Using Matrix to replace proprietary and centralized chat apps

Re:Using Matrix to replace proprietary and centralized chat ... by theshrike79 on Monday November 16, 2020 @07:33AM (#25110859)

WhatsApp has good onboarding and brand recognition. (YMMV, this is highly dependent on which country you are in). You don't need to create accounts or register. You just need to know your phone number.

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.

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Re:Using Matrix to replace proprietary and centralized chat ... by kybernetikos on Monday November 16, 2020 @07:37AM (#25110895)

I don't disagree with what you've written, but a chunk of it is exactly what people are getting criticised for elsewhere in this thread - giving a technical reason that I as a user probably don't care about for bad UX.

> 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.

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