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0 pointssolarkraft2y ago0 comments

I'm wearing a Matrix T-Shirt right now and can't disagree much about the experience not being great.

> There are a million clients because the official one has horrible UX and everyone thinks they can make a better one.

I wish. My experience is that there are few clients and a lot of them have similarly ... beginner-unfriendly UX due to the SDKs, the protocol itself and cultural factors (there seems to be a good amount of "this is good enough"/"you don't actually need that" hubris in the community).

Matrix, besides XMPP, is the only federated chat protocol with any kind of traction, so I figure that it makes sense to invest in improving it rather than building something new. Ideally using it would be a no-brainer choice for delivering chat apps: Why would you invent something new when you could use a protocol that already exists and already has a vast ecosystem of libraries and users? That's where I wish it was, reality unfortunately looks quite different.

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southerntofu2y ago· 1 in thread

> Why would you invent something new when you could use a protocol that already exists and already has a vast ecosystem of libraries and users?

Unfortunately that's exactly what Matrix did, and people keep repeating the same mistake. Just this week, i was seeing a new federated IM protocol whose main selling point is "not XMPP/Matrix":

https://github.com/tinode/chat

If only these Matrix/Tinode people spent their energy on making a decent XMPP client, Discord would not even be born. Alas, my interpretation is it's a hard-sell to investors to make a client for an existing network and these devs want to put bread on their tables.

yungporko2y ago

i mean it is also totally fair enough to just make another version of something that already exists for the sake of it, making things is fun and that's a good enough reason imo.

personally i'm really not a fan of the "x already exists so everybody should always use that and nobody should ever spend time making a different one" school of thought that seems to be so prevalent here. i just think it goes without saying that if their thing isn't obviously better and easy to adopt, it probably won't gain any traction.

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