alt Hacker News> What makes it not more popular ? Is it the federated approach ? The client applications that don't look really fancy ?
It’s not that the UI doesn’t look fancy. The overall experience of using Matrix has a lot of catching up to do. Like many others on HN I was enthusiastic about it early on, but I’ve been so worn down by all of the little problems, random re-authentication issues that nobody can explain, and missing features that I found myself avoiding using it unless I really needed to talk to someone I couldn’t contact any other way.
You can find isolated success stories about small groups who successfully use it for their group chat, but at the root of all of those stories is always one person who takes the role of very dedicated IT person to keep it all running and walk others through steps to fix it when it breaks.
They’ve been churning a lot on features and design, which has added another layer of fatigue on top of it all. It’s hard to even discuss Matrix any more because every negative experience will get waved away with an explanation that it was a problem with an old app or version and you just need to try Element X and Matrix 2.0 or the newest release. However, it’s felt that way for years. I’ll revisit it again in a year but for now I’ve reached my limit for how much time I can put into trying to make a project work and stay working.
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I think this is right.
I just also want to toss in that (at least for Element in particular) the continuing lack of long-form composition or history navigation appears to be a liability with some contacts.
At this point it's probably fine for chat format one-liners in the moment, but for the communications that have historically been going over e-mail as opposed to IRC it's something of a pain to use.
As someone who has dealt into this quite recently, I can confirm that it hasn’t really changed that much. The documentation for integrating clients and bots is just old or wrong or non-existent. The complexities of getting authentication right and even getting messages validated between two human clients was really much worse than it should’ve been and it’s just not in a position where normal people can use it just yet. That said, I’m hopeful that government adoption could make it right quite quickly. And adopting it within a managed setting would mean that the UX could be ironed out fairly quickly.