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Comment by bmarkovic | Hacker News Reader

The fact that this industry turned to a proprietary low-quality solution like Slack when Riot/Matrix have already existed tells the full story about what a bunch of incompetent idiots we all are.

Everyone frustrated with the new Slack input box deserves what they got. Me included.

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The reason for Slack's success is probably because it's a "turn key solution": you register your company, invite your employees, enter your CC, and you're good to go.

With a lot of these open solutions things are more complex. I think we should really focus on providing a good UX here if we want more adoption.

(also, I don't know if Riot is that much better; opening https://riot.im/app/ makes Firefox use 100% CPU and my laptops fan spin; I closed it after 10 seconds of just a loading animation)

https://modular.im gives a turnkey hosting solution for Riot/Matrix for what it’s worth.

Riot should be lighter weight than Slack, but launch (particularly if you haven’t used it in ages) can be slow, plus we’re chasing a startup perf regression on firefox atm. The main reason Riot’s better is that you can use your own server, participate in an open network, and have control over the software if some feature gets pushed out that you dislike. And you get E2E encryption :)

Coolio on both!

I think the messaging on modular.im could be a lot better, IMO. I don't know what the relations between all the different organisations/people are here, but having all of "Matrix", "Riot", "Modular" is just confusing branding/marketing. It would be much better to have just "Matrix protocol", "Matrix self-hosted", and "Matrix hosted", for example.

Right now, it's not even immediately clear that hosted Matrix is an option from just looking at the Riot and Matrix websites.

Just my 2c from a casually interested potential Modular customer.

It's true this is how a typical centralized commercial solution would be marketed. However, it's a bit trickier for Matrix since it's an open protocol with a neutral governing foundation and many client implementations.

Although New Vector (the company behind Modular) is currently driving most of the development of Matrix and Riot (the first and reference client), matrix.org itself is supposed to be a neutral network-related site. Notice the remark that it's controlled by the Matrix Foundation at the bottom of the page, and not New Vector.

That said, Riot does have a reference to Modular, but it's buried here: https://about.riot.im/free. I'd personally be fine with it being displayed somewhere more prominently (or at least under a more intuitive section name than "Free!"). I also think it would also be a good idea if the Riot page mentioned Matrix (or the Matrix logo) somewhere above the fold.

> solutions things are more complex

it's kinda sad that it has come to be that tech companies will consider installing matrix "complex".

I don't think it's sad; I've worked for a lot of small companies. Spending a few days learning and setting up tools is a lot of investment, never mind maintenance. I want to focus on creating business value, not "plumbing" like setting up chat tools.

Small companies sometimes turn in to large ones, but migrating from the tools everyone is used to is often not received well. There is a lot of inertia here.

> it's kinda sad that it has come to be that tech companies will consider installing matrix "complex".

I go to the Matrix website and there's a lot of "blah blah blah" about how it's an open network, a decentralized messaging protocol yada yada yada" Nothing about "how to actually start using the thing"

Then you get here finally https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now/

> To get started using Matrix, pick a client and join #matrix:matrix.org. You can also check the Matrix Clients Matrix to see more detail.

Or then there's this which looks more like it: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/introduction/

Compare this with going to Slack's web page and clicking "Try Slack".

More importantly, you don't need to get IT or Procurement involved to try slack.

> More importantly, you don't need to get IT or Procurement involved to try slack.

Are you implying you do have to do so to try out Matrix? You can simply use the web version of Riot hosted here (https://riot.im/app) and sign up for a free account on matrix.org.

There's a link to this accessible from the "Try Matrix Now" page you referenced above. Admittedly, it seems the words inviting you to try Riot "on the web" were linked to https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot instead of to https://riot.im/app/. That's probably a mistake and should be fixed.

Thanks for that info.

But when you try the Riot app on a Matrix server, can you create you own private workspace there or it's more like an IRC channel?

Because Slack let you have your own workspace/"server" in the free plan https://slack.com/intl/en-ie/pricing/free?geocode=en-ie&from... (you'll have some limits, but you get your own private space)

You can create your own rooms (which are like IRC channels) which can be invite-only.

The counterpart to Slack workspaces/"servers" would be Matrix communities. They allow you to group a bunch of rooms and users together for discoverability. The feature exists today and is usable but still not as polished as one would hope for, but I think work on this is coming up soon.

In particular, I think better community front pages (describing the community, supplying related URLs and such) and access control (such the ability to restrict joins to community rooms to community members without having to invite each user to the room separately) are things that will be worked on.

It isn't the install. It is the updates - and the potential for future backwards incompatible updates.

FLOSS software needs hosted, supported, reasonably priced versions with security updates to be competitive.

sorry, i think if a tech company can't maintain an install for something that is crucial , then it shouldnt be a tech company.perhaps it s a marketing shop or sth.

it's as if tech is delegating so much away that in the end there will be nobody left willing to actually do the tech

Maybe consider that we have literally hundreds of priority tasks, all of which are legitimately very important, and that while we can spend the time necessary to install and maintain non-turnkey solutions, we’d really prefer to work on one of the other priorities with that time.

This is just a general comment on the state of tech, not personal. It seems the priorities have shifted into other things away from tech.

There’s no such thing as general tech priorities, it’s just an amalgam of a bunch of individual priorities. In most of the cases I’ve seen those priorities are very reasonable. If you start a tech company and prioritize fiddling with internal messaging software over building your product, you’re going to fail. Prioritizing tech doesn’t mean yak shaving every random task, it means outsourcing as many non-essential tasks as you possibly can so that you have as much time and attention as possible for the one specific technical task that matters: building your product.

I don't think priorities shifted away from tech, they just moved up the value chain. Tech companies should focus their limited resources on building their core product, not managing "plumbing" like email servers or chat.

then again if amazon did that, they d never come up with AWS

I can definitely maintain an install of whatever is needed. Why would I use time doing something that doesn't create value over and above just using a paid for solution?

to be fair, Slack predates Riot (and Riot has only got properly usable as a Slack replacement since hitting 1.0 in Feb this year).

But yes, very frustrating to see folks forced by a proprietary product to suck up something like the Slack editor change when there are FOSS options where you can just roll it back, set a config flag to get what you want, or worst case fork it.

There is a chicken-and-egg problem with matrix. It's clearly nice, but the more people use it, the easier it will become to install/maintain. That's how wordpress wins over commercial blogging platforms.

One thing i found it hard to do is integrate matrix with an existing database of users. It would be perfect for our community chat.

Let's put some more blame on people who chose Slack for their companies/teams/communities. Most Slack users don't use it willingly.

I for one am showing the middle finger here; when forced to talk on Slack, I use Ripcord as a client.

Slack predates Riot by quite a lot.

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