I’m writing this post on behalf of my friend, a non-technical user who had the chance to use Matrix for about a week. I’d like to share his experience with you and ask what you think about it.
Matrix clients are incredibly challenging for the average user and seem unfriendly towards non-technical users. Unlike Discord, a non-technical person won’t grasp most things without thoroughly reading the Matrix specifications. Many can’t afford to do so for various reasons: lack of technical knowledge, limited time, or simply not wanting to, preferring a functional communicator like Discord or Facebook Messenger.
Discord’s registration is straightforward, with a refined user interface that just works. You register, invite friends, and you can chat and voice call seamlessly.
Now, Matrix registration. You choose a client like Element, widely promoted as the flagship Matrix client. After registration, you face the user interface, with unclear options tucked away where you wouldn’t expect. They are cryptically named, making it hard to figure things out.
After googling how to invite a friend, your friend joins, and a decryption error appears. Another 10 minutes spent reading how to fix it. Okay, problem solved.
Your friend calls, you want to answer, and… darn! You can’t click anything because “the voice call is in an unknown state,” and the dreadful ringing sound reminiscent of a '90s phone puts you in a gloomy mood.
This isn’t something a new user should encounter right after registration. Element may be open source, but it’s developed by a for-profit company with a team of programmers. The issue isn’t exclusive to Element but extends to almost every Matrix client.
This way, the Matrix network won’t attract new users. If users face such issues, they’ll quickly flee to a stable, popular platform like Discord.
over the years of using matrix i’ve become convinced that the people behind it simply have different priorities than people who actually want to use it. they’re mainly interested in the tech parts as opposed to making communication tools.
if you look at the “hype” behind matrix, it’s all about “the protocol”. federation, p2p “host a homeserver on each client”, encryption, bridging, complex state resolution algorithms, peppered with some vague marketing crap about owning your own data. nerd shit or, in the best case scenario, pipe dreams of a magic future that could come with all this flexible tech we’re building
notice how there’s nothing about actual communities. little to any discussion on moderation tooling, or ease of use. it’s all tech. they only care about the tech. the communities? uh well they’ll happen somehow
“matrix chat” is just a tech demo of the matrix protocol the same way https://github.com/matrix-org/thirdroom or that fucked up twitter clone they were building at one point is.
this turned into a bit of a rant but the people working on matrix need to have a deep inner look and explicitly work out if they want to work on “cool tech” or work on tools for building communities. also stop working on so many useless side projects and focus on making one thing that works.
I’m also of the opinion that Element wanted to do too many things. Prime example being the many sdks they now have to maintain for a long time, even though they want to focus on matrix-rust-sdk.
I believe many of these seemingly useless side projects are a result of Element looking for funding. Third room was at the same time as meta was openly talking about metaverse, so Element saw a new niche to fill early.
But yeah, my pessimistic opinion is that matrix.org tries to do too much with the limited resources. Now with sliding sync I do think that they address the long standing ux issues.
Not sure I buy this argument. I’ve been using Discord for many years, and on many platforms. Linux, Windows, Android, web client, Steam Deck.
I’m troubleshooting Discord for myself and my family/friends all the time. I would say me and my friends encounter Discord problems every few weeks.
Calls dropping, cutting out, not going through, failed notifications, server freezing, sync errors, content loading errors, file transfer errors, crashing of the app, audio devices not being detected, and more.
I think the issue is comfort. Discord isn’t a super polished and stable application, I’ve had to talk lots of my friends and family through random things in the settings because the interface is so confusing and cluttered depending on the page.
These are largely young adults who are fairly tech savvy, not old boomers.
The difference I think, is that because Discord is the default chat/voice app for gamers and general chatroom needs, people just get used to the jank.
Same is true of people who claim that Windows is so much more clean and stable than Linux and that’s why people don’t want to use Linux.
As an IT admin who has spent years supporting thousands of Windows machines at many different companies, I can assure you that Windows constantly has problems. I’m fighting with it all the damn time. The users I support constantly have problems that I have to figure out, many of which have nothing to do with user error.
If you grew up using a half-broken controller on your console, you know what I am talking about. Your friends refuse to use it, but you use it just fine because it’s the controller you are used to. You had hundreds if not thousands of hours getting used to it’s quirks, so you don’t notice them anymore.
The moment you experience a new platform and encounter an issue, your brain flags it as a huge annoyance, because you’re not used to dealing with it and you don’t know the work around or fix for it yet.
Not saying Matrix doesn’t have big issues, it does, but the reason people aren’t flocking to it are not due to Discord being so stable and easy to use/navigate. It’s because it’s the standard that millions of people are used to, thus they just accept it and figure it out and eventually hardly notice the problems anymore.
I fully understand what you want to convey. However, if transitioning from one platform to another is such a pain, why not minimize it or try to minimize it?
If millions of people are accustomed to a specific interface, it’s obvious they will resist moving to a new platform because the discomfort would be too big.
Instead of making them swallow five tablets at once, let’s give them one.
I’m fairly new to Matrix but have barely used Discord so I don’t really have any preconceived biases towards how it “should” work, but damned if I can figure out some things that ought to be pretty basic. My first conversation on the platform was pushed into a thread… ok cool I could see pretty easily how to jump back and forth between the thread and the main conversation, but after a few days and restarting my browser… apparently that conversation is now just gone? I haven’t found any way to ever get back to it again and there’s certainly no obvious options in the left sidebar where you would expect your conversations to be listed at.
Another issue is with the number on the browser tab telling me there is one unread message. There is ALWAYS one unread message no matter what I do. I can mark the room (literally the one and only room I’ve joined on the public server) as read, but five minutes later it’s telling me there are unread messages again even though nobody has said a thing. Close the tab, restart the browser, and join the room again? Oh look there’s already one unread message even though I just got here and nobody has said anything. Simple things like this are either completely misleading or make me think the whole interface is somehow broken.
Call me crazy, but I liked the idea behind Matrix and set up my own server, including Element and an IRC bridge to connect to a chat room I run, thinking this could be a great way to give users more options including inline images and more potential content. The setup went smooth, the bridge connected seamlessly and everything was great for a couple weeks. Then I tried getting email registration working, but it fails with a cryptic error message. I did manage to track that down and adjusted a config option, then it didn’t fail with any message at all but the emails also weren’t being sent. Pulling the since-forgotten full path to the json page I found another error that google had no errors for. Eventually the server had to be rebooted again and now even though synapse starts with no errors, Element can no longer connect to synapse, and I’ve given up on this ever being stable enough for non-tech users to navigate. I’ve been working on and programming computers since the early 80’s, hell I even run mail servers that pass the snuff test by all the big guys, there’s simply no reason a chat room should be this difficult to set up or configure.
Some day I plan to get back to it again, but it will require a lot more time and patience on my part.
Lol Discord is not Matrix. It has some features but its main use case is centralized, right? Facebook messenger is the same, useless comparison.
Matrix should become as easy as Email, though Email has no discovery at all, and we are used to that.
But agree with the Rest. Fluffychat needs some love, as it currently cant decide between Spaces and Groups. But apart from that its probably better for easy usage.
My complaints concern not the Matrix protocol itself, but rather what the end user sees, i.e., the clients. Most of them look like they were made hastily… I believe that with a little improvement in the UI of clients, Matrix could become the second Discord, just as Lemmy became the second Reddit.
Then they look for rooms to join and run into one called “toddlercon” and then that’s the last you ever see of them.
