A big part of a good chat UI is the knowledge of how things looks in the other end.
Real world friendships have ended because of how emoji are rendered differently on different phones.
Real world friendships have ended because of how emoji are rendered differently on different phones.
What's sad is that's so true. I overheard the other day my 13 year old niece saying she didn't like a certain girl hanging out with them anymore, because she's the only one "with green chat bubble".
Yes. They excluded a girl from their group, because she didn't have a blue chat bubble. (Essentially an iPhone).
Slack could still have an awesome UX and be open, people would use it out of choice because it has the best UX.
We hope that a Matrix-enabled client (https://vector.im is looking promising) will get the UI/UX right - and thus actually offer an open and free solution where you can run your own server (should you choose) and own and control your own data!
My biggest issue with Matrix still has to do with its privacy properties though. Homeservers simply know too much about their users. End to end encryption from clients to homeservers appears to be optional in Matrix (and even with e2e encryption, metadata will still be fully exposed to homeservers), and message histories are stored in plaintext at rest.
Now, this probably won't be a huge problem in the ideal scenario where the Matrix network would be composed of a large number of small independent homeservers, but history has shown that decentralized systems that aren't fully decentralized tend to eventually converge towards centralization as it becomes more popular (just look at what happened to email). And in a world where Google, Facebook and Microsoft's homeservers might eventually have a combined market share of over 90%, the privacy aspects of Matrix leave a lot to be desired.