I’m writing this post on behalf of my friend, a non-technical user who had the chance to use Matrix for about a week. I’d like to share his experience with you and ask what you think about it.
Matrix clients are incredibly challenging for the average user and seem unfriendly towards non-technical users. Unlike Discord, a non-technical person won’t grasp most things without thoroughly reading the Matrix specifications. Many can’t afford to do so for various reasons: lack of technical knowledge, limited time, or simply not wanting to, preferring a functional communicator like Discord or Facebook Messenger.
Discord’s registration is straightforward, with a refined user interface that just works. You register, invite friends, and you can chat and voice call seamlessly.
Now, Matrix registration. You choose a client like Element, widely promoted as the flagship Matrix client. After registration, you face the user interface, with unclear options tucked away where you wouldn’t expect. They are cryptically named, making it hard to figure things out.
After googling how to invite a friend, your friend joins, and a decryption error appears. Another 10 minutes spent reading how to fix it. Okay, problem solved.
Your friend calls, you want to answer, and… darn! You can’t click anything because “the voice call is in an unknown state,” and the dreadful ringing sound reminiscent of a '90s phone puts you in a gloomy mood.
This isn’t something a new user should encounter right after registration. Element may be open source, but it’s developed by a for-profit company with a team of programmers. The issue isn’t exclusive to Element but extends to almost every Matrix client.
This way, the Matrix network won’t attract new users. If users face such issues, they’ll quickly flee to a stable, popular platform like Discord.
I’m fairly new to Matrix but have barely used Discord so I don’t really have any preconceived biases towards how it “should” work, but damned if I can figure out some things that ought to be pretty basic. My first conversation on the platform was pushed into a thread… ok cool I could see pretty easily how to jump back and forth between the thread and the main conversation, but after a few days and restarting my browser… apparently that conversation is now just gone? I haven’t found any way to ever get back to it again and there’s certainly no obvious options in the left sidebar where you would expect your conversations to be listed at.
Another issue is with the number on the browser tab telling me there is one unread message. There is ALWAYS one unread message no matter what I do. I can mark the room (literally the one and only room I’ve joined on the public server) as read, but five minutes later it’s telling me there are unread messages again even though nobody has said a thing. Close the tab, restart the browser, and join the room again? Oh look there’s already one unread message even though I just got here and nobody has said anything. Simple things like this are either completely misleading or make me think the whole interface is somehow broken.
Call me crazy, but I liked the idea behind Matrix and set up my own server, including Element and an IRC bridge to connect to a chat room I run, thinking this could be a great way to give users more options including inline images and more potential content. The setup went smooth, the bridge connected seamlessly and everything was great for a couple weeks. Then I tried getting email registration working, but it fails with a cryptic error message. I did manage to track that down and adjusted a config option, then it didn’t fail with any message at all but the emails also weren’t being sent. Pulling the since-forgotten full path to the json page I found another error that google had no errors for. Eventually the server had to be rebooted again and now even though synapse starts with no errors, Element can no longer connect to synapse, and I’ve given up on this ever being stable enough for non-tech users to navigate. I’ve been working on and programming computers since the early 80’s, hell I even run mail servers that pass the snuff test by all the big guys, there’s simply no reason a chat room should be this difficult to set up or configure.
Some day I plan to get back to it again, but it will require a lot more time and patience on my part.