For example, how many people are using Matrix now, compared to IRC 20 years ago? IRC had 10M users in 2003 [1], Matrix has 28M 'global visible accounts', but who knows what that means.
Maybe it's ok for these platforms to remain 'small', growing slowly. Sure we'd all love to win the fight for a free internet tomorrow, but it's also important to maintain a realistic perspective.
Disclaimer: Usenet is still growing, but I presume that's just alt.binary - According to Wikipedia [1] it had 15M daily posts in 2010, and 171M daily posts in 2021.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
It means exactly what it says. We don't know how many people in European governments, militaries, healthcare etc use it, but we know that they use it, though that information is not possible to discover publicly. We can see how many public accounts there are.
Usenet is predominantly piracy at this point.
I'm not saying that they don't do things better but they don't market it that way. To beat Twitter be better than Twitter. Make something memorable and unique, give features that beat the stockholder driven choices of the other guys.
It is, but right now people don't care as much about privacy as features and community. It's not what people who focus on openness or privacy want, but it's the reality. Where are the celebrities and brands? Where are the conversations happening? Where are my friends? This is the challenge.
Twitter, Reddit, and many other mega-platforms began the process of sucking (exactly) when their user bases got too big. operational costs also soared as they over scaled to stay dominant, while they began to fear changes in functionality because of a circular cycle of fearing user backlash.
No one platform can service massive levels and disciplines of users well, yet everyone keeps getting greedy, and always loses sight of that fact. Costs of competition at monopoly level create a paralyzing fear of losing a grip on users... That fear makes those platforms resort to corrupt methods to retain and addict their users to their product, and makes execs and investors unable to see outside of the vapor cloud they create...
Also, never go IPO if you want to keep your product's soul... Cash out early like Tom from Myspace, and let someone else crash and burn the idea as a CEO... :P
Well, Slack and Discord have the ability to throw around money to solve that problem. Open source projects mostly don't.
So, open source projects have to hit some nerve and then slowly grow into useful and then a dominant project. See: the trajectory of Blender.
* End-to-end encryption
* Spaces as freeform hierarchies of rooms
* Widgets, to embed arbitrary webapps into your chatrooms
* Open standard API
However, the point is more that Matrix can do way more than this given it’s a protocol: Element Call is already a better UX for conferencing than Hangouts or Zoom; thirdroom.io is a super promising virtual world system built on Matrix, etc.
We probably do need to market it better though!
I'm a huge dork for open standards, I frequently miss the days of Gaim/Pidgin and having Google Talk be Jabber/XMPP underneath, and being able to IM my friends wherever. Personally, I'm probably going to dork around with Matrix/Element because it sounds like my kind of thing.
But I can't figure why I'd switch to it for work.
I moved my company recently from Teams to Mattermost. The UX was the biggest selling point. Collaboration happens in Mattermost in ways it simply couldn't happen in Teams.
Putting aside the fact that we're not going to churn company comms every quarter for funzies, why would I switch us to Element? What can I do with Element that I can't do with Mattermost or Rocket.Chat or Slack or anything else?
* Have signal-style end-to-end encryption by default, if you care about keeping your data secure on the server.
* Pick from a huge range of alternative clients, including hooking up custom ones thanks to Element being built on the open Matrix standard. For instance, if you wanted to plonk an Intercom-style chat box on your website which funnelled into your support chatrooms, there are a a bunch of different matrix-as-chatbox clients you could use
* Bridge to other platforms as if you were using them natively (as per the sibling comment) - e.g. if you already have other chat systems flying around the place, you can easily unify them in Matrix
* Talk to people outside your company. If you care about collaborating with external people (other developers; customers; partners; suppliers; sibling companies etc) then Matrix's intrinsic decentralisation means you can just talk to them via the public Matrix network. For instance, I spend my life collaborating with folks on the mozilla, KDE, GNOME, Ansible etc Matrix servers without having to think (let alone manage a million different tabs and identities and crappy clients for their various communities).
So, that's the pitch.
This idea that Discord is accessible globally is such an America-centric naïvete.
Normal users fundamentally do not give a shit.
OP is contrasting Element as a client, and it is subpar in comparison to Discord's UI/UX. No protocol differences can paper over this.
FWIW, you can bridge Discord to Matrix.
It is more valuable to me to have a single universal messaging app across all my devices than it is to corksniff over UX across a couple dozen apps.
Furthermore, I'm autistic, the UI of Discord is atrocious. Completely overwhelming.
I'm also not sure that I used it correctly, maybe I needed to find servers or something.
Anyway, my point it is that the lack of discoverability is not just a marketing issue but it seems like baked in these platforms. Something is not there yet and that's why it's not growing like crazy.
You needed to find people to follow. Unlike corporate social media content is not pushed to you by algorithms. You have to build your own social network manually. Not doing so you have an empty personal timeline, and a too busy global timeline that is full of irrelevant stuff to you.
> Anyway, my point it is that the lack of discoverability is not just a marketing issue but it seems like baked in these platforms. Something is not there yet and that's why it's not growing like crazy.
Strange as it may sound on HN, but I am happy it is that way. There is a different culture now on the fediverse, and it is one that likely won't survive that 'crazy growth'.
On HN there's the front page where interesting stuff is curated algorithmically and smart people that I don't follow or know perviously make interesting comments on that stuff. Mastadon doesn't seem to offer anything like that.
I used to open with the fact that it's federated, but it's a much harder concept to sell initially. People do appreciate it later on though, when they find out they can follow and interact with a bunch of other social networks and communities.
And the old web had plenty of platforms too, tripod and geocities were platforms as well. You could take it a step further still and say that unless you have a server that's sitting in your own basement, you don't own your own platform, since any hosting provider could decide to pull down your site as well.
it gets real lonely if everyone does own their own platform, and it certainly wasn't the case in the old web either (though it was definitely more common to own more of your own platform). Still, I don't really think this is the defining feature of the old web. I think the level of commerce is much more important, something like ao3 feels old web, and that's because it's a user-centric platform, rather than business-centric
I don't think everyone should necessarily own their platform, but it's very valuable to have the option to migrate anything that's a critical part of your identity or business to a different provider.