I looked into this recently too and ran into the same issues with Matrix. How the hell did they manage to make chat so complicated?
I found Zulip pretty interesting because it’s made a lot of smart UX decisions that let it double as a kind of inbox/task system and serve needs like customer support pretty well.
My main worry would actually be that even though I prefer its UX, the complexity and 2010s-style design would churn some first time users. If anybody has used it for engaging with external users I'd be very keen to learn how that went
> How the hell did they manage to make chat so complicated?
This is a bit like saying “CVS works fine; how the hell did they manage to make git/mercurial/monotone/etc so complicated?”
The point of Matrix is to replicate conversation history across participating servers without a single point of control. To make it impossible for a Facebook or similar to act as a gatekeeper on a conversation. It’s decentralised just as a DVCS is.
Just because we haven’t executed well enough yet on the implementation (due to getting stuck between Element and Element X on the clientside, and having to focus on govtech featuees on the serverside to try to keep the lights on) doesn’t mean the underlying idea of replicated chatrooms is bad. It just needs a git-equivalent implementation, where the perf and benefits mean folks stop fixating on the underlying complexity.
That's a very reasonable response and I appreciate you showing up to explain the actual implementation challenges. That's a problem many ambitious projects have and I hope you guys are able to execute on the vision.
I will say, as a vaguely interested outsider (but not so invested in the premise of decentralization that I am going to jump through hoops to use matrix) my impression of the user story "Ok I guess I'll finally check out that matrix thing and see what it's like" was that it assumed I had an understanding of various matrix concepts while getting started, and didn't really guide me down a happy path towards opening a functioning matrix client.
Eg here https://matrix.org/try-matrix/. I suspect 90-99% of first time users would want to just go straight to https://app.element.io/ but instead I had to figure out what the distinction between clients/servers/auth really meant, click through to install element, then select the rightmost icon to open it in my browser.
Some of the docs are similar (https://matrix.org/docs/chat_basics/matrix-for-im/#creating-...) - most likely I just want to make an account for the first time but the content is covering a ton of ground and arguably even introducing complexity (I can use any provider, but I don't have to, but need to keep in mind how it impacts data migrations, anyway this is the company behind matrix, they have an app, go here).
The subtext I sensed when I went through this for the first time was not exactly just that Matrix was complex. It was that the culture/expectations set by the people behind it was using it required me to learn/account for all this stuff even though I just want to open your chat app. To a certain extent as a nerd I am interested in your app, and I know a lot of the existing community is very interested in the technical details. But ultimately I'm just trying to check out a chat app, in fact I have already made the decision to go open it, and all the focus seems to be on selling its configurability/flexibility/potential rather than helping me chat.
The problem (exhibited all over this thread) is the conflation of protocols and apps. You misled yourself by overthinking it. This happened a lot a couple of years ago when people fled Twitter for Mastodon, putting themselves off by assuming they needed to understand nuts and bolts irrelevant to their use case. Did you need to know how HTTP works to use a web browser? Of course not. Likewise, most people confused about Mastodon would be better served if they understood they just had to sign up on a website and start talking to people, same as anything else. In this case, if all you wanted was to try a chat app, you should’ve started at Element and you never needed to even know about Matrix. People using these things interchangeably has done enormous harm to the decentralisation movement.
I found Zulip pretty interesting because it’s made a lot of smart UX decisions that let it double as a kind of inbox/task system and serve needs like customer support pretty well.
My main worry would actually be that even though I prefer its UX, the complexity and 2010s-style design would churn some first time users. If anybody has used it for engaging with external users I'd be very keen to learn how that went