Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by refulgentis 763 days ago
Matrix lost, or never even won, outside some unusually neckbeard-y communities. I gotta admit I kinda enjoyed watching someone try to make normies use it. Impossible. To be fair, discord is hard. But Matrix was really impossible.
1 comments
Arathorn 763 days ago
Matrix is a protocol, not an app, and it's still evolving rapidly.

Meanwhile, Element as an app is also evolving rapidly too. Totally agreed that the onboarding has been awful in the past, but we're plugging away improving it and trying to make it more glossy and less neckbeardy, as per https://element.io/labs/element-x etc.

The fact is that Discord has raised $1B+ to run a centralised unencrypted comms platform; meanwhile Element is doing something ~10x harder (decentralised & E2EE) with a tiny fraction of the $. It takes longer, but the difference is that Matrix should last indefinitely, whereas Discord will get Eloned sooner or later.

I wouldn't say we've lost yet, but ymmv. I do wish we'd progressed faster though.

link
mynameisvlad 762 days ago
> Matrix is a protocol, not an app, and it's still evolving rapidly.

If your argument is at all trying to be even in the ballpark of “Matrix is accessible to normal folks” then you’ve immediately failed with this sentence alone.

And at the end of the day, that is what the comment you were replying to was saying, that Matrix will never win outside of niche spaces. And as long as it’s not as simple as a single app with a single brand for people to remember, it’s not going to succeed.

link
Arathorn 762 days ago
Matrix literally aims to be the missing communication layer of the Web.

Just as the Web won without a single app with a single brand for people to remember, Matrix will eventually succeed too.

link
mynameisvlad 761 days ago
The web was not competing with literally hundreds of other services with tighter branding and the weight of multi-billion dollar megacorporations pushing for their success. They have far more resources available to push their own services and have absolutely no incentive to integrate with any other service or protocol.

I wish you luck, but optimism and blind faith isn’t going to magically make WhatsApp et al go away.

link