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As a daily user of Matrix (but not via Element, usually via alternative clients such as SchildiChat, FluffyChat, Cinny, and Gomuks) to participate in various communities that happen to be there and talk to some people I've met on there, I have no idea why it needed this dramatic effortpost. It's just a chat protocol that works semi-well. What's the big idea? I don't see how it's a "dead end" (mostly because you seem to have a lot of your information wrong).
Wrong. It has invites, emojis, stickers, and user avatars (which is a form of cosmetic).
Source: Literal screenshots from SchildiChat (which is a fork of the official Element client) that I have open right now:
https://pomf2.lain.la/f/kd2ff7b8.png
https://pomf2.lain.la/f/lhwijza7.png
Wrong. I'm in multiple Matrix chatrooms that have nothing to do with Matrix itself, on the official matrix.org server and other servers.
It depends on how you define "substantial", but there is cross-server activity in the rooms I use. Sometimes it causes problems, but not that often and increasingly less often. Protocol stability is increasing, albeit gradually. Most people do sign up for the default matrix.org server, but that's just because most people do the default in almost all cases.
Honest question: Have you actually used Matrix? How much? The post reads like the classic breathless "informational" YouTuber "explainer" about something they have no firsthand experience with. Like the idea that Matrix has no emoji support... It's had them for as long as I've used it, and that's been years. Where did you get these ideas?
No, it's not as braindead "easy" as Discord. (And I'm defining "braindead 'easy'" by a standard of someone I once talked to who claimed the Element interface seemed "too complicated" because... when she went to register, it asked her to enter in all of her info (desired username, desired password, attached e-mail, etc.) all at once in 3 separate form boxes presented in rows, instead of doing it like most modern apps where they have you enter in the first desired item in the only box on the screen and then send you to a new screen that says "Good job! You did it! And now we need [next thing].", repeating for all desired info.)
That's a good thing, because Discord, like New Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, etc. is designed according to the standards of Idiocracy. (The horror! In Matrix clients I can see actual dates and timestamps for things instead of "A day ago", "A few minutes ago", "A long time ago", etc. (But no I haven't used Discord in a long time so I don't know if it has those too.))
Why does it either have to be a "Discord killer" or a "dead end"? And why do you think that having stickers and invites (which again it does have anyway) is the difference between the two? It's all the network effect. People use Discord because everyone uses Discord because everyone uses Discord. That the primary users of Matrix are those who are banned from Discord is an expected feature, not a bug.
Most people are NPCs who simply use the most popular thing. That's all it is. Matrix does have flaws, and some pretty severe ones ("Cannot decrypt message") but those flaws are almost entirely irrelevant to this fact. It could be a 5x better or 5x worse Discord clone and it probably wouldn't be much more or less popular. You mostly haven't had dramatic vanquishings of incumbent services online since the days of Myspace and Digg. That's a fact that applies to even the best attempts. The network effect is a behemoth that basically only TikTok has been able to conquer in recent memory, and even then that's mostly only because Vine's shutdown left a hole. They also still didn't kill anyone.
I know alot more about Matrix than you do. I've actually read the protocol docs in depth and personally talked to the devs about it.
It might get better, but it can't get good, because the protocol is fundamentally broken.
You know what I mean. Emoji in the sense that Slack has them. Stickers in the sense that Telegram has them. Invites in the sense that Discord has them.
There's an in-between but this isn't it. Matrix is a dead end because its protocol is fundamentally broken and can't be fixed.
Wrong. Nobody uses Matrix because it's impossible to ask someone to sign up for Matrix.
Great. Then hopefully sometime you can impart that actual knowledge upon us instead of dropping "knowledge" that is transparently wrong.
Care to proactively provide some evidence for this inflammatory claim?
No I don't, because I don't use any of those. Maybe write like everyone is reading and explain next time?
That's funny, because I've done just that, they did, and we talk sometimes, even cross-server.
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The only Matrices im familiar with are the mathematical constructs and that Keanu Reeves movie, but i am pretty familiar with communication protocols so i would like to know what you mean by "broken" in this context.
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