The home page gives no clue as to what "Matrix" is. It seems to be yet another "federation" system. Is this worth any attention?
In the current internet environment of walled gardens and a siloed and decimated internet, any federation system is worthy of attention.
Will anyone other than geeks switch from Facebook, et al..
You'd probably need some legislation to force those running large communication platforms to open their protocols and allow federation before there can be significant progress. I really can't see their being political will for that at present.
You're probably right, the legacy companies won't buy-in without a fight, but I see two avenues of success.
- New companies: If a federated messaging system existed five years ago, Slack may have chosen to run on an open standard rather than build its own.
- Large corporates: they may want the self-hosting, security customizeation, and lack of vendor lock-in of an open standard. For example, I know that Goldman Sachs has built their own in-house messaging service (crazy, I know). They may be a good candidate to switch to an open standard.
A federated system can still be locked down, and made to be inoperable with other services. If you wanted to make an email service that didn't speak to other email services, you would still probably start with the email standard and make changes to lock it down rather than creating a new email service from scratch.
Likewise, a Goldman Sachs (or similar company) that wanted a locked down messaging service would likely consider an open platform that they could modify and lock down rather than using a commercial one (like slack) or rolling their own (which is extremely expensive).
People have built other stuff like blogs on top of it and you could use it for stuff like IoT devices.
It also comes with end to end encryption.
Matrix folks:
* if a teenager cannot understand what it is in 10 seconds of looking at it or if a teenager does not download the client after understanding what it is your product is hopelessly broken
* if a 30 year old cannot understand what it is in 20 seconds or upon understanding does not immediately install that software, your product is hopelessly broken
* if a 50 year who has facebook just looks at your website funny, then your product is hopelessly broken.
Seriously, you don't expose end users to platform-level infrastructure. Matrix audience is software engineers, so it's good that matrix.org is dedicated to explain itself to developers. The tools you build on top of it, those are the ones you show to end users.
Compare:
with
Where is a link to the app store for Riot? Where is the link to the website? Why do I get a table of "yes/no/kinda" when I click on "Clients"?
This project will will become another IRC -- cute but irrelevant.
I have, or had, a Disapora account. Nobody to talk to. I have an OpenID. No service I use still accepts it. The home page of Matrix has to provide a convincing argument that Matrix is worth more attention than Mastodon or GNU Social.