You can improve the UX of Matrix clients. You can not make Telegram decentralized or take it out of control of one single entity.
I don't use either so I don't really care. I just don't expect a consumer service with subpar UI to win market share solely on technical merits.
That makes sense for unfunded projects because most developers are not good designers, and designers don't have a culture of contributing to open source, but for a project that pays (some of) its developers, it's their choice how much to pay developers vs designers vs managers, and they are responsible for the way in which they allocate their limited resources.
I recently had to move my open source project's chat from Gitter to Discord, not because we like Discord or "don't care about open source" but because everyone is so damn tired of Gitter's terrible UX that it became the overriding concern.
Matrix bought Gitter two years ago, and I kept waiting, hoping that they would improve it, but they did literally nothing to it except connect it to Matrix within a couple months – and even that doesn't work well, with Matrix users still unable to respond in threads.
I assume there is a good reason for that. I'm not here to judge, only to point out that this "good reason", whether it's lack of funding or priorities or whatever – won't change anytime soon, so I won't be holding my breath anymore.
We spelt out the good reason in the original blog post: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/09/30/welcoming-gitter-to-matri...
> However: in the medium/long term, it’s simply not going to be efficient for the combined Element/Gitter team to split our efforts maintaining two high-profile Matrix clients. Our plan is instead to merge Gitter’s features into Element (or next generations of Element) itself and then - if and only if Element has achieved parity with Gitter based on the above list - we expect to upgrade the deployment on gitter.im to a Gitter-customised version of Element. The inevitable side-effect is that we’ll be adding new features to Element rather than Gitter going forwards.
We’re almost at the point of being able to switch Gitter over to being a branded Element.
Apparently, that has not been a priority in many years.
Matrix/Element is so far behind usability/features that it's really only used by people that favor decentralization/openess at the expense of actual users.
No. Most people can't do that (because not everyone is a software developer).
Good luck trying to convince the general population that “the UX is bad but theoretically anyone can improve it” is better than what you get out of the box with other messengers.
Just do the change yourself. Help those people close to you to install Element alongside whatever they are using now. Even if just because they are using to talk with you, it's better than nothing.
You don't get to migrate things that are on huge network effects in one go. But we can help the growth of one network organically until it reaches critical mass.
I am not asking them to delete the other app, I am not asking them to join a religion. I am just asking them (and helping if necessary) to install an app and set up an account on my server.