[Arathorn]

> you don't see the CTO coming to chat about it.

Speaking as the CTO at Element (and proj lead for Matrix), i feel like i've spent a bit too much time coming to chat about Matrix on HN over the years ;)

That said, I agree that Bluesky is doing well in terms of breaking through into mainstream awareness - much more so than Matrix (although obviously big-world-social-media is something of a different beast to distributed-instant-messaging).

The reason Matrix hasn't done better here is primarily economic: we spent too much time and money building out Matrix for everyone in the early days... and not enough time focusing on building either consumer (as Bluesky has) or enterprise or government specialised products. We then got traction at Element on the government side of things (https://element.io/en/matrix-in-europe etc) as it turns out governments love their digital sovereign communications - which in turn meant that in order to get sustainable and survive we had to focus hard on building stuff for that market. Now, ideally the stuff which works for Govt would work for mainstream too (after all, we're generally competing with Signal and WhatsApp, which are of course mainstream apps) - but in practice it has been hard to get that balance right. You can see my <del>TED Talk</del> FOSDEM 2025 talk about the road to mainstream matrix here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkCKhP1jxdk

Meanwhile, the plan on Matrix is to get to profitability via Govtech and then invest the money back into improving Element (and Matrix) so it also works well for mainstream usage - so hopefully we'll get back on the radar then. It's a long haul though. Meanwhile, kudos to Bluesky for getting to focus on the mainstream use case; I'm jealous, and I hope they find a good sustainability model!

[inigyou]

Matrix's biggest blocker is that it doesn't work very well. You try it, you get a worse experience than Discord, you switch back to Discord. I hope the Matrix project figures this out one day.

[embedding-shape]

What do you hope they'll figure out by ambiguous feedback like this? What exactly is worse? Is it possible it's just different, and that translates to "worse" although maybe it's actually on purpose? What specifically is it that doesn't work well for you?

[solarkraft]

Acute awareness of and attention to the overarching problem. Almost all of the individual issues are likely already known, but too often hand-waved away as minor inconveniences. This is common in the FOSS world and IMO the #1 hurdle for wider adoption.

That said, it would not be fair to not acknowledge that the Matrix 2.0 efforts have been real and massive improvements. Refocusing like this is a massive organizational effort and takes a non-trivial amount of resources. I’d like to take the opportunity to really commend that.

(That said, I have paused my close following of the project due to my frustration with the state of things and rate of progress, but I totally understand some of the reasons for it. It is only becoming more and more important to have an open standard for instant messaging, but I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point something new appeared and immediately captured all attention)

[selfhoster1312]

As an example, deuxfleurs.fr, a french non-profit host, mentions issues with notifications, message history, and message searching as reasons to leave matrix in their latest newsletter: https://blog.deuxfleurs.fr/2026-bilan-de-la-rencontre-ete-20...

[inigyou]

I mean... just use it for a while and see? It's death by a thousand paper cuts. There's no single big problem. It does get messages from A to B.

For instance when you click on a new room and the messages are stuck in a loading state forever. Or when you sign out and sign back in and need to reset decryption keys and can't read message you received before signing in

[inigyou]

Or when someone gives you a link to a Space and you click on it and get a loading spinner for a while and then an obscure error. What is a Space anyway? Why can't I organise my own channels into groups but only the admin of a Space can do that? It isn't intuitive. Obviously it makes sense to have groups of channels like Discord guilds, in some way, but it's currently confusing.

When I know the address of a channel I can never find the right textbox to put this in. And when it is the right one, it doesn't give feedback that it's the right one. IIRC it's the same box that searches channels on the current home server, but if you put an address there it shows 0 results, but if you click on continue then it joins the channel anyway. But there's another box somewhere in the app that also does this search thing but can't join a channel address. I think. And neither of them are in obvious places. In Discord, at the end of your list of guilds, is a big + button, which opens a text box asking for the address of a guild.

I really think you should just sit down with some inexperienced or first-time users and watch them do some basic tasks while thinking aloud. This used to be the bread and butter of the UX industry, which has atrophied.