I agree Matrix is promising and I use it on a regular basis, but I wish they made it easier for non-technical people to join and use.

I haven't been very successful convincing people to join. Some tried but were immediately put off by the complicated UI. It takes too much explaining and hand holding.

Those constantly in-your-face "session verification" prompts are bewildering and useless. And then it's impossible to disable spell checking in the Element client.

I hope it continues to get better.

Granted, this was about 1.5 years ago, so a lot has probably changed, but when a fellow engineer friend and I decided to switch to Matrix, we have a lot of trouble getting the end-to-end encryption working. It required a lot of finagling and sharing of keys and was pretty annoying.

Being engineers, we did figure everything out, but I couldn't see any non-technical users going through the headache, particularly when Signal is just "install and you're done".

That one appears to have been fixed. It's just a one-click thing now to enable E2EE.

oh? I'll have to check it out then. I would definitely prefer federated chat.

Matrix now and 1.5 years ago is day and night

Don't forget the bridges!

beeperhq is doing this for I believe $10/month (even iMessage). Free, reliable bridges would be the special sauce for Matrix IMHO.