alt Hacker NewsI am a daily user, family and friends chatting on Matrix.
My take is that there are two layers of friction:
a) people that care about chat encryption and would be willing to change, already did, to Telegram and/or Signal. "I'm not going to install yet another chat app" is a real answer by a friend of mine
b) no one wants to either host their own server, nor pay someone to host it for them. If it wasn't for me and a one of my friends, none of the people I chat with daily would be on Matrix.
And yes, there is the matrix.org server. Out of the ~13 people I chat frequently with, 1 is on matrix.org. "What's the point of changing apps if I'm still going to be using the centralized server" is another answer I've gotten.
I don't know what the solution to this dynamic is other than us, the power users, setting it up and paying for the group of people around us.
Replies
> “I’m not going to install yet another chat app”
This is legitimate.
I have to use:
- iMessage & SMS for most US based family, casual friends and co workers. - WhatsApp for European Family - Signal for one group of friends - Telegram for another group of friends
Every time I message someone I have to remember what app to use. It’s annoying. This in addition to random threads that pick up with the same people on instagram, discord, etc., which I try to redirect to our “standard” channel as aggressively as I can.
> no one wants to either host their own server, nor pay someone to host it for them.
I hear this every time anyone brings up a federated chat/social media/anything service, and I just don't get it. If you don't want to host it, don't. There are plenty of servers out there, and a lot of them are free. Yeah, you have to trust the person hosting it, but why is that only a problem for federated services?
What about maintaining encryption for an entire room of clients? I heard it's very difficult and prone to errors. Do you enforce it?
> a) people that care about chat encryption and would be willing to change, already did, to Telegram and/or Signal.
It continues to baffle me that the "telegram is encrypted" spin is still widely believed, even on a forum like this. Telegram is for 99.9% of intents and purposes not encrypted.