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Comment by tachion | Hacker News Reader

And who are you talking to? The problem with Matrix (or other messenger technologies) is not that they're not good enough (in most cases nowdays) but that if not enough people are using them, they're useless, even if technically superior. I have pretty great working Jabber server but the issue is I have literally 2 people left I can talk to using it nowdays and both hardware and maintenance costs when compared to benefits are not looking good.

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In my case, I became "that guy" and aggressively pressured people I know to switch to it, even if it's just to communicate with me. The way to get people to switch is one person at a time.

I know it's annoying, and I do avoid doing such things in general. I'd have never done it to get people to switch from proprietary centralized service X to proprietary centralized service Y.

But Matrix/Riot is special and worthy of such evangelism. It's the first federated secure IM system with a good user experience and instant messaging desperately needs to move away from today's proprietary walled garden hellscape.

I had hoped XMPP would pull it off, but it didn't. For a time it seemed Google Talk would make that happen, but Google bait and switched us.

I'm hoping that Matrix/Riot can pull off what XMPP failed to do (and Google arguably actively sabotaged), and I'm willing to strain friendships with social pressure to convert people one person at a time.

Because that's how you build movements. One person at a time.

I use Matrix as a glorified IRC bouncer, since matrix.org has bridges to freenode and mozilla IRC networks :)

There are some rooms that bridge IRC, Gitter and Telegram using Matrix, of course providing native Matrix access too.

Matrix has a big community of people with a lot of active rooms to chat in, and beyond that it has bridges to other networks like IRC, Gitter, and Slack. See voyager.t2bot.io for a graph of a whole lot of public Matrix rooms (created by a crawler bot).

This doesn't change a lot. This makes it at best Slack competitor (and I am aware of the gateways plugins being worked on) and not WhatsApp/Skype/iMessages competitor.

What's wrong with being a Slack competitor? Your perspective here seems to be "it's useless if it can't take on WhatsApp", which I think is overly pessimistic.

I use it primarily as a Slack alternative, for coordinating with people on Free Software projects.

Basically this. One of my favorite insights from an episode of Masters of Scale about Slack[0] is that products like Slack don't necessarily have to achieve huge network effects in the traditional sense to be successful, because you can convince companies to use it for specific teams, projects, or even company-wide, and then grow one company at a time. I'm currently using Riot/Matrix for things I'd usually set up a Slack/Gitter/Discord room for. For most of my friends they associate Riot with whatever the purpose of the chat room is, but at least it's a foot in the door from my perspective.

[0] https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/stitcher/masters-of-scale/e...

Sorry for the late response, I just saw this. I'm currently in a group chat with two other close friends. We were originally using GroupMe, but I convinced them to switch and register on my server (after I made sure that it was working reliably myself).

At the moment, it's the only messaging platform that I use. I use regular texts to talk to everyone else.

In my case, I don't need everyone to be invested into the network for it to be worth it. I'd say that around 95% of my daily communications are in the one Matrix group chat, so I've reduced my reliance on centralized services quite a bit.

I've set a general long term goal for myself to gain more control over my own data. The first step was purchasing my own domain and migrating away from Gmail. This is just another small step.

Check out public rooms directories, right in the app/webapp. Plenty of users and public channels, mostly IT oriented.

> if not enough people are using them, they're useless

I feel like it only takes a handful of active users in your network to make the app worthwhile, though. I use a variety of messengers (including Riot) to talk with different people and don't find it burdensome, even if it is suboptimal.

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