[skowalak]

I disagree. I have been using Matrix with Element as my main IM with my own homeserver for 3 years now, and the onboarding experience is just bad. You have to read so many texts which are spread across so many pages just to get stuff to work and even then sometimes it just won't.

Sure, the author could have prevented some of their problems by reading the documentation, but Matrix is trying to become a solution everyone can use. And noone wants to read a manifest only to send some messages.

[crimsoneer]

Honestly, on this I totally agree - hosting your own Element/Matrix instance is really unnecessarily painful, with the documentation all over the place. But hey, it's free and open-source.

But as as user, if you're even a little technical, downloading Element, registering and messaging your friends is really not the difficult bit.