Comment by 0xy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xy | Hacker News Reader

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I'd wager you cannot build a Telegram-tier frontend using Matrix technology. Element is evidence of that.

Clearly there's an axis with security on one side and convenience on the other. Tilting fully to either side results in a terrible experience. For me, Telegram strikes the perfect balance. Secure chats have fantastic privacy, while the UX isn't totally garbage. The trade-off is that chats are non-E2EE by default.

Signal's has the axis tilted all the way to the "security" end, so that the product is unusable if you aren't a technical expert already.

Could your mother figure out how to encrypt an email message using GnuPG? Absolutely not a chance.

Could she figure out how to send a message on ProtonMail that encrypts it client-side for her? Probably.

Signal is GnuPG. Telegram is ProtonMail.

> Signal's has the axis tilted all the way to the "security" end, so that the product is unusable if you aren't a technical expert already.

Wow, I really disagree with this statement.

> Could your mother figure out how to encrypt an email message using GnuPG? Absolutely not a chance. [...] Signal is GnuPG.

My parents are not technical people, yet they can use Signal. My siblings as well. I think the UX is approximately on par with WhatsApp (when I was using it).

They have done a great job when it comes to UX. Ultimately I would like to push them towards Matrix, but the UX is not here yet for most clients. Fluffychat comes close to it, unfortunately I'm experiencing issues logging in with my account (timeouts), so I can't recommend it yet.

> Signal's has the axis tilted all the way to the "security" end, so that the product is unusable if you aren't a technical expert already.

Sorry, just to confirm: are you saying Signal has worse UX than Element?

> Signal's has the axis tilted all the way to the "security" end, so that the product is unusable if you aren't a technical expert already.

How so?

What's wrong with Element's UX? It's improved an awful lot lately.

It's slow, very resource intensive on desktop, practically unusable on mobile, you sometimes can't join rooms and the client tells you some weird obscure Matrix error, you sometimes can't leave rooms, the moderations tools are quite poor, etc. etc. etc.

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