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Comment by crimsoneer | Hacker News Reader

I mean, this is quite silly. Matrix is the open-source network infrastructure, Element is the client. Of course if you go to the Matrix web-page, it's not particularly user-friendly - if you expect to just use the thing, you should be going to Element. The ActivityPub page won't exactly help you sign up to Mastodon either.

There are plenty of problems with Element and Matrix (I say that as someone who has been trying to migrate off Slack for 1+ year) but this comes off as the author just not doing basic reading.

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I disagree. I have been using Matrix with Element as my main IM with my own homeserver for 3 years now, and the onboarding experience is just bad. You have to read so many texts which are spread across so many pages just to get stuff to work and even then sometimes it just won't.

Sure, the author could have prevented some of their problems by reading the documentation, but Matrix is trying to become a solution everyone can use. And noone wants to read a manifest only to send some messages.

Honestly, on this I totally agree - hosting your own Element/Matrix instance is really unnecessarily painful, with the documentation all over the place. But hey, it's free and open-source.

But as as user, if you're even a little technical, downloading Element, registering and messaging your friends is really not the difficult bit.

Things like this are technically correct but irrelevant. If the average person can't figure out the UI & flow without getting frustrated then it's game over.

> if you expect to just use the thing, you should be going to Element.

Element sent them to matrix.org

I'll happily admit the Element/Element X migration they're currently on is silly and unhelpful, but the point being if they'd just gone to the Element home page, or download the actual Element app instead of the X one, it would have perfectly happily registered them to Matrix.org by default and everything would have been just fine.

> or download the actual Element app instead of the X one

MacOS app store only had element X, and also how is a user supposed to know to use the old one? Matrix.org tells me element X supports more stuff! The author says it's in beta but I can't see any indication that clearly tells me that and I'm looking for it.

> just gone to the Element home page

The app doesn't take you there.

But OK let's do that.

element.io

There's a big getting started button.

Now there's a form asking for my work email address and phone number and what challenges I'm looking to overcome.

> Setup a self-hosted or cloud deployment, with powerful enterprise capabilities.

To get started I need to not go to "get started" I need to go to sign in, which I can't do, then register.

You’re missing the point. He’s following a reasonable user flow. If he went to the wrong place in the beginning, that confusion itself is a problem that the Matrix community needs to address.

100% agree.

The user should fall into the “pit of success” — no matter where/how they first enter the pages of matrix or element … it should be natural that they end up at the correct getting started for them.

> his comes off as the author just not doing basic reading.

Perhaps a technology will not have success if its users need to do basic reading.

Perhaps I would prefer a chat platform devoid of people who can't do basic reading

A chat platform for the illiterates might not be the best business proposition

Jokes aside, I don't think matrix/element, at this stage, are trying to overthrow telegram or whatsapp.

It seems their main approach is somewhat aimed at the people who use(d) IRC on the general audience side and institutional clients who they work with to create ad hoc solutions for employees, in which case which client to download is slightly less problematic since it's going to be a custom one anyway

As the Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation I can assure you I'd love nothing more than to displace centralized, proprietary communication tools.

It just so happens that right now it's easier to land with folks who are patient with sharp edges and already believe in the value of FOSS, E2EE, and decentralization. Gotta start somewhere, right? :)

IDK if you caught it, but the project lead, Matthew Hodgson, gave a main stage talk at FOSDEM a couple weeks ago and offered an update on the project and, in particular, on how we're taking advantage of the push that regulators are making for interoperability. WhatsApp, in particular, gets mentioned in this context and the writers at WIRED and Tech Crunch seemed to pick up on that!

You literally just install the non-beta client and register an account and then log in. It's that simple. I'm impressed that anyone could get this wrong and then blame the program.

The ability of some in the FOSS community to always blame the user for poor UX design is truly impressive.

Do we need to test and simplify our onboarding? No, it's the confused users who are wrong!

My grandmother could use Matrix when she was starting to develop dementia. The only thing that tripped her up was the end to end encryption and key loss. It's not a UX problem, its a PEBKAC issue.

I think the core of the problem is the naming separation between the default client and default instance.

It is ok that matrix the protocol and matrix the server software have a different name than element. But the official server instance used by element should not be matrix.org but element.io because that is where you have to sign up and log in if you want to use the default official instance. Otherwise you redirect clueless end users to protocol papers and server administration docs.

He did start with Element. He only went to matrix.org because there was no way to set up an account through the Element client.

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