Our goal is of course to use it as a replacement to WhatsApp / Telegram / Discord for social stuff, even though it's dominated by developers today. And we will get there (despite all the negativity on this thread :|)

This is a very regionally desirable feature, in my experience.

I have never (deliberately) sent a voice message on any platform, nor do I know anybody (well/any more) who would. But I went to a university with a high proportion of Chinese students, and it was really striking how much that feature was used (in apps that supported it obviously).

I'm just speculating, but I wondered if it was at least partly because of the tonal nature (roughly speaking: four intonations for each vowel, rendering completely different words, not just subtle changes in tone/emphasis) of mandarin, and relatively large number of different characters, making vocal communication more efficient than written; to an even greater extent than that may be true of English, for example.

I'm not really sure what I'm saying. Maybe it's not good to burn one market, maybe it is good to focus on excelling in others if (if!) the alternative is mediocrity everywhere, I don't know. Your comment just reminded me and I thought it was vaguely interesting.

Any app lacking them has no chance of gaining traction there.

I think it's because we dumped SMS (which has no voice clips) early and moved to WhatsApp (I think it's been the norm for like 8 years now in Argentina).

same here.

really dislike how people essentially just ramble on and on for what could have been one sentece or a few words.

so it costs the recipient a lot of time and concentration to get the gist of the message.

maybe a cultural thing because my wife and here friends use voice msg a lot.

In short, I don't think it's regional. It depends on the person with whom you need to communicate.

I'm not denying it's helpful/required for accessibility, I'm just talking about 'in general' large scale use of it (or not).

Maybe it's less about glasses (if you have to find your glasses to type a message I expect you also need to in order to unlock your phone, open the app, and tap the voice message button) for older people than it is about accustom to IM - the brief chatty format is more like a telephone call than a letter.

(But those I've known to use smartphones haven't used voice messages - as distinct from telephone voicemail - anyway, as I said.)

From my anecdotal/regional experience, people over 60 prefer to use voice messages almost exclusively while younger people prefer to text.

Maybe someone at telegram or whatsapp can provide statistical data to shed more light on voice message usage.

My personal pet peeve is that I have no idea what the difference is between "people" and "rooms", and why when I try to talk to a friend our chat is sometimes in one and sometimes in the other. Maybe you'd like to take a page out of the Telegram/Whatsapp book and not distinguish between the two, since they're all chats, they just sometimes have two people and sometimes more.

Best of luck, I'm really hoping to switch to Element for all my chats one day!

I still think that this is one of the more important open-source future-facing projects around and will continue supporting it, and urge others to, as well. If you dislike the hegemony of centralized services, then throw some money towards projects that support ideals you believe in.

I am a member of a social group that varies widly in age and technical experience. When I tried switching two of our members over to Element, I noticed them quickly growing upset with the app because the found it to be missing key features they expected like easily recording audio messages or the visual seperation of messages that are more than a few minutes apart.

From my personal experience with switching people from one chat app to another, people expect a replacement app to:

1. have 1:1 feature parity with the app it's replacing, 2. display all the information they've grown to rely upon, 3. and both feel and work like the app it's replacing. (even cosmetic things like text bubbles and larger font sizes)

Failing the first two points lead to the immediate dismissal of the app. Failing the last point is seen as a deficiency in the new app. Inversely, succeeding in all three leads to smooth adoption. It is why all my group is using telegram right now instead of whatsapp.

I'll have another go at switching my group to Element when/if the app gains the ability to send audio messages, but without Element looking and feeling similar its compition, I'm skeptical of my chances to succeed.

By the way, I really like Matrix and appreciate the hard work and care you're putting into this project. Thank you and keep up the good work.

Sign-up is a metric that your marketing team loves to track, but is a crazy user bottleneck.

Even if you only do it for, e.g. 6 months-1 year (spam concerns), let people chat with no account/sign-up. Let me give people a link that will let them chat with me, with no sign-up.

Element (back when we called it Riot) removed support for this a while ago BUT we are trying to design it back into the app, which you can follow https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/9264

And yeah as a developer on the project, getting users into rooms quickly and chatting is a desperate goal of mine.

Whatsapp: 1) Install 2) it works. Even my 60+ relatives can handle it.

Discord: 1) install 2) it works. It also has voice/video chat rooms and a huge ecosystem of bots.

Telegram: Works, has bots, channels can be moderated, sticker packs, gifs etc fun stuff.

Discord: Works as long as Discord does not run out of VC money.

Telegram: Sends all phone numbers on your phone to a third party.

It's very strange to me to hear people describe Whatsapp as having good UX.

Having to give up your phone number and contacts is a feature for most people. They can instantly see that Marge from the office also uses WhatsApp so they can call/message them using that instead of paying for calls and SMS.

The limitations of WhatsApp web are mostly due to it being end to end encrypted. The "web client" is basically just using the phone as a proxy. It _is_ possible to have E2E encryption and allow multiple separate clients, but it's not a trivial problem to solve, thus most won't do it. (Telegram's E2E chats are device to device and not available on other clients than the one that initiated the connection.)

It's still crap, don't get me wrong. I'd rather use anything else, but at least where I live, it has critical mass and is the de facto standard.

> it has critical mass and is the de facto standard.

Yeah, it's the critical mass thing that is the most significant reason here, although it originally caught on back when simple onboarding was very unusual and that was its killer feature.

I’ll admit, the documentation isn’t perfect. But it’s pretty good, and they should be able to set it up. There’s a few things I think could be more explicit in the docs, but even a mediocre set of sys-admin skills should be able to fill in the gaps.

I’m not an IT guy, or a sys-admin. I’m just a lowly, mid-level web developer :) But I was recently able to successfully setup my own Synapse server as per the docs, the very first attempt.

However, to your point. A more streamlined, or ‘automatic’ installation option would be fantastic!

[1]: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Also wary of it wanting to upload my contacts list - could you comment on how it’s used? Or is that entirely up to the specific app?

Uploading contacts is strictly optional (and is missing on some platforms like Android currently, as per complaints elsewhere on this thread). They're used purely to discover which of your contacts are already on the platform - the privacy policy can be found at https://github.com/vector-im/policies/blob/master/docs/ident...

on the other hand, we use Matrix for all the communication in our little startup. we got some integration going on such as rss feed and notifications about new signups etc. works great as a Slack alternative.

The developers seem to really get average users, and the commitment to privacy over feature adoption schedule means every feature is as polished as the latest cryptographic design allows it to be. This means every feature is an actual feature that gives more power to the users.

Sure, there's stuff that indeed needs improvement, like usernames and registration without phone numbers, but once those come, it's likely to be polished enough not to require sudden knee-jerk patches like adding Google Captchas because a billion cryptocurrency scambots suddenly started spamming everyone, and there was no private Captcha alternative available.

I love that Signal doesn't consider privacy an individual feature (like Telegram Secret Chats) or Matrix opt-in E2EE (something that was the case at least in the past). Everything is E2EE, it's an integral property of every feature, there's no risk of downgrade attacks because the codebase never contained a non-E2EE implementation of some feature in the first place.

When working with TFC, I wanted the same with advanced properties like Onion Service based anonymity for everything, as well as endpoint security against key exfiltration, which I knew meant almost non-existent userbase due to the architectural design that requires custom HW data diode etc. I consider myself in a privileged position, I didn't have to consider every average user and that was almost exclusively due to the fact there was already a usable solution for networked TCBs, i.e. Signal, and a usable anonymity solution for networked TCBs (Ricochet and later Briar and soon cwtch.im). So I'm glad I didn't have to reinvent the wheel. Signal, Briar and Cwtch are _the_ interesting platforms. Signal is slowly taking over Telegram in terms of usability, while Briar is experimenting with an incredibly fascinating stuff like blogs and forums hosted on your personal devices' Onion Service. You could theoretically run a clone of any social media platform page for yourself from your phone, once average phones are fast enough and use fast enough Internet (5G/Wifi6 etc) to make Tor snappy (enough). Who knows, perhaps by then Signal will also run over Tor.

Signal still has usability annoyances, like this one where they decided to remove the UI for creating and leaving group chats from the desktop version in an impulse half a decade ago, and have refused to add it back again since.

On multiple occasions I ended up talking to maintainers or developers due to bugs.

It's been many years and you can barely use the official bridges for IRC and with many limitations.

Basically a split off of a subcommunity of a discord of a reddit community. (Specifically moving politics away from the community discord)

So, it is possible to move people over, but it only really works in terms of batches of people and basically as a island of people, rather than integrated into the wider community.

What good is a phone messenger app if I can't send someone a message on their phone number?

Signal just works, I use it as my day to day sms app, and it shows me who of my friends also have signal so I text them on messenger if they do, and WhatsApp if they don't.

So the real reason is Matrix just isn't even trying to compete with signal or WhatsApp, it's competing with MSN Messenger, which everyone stopped using over 15 years ago.

Element seems to be focusing more on the IRC/Slack/Discord style of communication though instead of Signal/WhatsApp. You can definitely use it for the latter (I use it for plenty of 1 on 1 conversations with RL friends) but right now it's more for channels and rooms and eventually Slack workspaces/Discord guilds.

That's all on the client end though; I'm sure someone will eventually write a Matrix client that mimics Signal/WhatsApp etc more.

The relationships between the home server, identity server, and client on Matrix are not made clear in any user friendly way in the Matrix documentation for homeserver operators so I can't imagine it's clear for end users either.

It's one of the things that I think keeps killing Matrix. Now let's see if Arathorn shows up to tell me how wrong I am. Wouldn't be the first time. Nothing inspires confidence in the maturity of a product like a CEO that joins discussions to tell users who've had bad experiences that it was their fault for not understanding the documentation. That's how Facebook got so big, don't you know?

I'm absolutely obsessed with chat solutions like Matrix and Arathorn probably doesn't remember me but I remember his attitude towards my feedback.

You may want to consider how your (seemingly legitimate) comments about the documentation might sound to Arathorn, who is obviously working hard to engage with the community and owes you nothing. For comparison, Arathorn seems to have engaged constructively with other more polite comments in this discussion.

I hate all the messengers that make you friends rat out their full phone address book (including your private phone number!) with a passion and I am very glade Matrix has not succumbed to this predatory practice like many others.

If you're interested, https://github.com/vector-im/roadmap/issues/10 is the relevant issue on the public Element roadmap: https://github.com/vector-im/roadmap/projects/1

If someone gives me their phone number I would find it to be extremely rude to them if I just pass it to some third party without their consent. And most people likely do in normal life:

"Hey Bob, can I give your phone number to Alice ? She would like to buy that furniture you re selling."

Yep people will just give their full phonebook to a third party so they can see who else is one the service (and betrayed their thrust by giving it their phone number!). I really hope this is just UX dark patterns, where the apps ask for phone book access but don't explicitly tell users how they are doing this matching. Users doing this willingly would be much worse...

I would say people didn't stop using it, rather than the service got axed.

> very privacy and security leaning in nature

were not already on Matrix?

Not all of us. Many of us realize the benefits of federation and the security implications of having a single point of failure.

It was turned on by default in May of 2020. It was available before then.

> I don't have any fear of Moxie turning and pushing backdoor keys into everyone's app.

He could, though, and you have to trust him not to. I see that as a problem.

Thanks! I do think default matters though. Do you know how they handle groups and metadata?

> He could, though, and you have to trust him not to. I see that as a problem.

Personally I don't. At the end of the day we have to trust a lot of people for society to operate. I'll stay on Signal where I can get my non privacy concerned friends connecting while all signs point to the opposite of Moxie turning. Especially considering the tradeoff of how the space is moving so fast currently. Maybe I'll revisit when no metadata E2EE group chats are widespread and Matrix creates a very simple server setup. Federation makes sense to me for mature technologies, but not for fast moving technologies.

They sure do, but you also have access to all the parts needed to maintain your own instance and so does everyone else. Failures, when they happen, are limited to instance who aren't "functioning perfectly" instead of extending to every user of a centralized system.

Just to keep everyone reading this thread on the same page: The point of failure being discussed here is the human factor. See comment ancestors for context.

Thanks for reiterating this, because I think it is a key thing people who are scanning this thread are missing.

I think this is actually the argument for a centralized system though. At least for something that's a replacement to text messaging. I think the issue with a federated system is that most people don't know how to run a server, even pretty technical people. So this makes sense as a slack replacement, but not text messaging. At least to me.

I did look into matrix, but either I have to host a server myself or I will forever be stuck on one other guys server, right? Then there is no reason to move to it and it is not really anymore federated than email.

> or I will forever be stuck on one other guys server, right

This is valid criticism at the moment. There is work being allocated on fixing this issue, with multiple protocol drafts, but it might take a year a two before you can finally transfer accounts between servers.

In my mind a true federated service would allow me to move my stuff from one place to any other place, kinda the way I can move my domain to a new host.

The Element clients are the closest to what you could consider official clients, being made by the Element company, which does most of the Matrix design and development.

I could write a list of criticisms of Matrix's software products, organization, and track record, but the main problem is that we want an ip-native comms tool that's /actually/ decentralized.

Matrix is Open Source, federated, self-hosted Slack (plus voice calls). That's great, but that leaves you needing to trust a homeserver admin or host your own homeserver. Putting aside that there STILL isn't a finished homeserver implementation, you'll have to rely on a third party no matter what. Either it's hacker Joe (the admin of your homeserver), or the server hosting company that hosts your homeserver, or the DNS registrar who legally has to have your real identity...

It may be theoretically possible to host a homeserver without a domain name, but you'd still need to register your real name with an ISP to get a static IP.

Freedom from this kind of control should be baked into the software. Plenty of teams have tried it (retroshare, Scuttlebutt, etc.) but unfortunately none of them are quite there yet.

Keep in mind software of this kind doesn't just [poof] appear out of nowhere...it's typically built incrementally on meager budgets.

What you seem to want is a peer-to-peer solution, which at this point in time is not something Matrix has built or claims to have built.

I'm well aware that FOSS projects tend to be underfunded. Matrix is an outlier with some large grants fueling the project and opaque organizational structure.

> What you seem to want is a peer-to-peer solution, which at this point in time is not something Matrix has built or claims to have built.

Peer-to-peer is not absolutely necessary (it can be both). There's nothing wrong with routing message through a network, but e2ee is absolutely necessary, and it took until May this year for Matrix to enable that feature by default. Most importantly, in Matrix, your identity is associated with and controlled by a homeserver. It's under someone else's control. That's not good... Your identity should be under your control. We've known how to do this with asymmetric encryption for at least a couple of decades.

> What you seem to want is a peer-to-peer solution, which at this point in time is not something Matrix has built or claims to have built.

Except we have: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p-2-p-matrix. We have people working on it full time, and hopefully going to evolve into hybrid P2P/Client-Server eventually as per that blog post.

Meanwhile, portable identities are also in active development (as part of P2P), as per https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/neilalexander/....

> e2ee is absolutely necessary, and it took until May this year for Matrix to enable that feature by default

Sorry, you're complaining that we... did the thing you want us to do? But it took longer than you wanted? My heart bleeds.

I've managed to talk 6 people into making an account (matrix.org) and using element. None of them are linux-y or tech-y and they've mostly managed fine (apart from help with setting up e2ee, exporting keys etc which I helped with).

Is the app dead easy to use (like WhatsApp, Viber, Signal)? No it isn't but it's understandable.

Gosh sorry I remember seeing that post, but for some reason I thought it was more of a concept without anything shipped yet. I should do a better job of reading.

Exciting!!

Wasn't complaining. I don't use Matrix.

> Meanwhile, portable identities are also in active development (as part of P2P),

Portable identities should be how it works by default. Nobody should be asked to sign up with a server and share their email address and metadata with it.

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