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It is more than a protocol. It's an experience.

E-mail is totally intercompatible, but the experience for anything apart from "the equivalent of letters" is simply horrendous. Delta Chat tries to make e-mail more like a chat app, but it isn't perfect, because e-mail wasn't designed to be a chat application.

XMPP has other massive usability flaws. So does IRC, Matrix, and others.

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None of Matrix’s typical usability problems are the protocol’s fault - they are the clients’ fault. The fact is that on the Matrix side we invested much more time on the protocol, spec process and even server implementations in the early days.

Meanwhile the clients Element built to bootstrap the protocol have been stuck paying off huge amounts of product debt, and are finally at the point now of surpassing mainstream apps - eg https://element.io/blog/element-x-ignition/ - but it took years longer than it should have to get there. Again, it’s not the protocol’s fault though, other than the extent to which building a protocol draws energy from building killer apps.

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