account and barring major architecture changes, I never will. Weakly secured centralized control of metadata with no option to self host your way out of it, and a requirement of a phone number which makes it a non starter for friends in countries that have good reason to be anonymous. Zulip is at least self hostable but all private conversations in plain text on the server and lock-in to only being able to access chats on the one server are also both non starters. It is not a matter of trusting the admin, it is trusting that the Linux server was deployed with no exploitable flaws, and the admin never gets a court order. Too much trust for me. Zulip is maybe a nicer UX alternative to IRC, but it is not comparable to Matrix.
notepad0x90 1y ago
it may have to do with many of us on HN not getting the target audience for Matrix. It works great for a ton of people. Their usage stats speaks for itself. But there are reasons it isn't competing with discord, slack or teams. I would like to say a lot of that has to do with matrix.org not having a serious/good commercial play, but I think it's a lot more nuanced than that. Matrix is sort of like Mastodon and Lemmy in its target audience and usage, and there is nothing wrong with that. But I think a lot of us wanted something like Bluesky but for chat apps. Marketing and UI are very important. something like Signal can get away with being terrible at it because they were able to get publicity and marketing from snowden, politicians,etc... I even think Matrix is a better OMEMO/E2EE communication client than Signal. But having a good product isn't enough, the user experience needs to be competitive for the general public to join and things like branding and publicity are especially important for Matrix because a good product other people aren't using isn't usable for communication purposes. Don't get me wrong, I know the matrix team is well aware of this and they try their best, but it seems for now at least they know their target audience and that audience is happy enough with it. I suspect in Europe at least they're going to do really well. Whatsapp and Viber are very popular east of the Atlantic. Matrix should focus on disrupting those. Having something like whatsapp numbers instead of full on user id's (or translating them) for example would help compete there. Matrix is carving out a nice but they're developing it like it should be competing with the bigger/dominant players. I interact with very technical people that are into opensource, development, security, etc... and every single time, I am the first person they hear about Matrix from.
- n2h4 1y ago
  [dead]
justaj 1y ago
> Matrix isn’t perfect but it has only improved in the 5 years I’ve been using it. I'd very much like to disagree. From the top of my head, in the past few years of using Element Web: - Notification center is now gone. - Room search is now only limited to official Matrix rooms. - At peak it consumes ~2.2 GB of RAM. - UI feels more sluggish by the day. - Loading it now takes ~10 minutes. - Using it as an IRC bouncer (to Libera) is now gone, which was what initially attracted me in the first place. And I don't even use the voice / call functionality of Element Web. I somewhat understand the reasoning behind the decisions, but I feel like they should have improved the UX first before working on the protocol itself.
- lrvick 1y ago
  Have you considered that multiple of your complaints could be addressed by protocol improvements?
  - mqus 1y ago
    I don't see this, since the complaint is about things that used to work and not things that are still missing.
    - lrvick 1y ago
      Things working well with a few channels and a few hundred people are very different than working with thousands of channels and thousands of people.
  - justaj 1y ago
    While that would perhaps be the best solution in the long run, wouldn't you agree that gains in userbase necessary for growth (or at least sustainability) are predicated upon how good the UX is _currently_ ?
    - lrvick 1y ago
      My minimum requirements for personal online communication outside of public web-accessible forums like this one, are open protocol, open source implementations, optional E2EE, independent hosting, client choice, and access to channels on other independently hosted servers. These are non negotiable for building my social graph of communication with family, friends, colleagues, etc. Communication is a sacred part of the human experience and I will not allow centralized entities to control my primary means of connection to my friends and family. My options for digital comms are then are limited to email, IRC, XMPP, or Matrix. Matrix has leaps and bounds the best UX and functionality by this criteria and is what I use for the overwhelming majority of my communications. Anyone that is exclusively willing to communicate over corpotech disrespects my values for freedom and privacy, and is by extension opting out of being friends with me unless we see each other in person regularly. 9/10 times the people that respect me and want to be friends with me also respect my ethical conviction and create matrix accounts to talk to me if they do not already have one. Taking back control of the internet will require conviction and I try to lead by example in my social circles. I personally could not give less of a shit if Matrix has feature parity with xyz corpotech as they are not solving the same problem. I also use IRC heavily to talk to many of the best engineers in the world and that is a low UX bar to beat. That said, as corpotech walled gardens keep screwing their users, more and more hold-outs will come over and new features and improvements will reduce that friction over time. For now though very few individuals understand the vital importance of digital sovereignty for a citizen controlled society, but governments absolutely get it and do not want people like Zuck controlling their comms, so it is not surprising governments are first in line willing to pay for help switching to Matrix. The people will follow in time.

godelski 1y ago

I think HN just tends to be negative, though it seems to be getting more negative. I think a lot of people don't understand that finding problems is easy. Fixing them is hard. Which yes, you need to identify first but criticize, don't complain. But it's funny because anytime someone talks about Signal lots of people point to Matrix as "better". I'm not going to do the reverse because they solve different problems, which is okay. Besides, we should have a diversity of platforms, competition is good and there's no one size fits all. Biggest problem is people thinking there should be one superapp. I'm pretty confident people are mostly forming opinions to justify their decisions rather than speaking from informed points of view. My evidence is that these platforms solve different problems. Personally, I don't use matrix other than occasionally playing around. But I'm glad it exists and want it to keep existing

WhyNotHugo 1y ago
Competition can be good, for example, if we had new clients for existing federated IM protocols. But Matrix brings fragmentation more than anything else: a brand new protocol that's slowly re-inventing what we already had. Matrix clients don't really compete with existing ones for open (or closed) protocols, they exist in an entirely new sphere. I don't think this is a net positive; the general ecosystem has finite manpower, the more we fragment it, the less each protocol gets. In the end, we have a new federated IM protocol which doesn't bring many new things to the table, but we still don't have any reliably easy-to-use clients.
- tcfhgj 1y ago
  > But Matrix brings fragmentation more than anything else: a brand new protocol that's slowly re-inventing what we already had. We certainly didn't have decentralized rooms before

bigstrat2003 1y ago

Same. Some friends and I use Matrix for keeping in touch, and I've been quite happy with it. I find that it just works and gets out of our way.

v3ss0n 1y ago

When compare to Zulip , Matrix usability is nothing close to that.

lrvick 1y ago
Zulip lacks end to end encryption and decentralization so they are not remotely comparable.
- tabbott 1y ago
  If you're doing consumer chat with friends and family, I'd recommend Signal over Matrix or Zulip. For a community: A lot of communities want anyone in the public to be able to join their spaces and read their channels. For that use case, E2EE makes the chat system slower and less usable, with limited security benefits over using web standard encryption. What E2EE may protect you from is a malicious server operator reading the organization's messages. If the server operator is a leader in the organization already, that person may already be directly a recipient of all the interesting messages anyway. The practical benefit I see for E2EE in Zulip is mainly for Zulip Cloud or other settings where a third party is hosting the Zulip server for you. As for decentralization, a self-hosted Zulip server only talks to external infrastructure for sending notifications (Emails, mobile push) and to implement user-controlled features (E.g., outgoing webhooks). The Zulip API is fully documented, easy to understand and implement, and has community-developed clients. Maybe you're thinking of federation? Matrix has fancier mirroring functionality, which can be important if your use case requires sharing dozens of channels with dozens of other servers. But Zulip is supported by Matterbridge and has various nicer mirroring integrations for sharing a channel with another server on various protocols. But I don't know of many use cases where the usability of the core chat system isn't far more important than the usability of federation features.
  - lrvick 1y ago
    Signal is a non starter. Never had an account and barring major architecture changes, I never will. Weakly secured centralized control of metadata with no option to self host your way out of it, and a requirement of a phone number which makes it a non starter for friends in countries that have good reason to be anonymous. Zulip is at least self hostable but all private conversations in plain text on the server and lock-in to only being able to access chats on the one server are also both non starters. It is not a matter of trusting the admin, it is trusting that the Linux server was deployed with no exploitable flaws, and the admin never gets a court order. Too much trust for me. Zulip is maybe a nicer UX alternative to IRC, but it is not comparable to Matrix.

notepad0x90 1y ago

it may have to do with many of us on HN not getting the target audience for Matrix. It works great for a ton of people. Their usage stats speaks for itself. But there are reasons it isn't competing with discord, slack or teams. I would like to say a lot of that has to do with matrix.org not having a serious/good commercial play, but I think it's a lot more nuanced than that. Matrix is sort of like Mastodon and Lemmy in its target audience and usage, and there is nothing wrong with that. But I think a lot of us wanted something like Bluesky but for chat apps. Marketing and UI are very important. something like Signal can get away with being terrible at it because they were able to get publicity and marketing from snowden, politicians,etc... I even think Matrix is a better OMEMO/E2EE communication client than Signal. But having a good product isn't enough, the user experience needs to be competitive for the general public to join and things like branding and publicity are especially important for Matrix because a good product other people aren't using isn't usable for communication purposes. Don't get me wrong, I know the matrix team is well aware of this and they try their best, but it seems for now at least they know their target audience and that audience is happy enough with it. I suspect in Europe at least they're going to do really well. Whatsapp and Viber are very popular east of the Atlantic. Matrix should focus on disrupting those. Having something like whatsapp numbers instead of full on user id's (or translating them) for example would help compete there. Matrix is carving out a nice but they're developing it like it should be competing with the bigger/dominant players. I interact with very technical people that are into opensource, development, security, etc... and every single time, I am the first person they hear about Matrix from.

n2h4 1y ago
[dead]

justaj 1y ago

> Matrix isn’t perfect but it has only improved in the 5 years I’ve been using it. I'd very much like to disagree. From the top of my head, in the past few years of using Element Web: - Notification center is now gone. - Room search is now only limited to official Matrix rooms. - At peak it consumes ~2.2 GB of RAM. - UI feels more sluggish by the day. - Loading it now takes ~10 minutes. - Using it as an IRC bouncer (to Libera) is now gone, which was what initially attracted me in the first place. And I don't even use the voice / call functionality of Element Web. I somewhat understand the reasoning behind the decisions, but I feel like they should have improved the UX first before working on the protocol itself.

lrvick 1y ago
Have you considered that multiple of your complaints could be addressed by protocol improvements?
- mqus 1y ago
  I don't see this, since the complaint is about things that used to work and not things that are still missing.
  - lrvick 1y ago
    Things working well with a few channels and a few hundred people are very different than working with thousands of channels and thousands of people.
- justaj 1y ago
  While that would perhaps be the best solution in the long run, wouldn't you agree that gains in userbase necessary for growth (or at least sustainability) are predicated upon how good the UX is _currently_ ?
  - lrvick 1y ago
    My minimum requirements for personal online communication outside of public web-accessible forums like this one, are open protocol, open source implementations, optional E2EE, independent hosting, client choice, and access to channels on other independently hosted servers. These are non negotiable for building my social graph of communication with family, friends, colleagues, etc. Communication is a sacred part of the human experience and I will not allow centralized entities to control my primary means of connection to my friends and family. My options for digital comms are then are limited to email, IRC, XMPP, or Matrix. Matrix has leaps and bounds the best UX and functionality by this criteria and is what I use for the overwhelming majority of my communications. Anyone that is exclusively willing to communicate over corpotech disrespects my values for freedom and privacy, and is by extension opting out of being friends with me unless we see each other in person regularly. 9/10 times the people that respect me and want to be friends with me also respect my ethical conviction and create matrix accounts to talk to me if they do not already have one. Taking back control of the internet will require conviction and I try to lead by example in my social circles. I personally could not give less of a shit if Matrix has feature parity with xyz corpotech as they are not solving the same problem. I also use IRC heavily to talk to many of the best engineers in the world and that is a low UX bar to beat. That said, as corpotech walled gardens keep screwing their users, more and more hold-outs will come over and new features and improvements will reduce that friction over time. For now though very few individuals understand the vital importance of digital sovereignty for a citizen controlled society, but governments absolutely get it and do not want people like Zuck controlling their comms, so it is not surprising governments are first in line willing to pay for help switching to Matrix. The people will follow in time.