alt Hacker NewsSeeing such issues with Matrix and other open, common-good projects, I get the feeling like they just aren’t architected for good everyday-user UX.
Matrix is making real efforts to change this with Matrix 2.0, but still seems to suffer from design debt in many places.
I think this is partially due to the people they attract who largely work on the projects for free: Tinkerers who care about some form of technical elegance for the fun of it. I’ve had a few conversations around FOSS, including Matrix, at this point, and a not-too-uncommon response to my relayed criticisms was “then the user is wrong”.
I can’t tell them what to do. I could tell them what to do if they want adoption by normal people, but many don’t seem to be interested in that and you really can’t argue with that.
If adoption by normal people is a project goal, you have to seriously engineer for that. As much (partially fair) criticism as Gnome gets, they managed to build a desktop package that can seriously be used by normal people in the real world.
What you are writing may be true but what the article is about shows the exact opposite of "some form of technical elegance". This thing seems to be bug-ridden for feature areas off the mainstream usage path.
What helps against this are a rigorous design, testing, perhaps some formal methods sprinkled in (because distributed systems are really hard). That's what a tinkerer community could do that does not have an investor with strict timelines and profit requirements breathing down their neck. But the community apparently does not. At the least they should mark features as experimental that clearly have such fundamental issues.