It's very popular with people who value not having their data stored in plaintext.

I use Discord for public communications and I don't mind plaintext storage at all - on the contrary, on public chats, I personally value public history.

The last time I've used Matrix actually, usability was a disaster; took me a while to figure out even just how to login, and that wasn't the only problem.

The login screen was too complicated for you, eh?

I was asked to login concurrently from two different browsers, every time I wanted to login. It was a very puzzling experience, and took me a while to figure it out, because it was something I've never experienced before in chat systems, and it wasn't spelled clearly, like "you must login from two browsers", in order to compensate for the unusualness.

The UX of communicating with other users was problematic as well. I've tried to establish communications with a certain user, and I have no idea if I succeeded or not (likely not); two separate communications "channels" (I don't know the terminology) were opened with the same user, which is perplexing, since again, this is something I've never experienced before.

I think those two weren't even the only problems I've had.

Did you file a bug? That doesn't happen. Normally you log in. And that's it. On a new device, you can (optionally) verify your account to see previous encrypted comversations. But you don't have to do that.

As for the chat rooms, they work exactly like Discord, which is exactly like every chat client with chat rooms has since the dawn of IRC. You can send a message to one person, or you can join a room and message everyone at the same time.

Easy peasy!

Do you remember using Riot pre-cross signing?

If you don't, then you have no idea how bad it used to be.

I do and it wasn't bad. And for literally years now its been great.

Do you know how much comments like that help Matrix gain a foothold in the closed source messaging space?

Not all all, that’s how much.

Seriously. Again, huge proponent and financial supporter of matrix efforts here; I think they do an a amazing job. But comments like yours are detrimental to what they do.

Nah, they do help the folks who don't know about it.

People don't value that, they value a good UX and the fact that all of their contacts have the app. Matrix has neither of these.

People do value that, and they also value a great UX, which Matrix also has. Additionally, matrix, doesn't forcefully associate your plaintext account with your phone number! People with a clue value that.

700,000,000 users disagree with your statements. You can’t make something true by just saying it’s true.

Also your attitude is super toxic. You’re calling people who don’t value the same things you do, “clueless”.

You don’t really get to bullshit people on HN — you can be super smart and skilled in your field, you’ll far too often come across people with vastly more experience than you. I invite you to think about that.

Again, matrix is great, and I see it as the future of messaging. But it’s absolutely not the “present” of messaging; it’s years behind telegram, and the UX of most clients including the more popular ones is garbage.

A lot of users of Telegram are those who lost WhatsApp for few hours and was looking for alternative btw... I'm not sure about values honestly.

Its not years behind. That's a lie. In fact Id say it's ahead because you don't need to use a phone number (huge liability), you can choose to use e2e if you want and theyre not storing your data in plaintext!

Oh and all of matrix is totally open source! Wow. That's how you know you can trust it. If they decide to pull a WhatsApp and move to Facebook, you can just fork and get on with your life.

I like that the telegram client is open, but the sever isn't. Which means I don't really trust them. Same problem as Signal.

Just because it's open source doesn't mean I can trust it, I don't have the time to audit the code myself. Being open source is not a feature.

Mabye you wont, but someone else do it. It would be pointless to open code with unwanted tricks behind.

Yes it is, because you can. Just because you personally wont doesn't remove it as a feature.

Which client has a good UX in your opinion?

I used to really like ICQ's floating usernames and email-like modal. A message came in and a little icon appear beside the username (which I used to float in the unused part of my menu bar) along with an audible notification "uh oh!" You double click it, a small chat window opened up with your conversation history and a place to type. You then typed and send your message and the window disappeared until they replied. It was great because you could see who the messages were from without having to use any screen real estate.

Then things like MSN Messenger got popular. Protocols got locked down and screen real estate got consumed. For some reason everyone wanted to use Google Talk (which was horrible but at least spoke XMPP so folks on Pidgin could still chat with their friends). BB messenger taught a few tricks to Apple. Then facebook messenger happened, whatsapp, wechat, etc.

In the background, there were programs like teamspeak and mumble that were trying to do voice chat for gaming reasons. In a way, these were the precursors to Discord who now, for some reason, dominates what people consider a good chat UI. I personally think it's a bloated mess. In my opinion, ICQ had the best chat UI. Because it stayed out of the way.

It's too bad it turned out to be spyware! Hah

So is PGP...

PGP is rad.