this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
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yeah when it works it's cool, but it doesn't always work.
Plus the user experience for anyone who not only isn't tech literate but neither fairly tech savvy can be a pain. Navigating the way into joining rooms, DMing people, etc is pretty confusing (even for someone like me, who can manually install Arch for example^[obligatory I use arch btw]) and that's without mentioning all the E2EE problems with federated instances, etc, which not only can mean sometimes users can't see each others' messages but it can even break bridges.
Oh and the bridges may be cool but they're also kinda shit, I mean the TG one can't handle supergroups, WhatsApp often requires you to open the app anyway to view certain content, I don't use the signal bridge cause I don't mind using signal. Oh and tbh bridges only exist because we still need to talk to some folks in the other places, but they do not provide you any extra privacy, your message is still going in telegram/meta's servers and through their apps (which realistically you'll also still need to keep installed anyway) etc and on top of that it will also go through the servers of whoever is hosting your instance.
Yes self-hosting is an option, no your average joe will not do it and it is absurd to ask them to, and self-hosting for your whole community is nice but it gets hard if you're on your own and good luck if you have quite a few friends to actually talk to that have to be in your instance.
Unfortunately, messaging apps are meant to do one job: talk with people, and in order to do that privately and securely you need to get people on the chosen app^[refer to part about bridges] and therefore it needs to be easy enough to grasp that even people who don't know what an OS is can get them, hence why Signal beats out Matrix (and getting people to switch to Signal from WhatsApp or Telegram is still pretty challenging).
So this is why I believe it's less developed. Matrix is probably not the only made in Europe project tbf, and besides even US things can be used if they are open source.
I've never had issues with that or other things like Encryption when using the official Element clients. But I also don't install Arch manually or use it at all.
Just because it "works on your machine" doesn't mean it works for many. You were lucky, but I, for example, have witnessed several instances of people not being able to see each other's messages in the local LUG group because of encryption vs within instances. I also had my bridges break because of it.
I was also able to join rooms and shit but I found it unintuitive and I know for a fact that someone like my grandma, mother, aunt, most of my friends, etc would not find it will struggle with it and won't bother because it is a pretty silly way to navigate it. There's a bias here: you are on Lemmy, you're already more familiar with these concepts than the average user so obviously for you it is easier, but for others it is not atball easy to mavigate and in fact it can be very confusing, and it would be silly and counterproductive to dismiss that as them not wanting to learn and to say that matrix is as well developed as WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal, cause from a functional point of view it just isn't.
P.S.: I realize the tone of my message may seem a bit hostile from the text but it's not meant that way.