it may have to do with many of us on HN not getting the target audience for Matrix. It works great for a ton of people. Their usage stats speaks for itself.

But there are reasons it isn't competing with discord, slack or teams. I would like to say a lot of that has to do with matrix.org not having a serious/good commercial play, but I think it's a lot more nuanced than that.

Matrix is sort of like Mastodon and Lemmy in its target audience and usage, and there is nothing wrong with that. But I think a lot of us wanted something like Bluesky but for chat apps.

Marketing and UI are very important. something like Signal can get away with being terrible at it because they were able to get publicity and marketing from snowden, politicians,etc... I even think Matrix is a better OMEMO/E2EE communication client than Signal. But having a good product isn't enough, the user experience needs to be competitive for the general public to join and things like branding and publicity are especially important for Matrix because a good product other people aren't using isn't usable for communication purposes.

Don't get me wrong, I know the matrix team is well aware of this and they try their best, but it seems for now at least they know their target audience and that audience is happy enough with it. I suspect in Europe at least they're going to do really well. Whatsapp and Viber are very popular east of the Atlantic. Matrix should focus on disrupting those. Having something like whatsapp numbers instead of full on user id's (or translating them) for example would help compete there.

Matrix is carving out a nice but they're developing it like it should be competing with the bigger/dominant players. I interact with very technical people that are into opensource, development, security, etc... and every single time, I am the first person they hear about Matrix from.