[subway]

Kinda-sorta?

Matrix is an incredibly centralized service masquerading as an easily self-hosted distributed service. The moment you try to get a non-technical user connected to a homeserver other than matrix.org, all hell starts to break loose.

It's bad enough that both France (tchap) and Purism have created their own client forks to make on-boarding somewhat tolerable at the expense of really painful rebases against upstream Riot, while Riot tries to get it's shit together on the non-matrix.org user story.

Mattermost has a slightly less painful situation -- they provide a relatively easy to brand/preconfigure client (and fantastic docs on how to do so: https://docs.mattermost.com/mobile/mobile-compile-yourself.h... ), but you lose out on federation and self-service sign-up, leaving your community isolated (sometimes a pro, sometimes a con).

[Arathorn]

This is pretty disingenuous - we have spent loads of time making Riot work well with self-hosted servers (c.f. the current login & registration flows, which explicitly prompt you to select a server), and around 50% of the network are running their own servers. Our intention is to turn off the original matrix.org server once we have decentralised accounts and the network is healthy enough.

[subway]

Please share a useful workflow for getting a non-technical user onto a non matrix.org homeserver.

I've personally run 3 homeservers for communities formerly centered around Facebook, only one of which was technical. For the non-technical communities the workflow was the one provided by riot-web when a mobile user visits the homeserver.

Neither of the non-technical communities saw more than 5% adoption in the org. The technical community constantly complained about the login flow.

When I deployed Mattermost with a custom app for the first non-technical community I saw 40% adoption within a week, and 80 within the month. The second community has looked at the first as an example, and I can expect 80%+ adoption within a week or two of deployment.

I've asked repeatedly in both #ios:matrix.org and #android:matrix.org about assistance in putting together docs similar to mattermost's and was completely ignored.

I've asked if the Riot folks would be open to deep-links providing the homeserver to mobile apps, and was shut down by somebody who insisted deferred deep links were the only kind of deep links, and that they would only ever be supported by a Google Play on-boarding flow.

I really want to love Matrix, but y'all make it fucking difficult sometimes.

[Arathorn]

so, you should be able to enter an mxid (e.g. @matthew:wherever.com) on Riot/iOS & Android and log straight in.

Meanwhile, if you go to Riot/Web on mobile for a custom deployment, you should see a page like this https://webchat.kde.org/mobile_guide/ which guides you through the process.

Deeplinking from web into the app is hard, as the only way to do so vaguely reliably is by fingerprinting the browser using something like branch.io, which is distasteful from a privacy perspective. Meanwhile, affiliate links in google play seem to only work about 30% of the time, given the planets have to be in precisely the right orientation for the association to not get lost.

Mattermost might be doing something smarter (perhaps letting you install the app generically, and then getting you to click a custom URI handler link from the web to provision the correct config on the client?) - but would be useful to know which of these failure modes people were falling into?

[subway]

> Deeplinking from web into the app is hard

This is exactly whay I was getting at before. Please stop fixating on the deferred form of deep links. The play store need not even be involved for deep linking to an already installed app.

The mobile_guide instructions are where most people bail out.

"Yeah, no. This is too complicated." is the response when they see

"Install an app, then click on a check box that changes the UI, then enter https://foo.bar:8448, then register".

That's a massive turn off before your app is even installed. A flow of "Install this app, then return to this web page" is significantly easier. Or if/when branded builds of Riot are possible, it becomes "Install this app."

[Arathorn]

have filed https://github.com/vector-im/riot-meta/issues/290