| 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. |
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?