Maybe I am alone in this, but not everyone likes the UX of slack or discord and might prefer a more information focused/less distracting desktop application and prefer a native desktop application over something electron/browser based.

And for those people the current options for Matrix are all very much a work in progress to put it mildly.

I've been using nheko (well, the fork of it that's actually maintained). There are a couple areas in which it's a bit of a WIP, but it's a pretty good experience so far.

Giving Nheko a spin right now and while it is somewhat better than some of the other matrix clients I have tried, the UI is still much too close to discord/slack for my taste. And doesn't have enough knobs to disable features I don't want(*) (hopefully that will change over time). It feels quite a lot snappier than the other clients, which is good.

It wastes quite a bit of vertical space per message, but it's still somehow hard to see for me which lines were said by which person. Something with relative placement of avatar, nick and message is throwing me off.

(*) Granted, it may be a bit odd that I simply want to disable _all_ matrix features (avatars, replies, displaying images, honoring redactions, large multiline messages/embedded texts, typing notifications, etc.).

There's more than one way to do it, and I definitely look forward to clients becoming more varied and configurable as Matrix (I hope) grows in popularity.

Totally agree that not everyone wants the same UX.

And same applies to IRC as well, there are clients that go more in the slack/discord direction (which I also won't touch), but it's great to have options, so everyone can be happy in the end :)

> If I was starting a new chat channel for a project, I'd use Matrix, not IRC. Matrix is more decentralized than IRC due to federation, and Element offers a user experience that should be familiar and comfortable to users of Slack and Discord.

I've been trying Matrix on-and-off, and found it ridiculously complicated to figure out bridging (which is probably Matrix's top selling point, and was important for my communities) on the "official" servers.

Bridging seems like a big selling point if you're migrating an existing chat channel to Matrix. It seems less compelling if you're starting a new one.

Given how some (open-source-esque) communities work, there'll be people who prefer using their preferred platform (e.g. IRC, Discord, Telegram) even if it doesn't have first class support.

Matrix's architecture has significant privacy issues.

It leaks metadata on users activities in channels and their read receipts.

The data is published to the whole Internet.