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Comment by proaralyst | Hacker News Reader

I would like to use Riot/Matrix but its UI (at least on Android) is terrible. I can't convince non-technical friends & family to switch.

Part of the problem is the inability to assign nicknames to contacts, so you have to remember everyone's Matrix ID.

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For me, the problem is how incredibly slow Riot is (and every other client I've tried has almost unusable bad UI, sometimes in combination with being slow).

IMO: Text chat with a few emojis and images here and there should not ever be among the things that slows your computer to a crawl.

EDIT: I'm speaking of the UI, not the network connection; the latter is sometimes slow too, but that's understandable

It's very likely that what was slow there was not riot, but the server. The Matrix.org homeserver is notoriously overloaded.

Agreed, I set one up and tried to convince people to switch but the latency made it just unusable. It worked fine with a channel or two but if someone tried to join a federated channel it would bring the whole thing to its knees for hours at a time, knocking out the local channels with it.

Matrix.org is so slow it's borderline unusable, that's right. However, while switching to another homeserver (and avoiding federating with big rooms like Matrix HQ) helps a lot, Riot isn't exactly a lightweight client as well.

If you want to experience full speed Riot, you can choose a different server. This basically comes down to client UX: if server choice were more discoverable or if it at least didn't always default to the same one, then everyone wouldn't end up on a single overloaded server.

I was primarily talking about UI lag, not network speed. Network speed was slow at times, but the worst above all was how laggy every keystroke is, every UI click, etc. and how much CPU it burns (heating up my laptop whenever it's open).

Native IRC clients for example have no such problem, and consume ~0% CPU at all times.

> heating up my laptop

Aha, I was thinking of the mobile client, which is fine perf-wise imo. But yes, the Desktop/web client is very Slack-esque. Not in a good way.

Just as well that we're working on it and released huge improvements yesterday! Think 70% reduction of memory use and dramatic reduction of launch time :) (https://medium.com/@RiotChat/riot-im-web-0-17-and-ios-0-7-6-... for the details)

We're still aiming for a full redesign of Riot.im to be out before end of the year, there should be things to look at at the end of the month, all crafted for the non-techy friends, so watch de the space!

And yes, the backend is not helping neither, although we've also done good progress on perf improvement there in the last months and still rolling new ones (e.g. Py3 being deployed as we speak and reducing server RAM by 3). Switching away from matrix.org can help, and agreed that a directory of public servers à la Mastodon could be interesting (although we would need to find a non-scary way to do so, lots of non-tech people would run away from it: they just want one click onboarding without having to understand what's happening behind the scenes). We've also soft launched a paid hosted offering, for 50-100 people teams who could do with their own DNS and faster servers at http://modular.im

I won't argue any of your UI opinions other than to say that riot - which is only one of the many possible clients [1] over the matrix protocol - is still in early days, and is getting better with each version. That being said, as far as having to remember everyone's matrix id, I'm sure users had similar complaints back when email addresses were still novel. I'm sure conceptual address books will be a thing in future matrix clients - both riot as well as others. Failing that, you can always submit a feature request! [2]

[1] https://matrix.org/docs/projects/clients-matrix [2] https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web

Yes. I think it's brilliant but the UI/UX needs a big update. Also from a techie point of view it's cool but from a normal user, there are too many options in group chats. Esp when people change phones etc.

Not just the UI but it's still rough around the edges in some cases. I ran into a couple bugs, I realize now I shoulda reported / researched further into, but my use for it is minimalist.

Why not use Signal? Better privacy guarantees and the same underlying protocol.

Had the same UI problems.

Also Signal isn't federated and doesn't use the Matrix protocol.

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