Thanks to you and the team for all the hard work!
The only way I've found to join a room is the `/join` command. There's a GUI search, but it doesn't work.
Users have to pick their identity provider, their home server, etc. Lots of choices, scary messages, and generally annoying to set up. Services that depend on someone who is technically inclined setting things up never become widespread outside technical communities.
If users pick an unreliable server to connect to, or there's a network split, things break, just like IRC does.
There are several clients, all slightly different. It's up to the user to pick which one they want, when they've never used any of them and just want something to work.
It's better than IRC, but that bar is so low you'd have to bury it to get any lower.
It's true you have to pick a server to use, but we try to provide decent defaults (although it's true matrix.org has been overloaded recently).
We're trying to simplify onboarding via P2P Matrix - by default, you'd start off entirely P2P, and only pick a server if you want to 'anchor' your account somewhere.
I have a feeling you may be going off outdated impressions here; we've been desperately trying to improve UI/UX (as per https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing... and https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing...).
riot-web version: 1.6.0 olm version: 3.1.3
Search didn't find the room. /join did.
Also it just took me over a minute to find the version number, because the client settings are hidden in a dropdown menu under my user name, not in the gear icon (tooltip "settings") on the upper left or the hamburger menu that says explore, and even in the right dropdown it's under "settings->help & about" instead of just under "help" where the "about" box has lived in every single program since the '90s...
And noted, in terms of the version number being in the wrong place on Riot/Web.
never used that /join command, the GUI works fine for me