Element looks and feels more like a replacement for Discord or Slack than WhatsApp or Messenger. My intention is to build an alternative to the latter two in terms of UI/UX. Something your grandma could use, like Signal, but decentralized and with features like quote replies and message editing.

The goal would be to build a beautiful, private, secure, delightful instant messaging app that happens to run on Matrix, rather than building a Matrix client period. It’d still allow power users to do stuff like federation, but would by default abstract techie/Matrix concepts like homeservers, rooms, and encryption keys.