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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

I've never used Matrix, directly.

However I use Beeper all day every day, via their iOS, Android, and macOS clients. Beeper (not the iMessage app, but their previous and continuing multi-network app) is pretty great. I get one consistent UX across all chat networks I use. Sometimes the networks drop out, but rarely due to Beeper issues.

Beeper is essentially a Matrix homeserver, plus a bunch of hosted Matrix bridges, and as far as I can tell, that whole part of Beeper was a great technical decision. The Beeper clients started off as forks of the Element clients, and honestly they were a trashfire at the beginning, but Beeper have been quickly iterating and replacing parts, and they're now pretty solid. They're not yet WhatsApp quality UX, but they're approaching it.

I don't think the problem is Matrix.

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This. I use Matrix daily using nheko for my client. It's a rock solid experience (except for a bit of trouble with voice calling one of my friends). I've never been randomly told I have to reverify. If you are being asked to relogin and reverify every time you restart your client, you're doing something wrong.

Depends on how you define "Matrix", I guess. The technology is undoubtedly great, but it also needs to sell itself as a (standalone) product if it wants to catch on.

But Matrix isn't a product. There are companies building products on it, such as Element and Beeper, and as far as I can see the latter are doing a perfectly good job of selling themselves.

That may be technically correct, but reality is if Matrix wants to catch on (large scale) as a concept, it needs to act as a product in some way. Even if that just means having a good landing page guiding users on how to sign up on a server, install a client, and connect the two - and making sure that this always works.

I think that's one approach, but many other federated systems don't do this. ActivityPub does not do this really, instead Mastodon, a product using ActivityPub, markets itself. Arguably you could look at HTTP and say that HTTP doesn't have a fancy landing page pitching itself to users, browsers have landing pages pitching their experiences to users.

Matrix could have a fancy landing page pitching itself to implementers who implement homeservers, bridges, or clients, and they could market to end users.

Maybe "Matrix" is not the ideal name for it then.

ActivityPub, HTTP, XMPP, etc sound like technical things. If you land on a page talking about the "XMPP specification" then you quickly get the idea that it's not where you want to be as an end user.

"Matrix" does sound a lot like the name of an end-user relevant product of some sort, and a client sending users to matrix.org compounds the issue.

There's a reason why big companies have brand guidelines. They have people on staff that understand that people are confused quite easily and don't want to figure out where "Matrix", "Element" and "Element X" stand in relation to each other.

I wouldn't read anything into a name. For a start that's very language specific, but also there are plenty of non-user facing technologies with non-technical sounding names, and vice-versa.

The client I use doesn't send users to matrix.org, and I would assume that's by choice. Why do users need to know? Matrix.org is clearly a hub for the spec, documentation, GitHub links, developer community.

Yeah it’s unfortunate that they picked the “cool” name for the protocol, not the product.

I keep saying that they should make a Matrix branded client that lets you easily donate to the foundation (like Signal does) and creates accounts only on matrix.org.

Unfortunately that doesn’t really work with the ethos of the project.

That's a very interesting thread, because this is one of the major issues we have with Matrix. It's not directly a product but a (technical) protocol that can't be presented as such to the general public.

We definitely aim for Matrix-based products to be used by the general public, in the same way emails are. For this to happen, we need to be mindful of who our audiences are, what they are looking for, what they know and don't know, and how to deliver a message that works for them.

If you're interested in how we thought the website, you can check https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/1502 and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/1543 for example

Curious to try Beeper now. If anyone has a referral code, please reach out. Email address is in my profile.

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