| > We need decentralized communication > Although Riot has made significant progress in the past few months, there is still a long way to go before it becomes a suitable drop-in replacement for platforms such as WhatsApp or Discord. The problem with adoption client based on Matrix protocol is clearly lack of the quality of clients and being so annoying for users. I think it also stands true for other protocols like IRC or XMPP. In my humble opinion, clients for all 3 are far behind Telegram or WhatsApp or even BBM. Looking on commits in repos of various Riot clients, I am not sure if there is significant progress (yes, it's a bit unfair to said that, but comparing to let's say webpack repository, number of random contributions is quite low). For Android there are two versions - Riot and RiotX. RiotX is in early stage development (I'd say it's unusable), while the Riot just gets minor changes. iOS client is OK. Web and desktop client (based on electron) is not as simple as Slack to get start and running. I keep fingers crossed for Riot developers and spontaneous contributors to improve those clients - without good, simple to use clients there isn't any chance for Matrix to be adopted widely as WhatsApp or Telegram are. Centralization is not really important factor for most of people during selection of communicator. IM is a tool and if it does not do its job properly, people will look for better alternatives. Just, please take a look how many sysadmins/devops switched to Slack from IRC. Please stop writing yet another article how centralization is bad - just help Vector.im, TheLounge.chat or other group to bring such IM client where most of people will be comfortable to use it. |
Which seems to be an issue a lot of open source, decentralised projects have to be honest. They get a lot of programmers involved, but seem to struggle to get the aesthetics/design side up to par.
What would it take to get the kinds of designers found at the likes of Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, etc working on open source projects lke Matrix?