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Comment by nadir_ishiguro | Hacker News Reader

I get (and share some of) the frustration, but have yet to find anything better.

XMPP and IRC are not it, for me. Neither give me a better experience nor are they easier for non-techies than matrix.

I also empathize with the people behind the project, as monetization is much more difficult for non-scumbag companies, among which I definitely count Discord, Slack and to a lesser degree Telegram.

As a user though, the speed of improvement has been less than satisfying. It has felt like matrix was just shy of fulfilling its promises for years now.

I still enjoy using it though and am hopeful for its future.

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> XMPP [… is] not it

What. XMPP is much easier to work with since both servers & clients use an order of magnitude less resources (CPU, RAM, storage, bandwidth). This makes them easier to self-host & also get someone to actually launch & keep an app open if it isn’t spiking. There are handholdingest deployments like the server+client of Snikket. & if you want that web link to send someone that is skeptical of installing yet another chat application, Movim covers that angle with posts, & multi-user, multi-stream audio/voice calls (where you can use the home instance, or self-host it). But also there is clients/services for anything in between—& without a protocol that keeps as much metadata & skyrockets on costs trying to sync the entire history of every chat/attachment for all users (which inevitably leads to all that metadata synced to the mothership, Matrix.org).

> It has felt like matrix was just shy of fulfilling its promises for years now.

Unfortunately, their promises grow at a faster rate than the reality of the protocol and software. The biggest problem they have is that they constantly tout it as this amazing thing that people should start using, when in fact it's got tons of rough edges and it would be a big mistake for most average people to use it. It might eventually get there, but I think it's actually less likely with the kind of self-promotion they do. It leads to too many results like the article linked here, where people go "Wait, you said this would be great but it's actually just kind of barely usable" and they're permanently soured on the concept. It erodes trust in the organization and the product.

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