One of my favorite hobbies is dunking on Matrix. I mean, hell, they make it so easy. “Unable to decrypt message” is more of a punchline than an unexpected error message. And that’s not to mention the bizarre handling of reported security issues that have cropped up on more than one occasion so far.
There is a lot to ridicule, and I enjoy it as much as the next person, but I think it’s also important to say outright that I believe Matrix is our best hope for a cross-platform, federated, secure messaging protocol, and we should be more active in showing them support.
Working in the open is hard. Setting up a governance model from the beginning and making changes to the existing specification issue-by-issue as a community is not the easy way, but it is the right way. Building open protocols that a multitiude of clients can build around is not a trivial matter. Federation is built-in by default. They don’t require a unique identifier, like a cell phone number. And users maintain their own crytographic keys, for better and for worse.
I’m hopeful that one day Matrix, or something Matrix-shaped, will be the default way that humans send messages to one another. I know federated platforms get a lot of hate for some of the UX problems that come with the territory, but people understand email, and I don’t think it’s as big of a conceptual leap as others tend to make it out to be. I think this is something your dad, your granddad, your aunt, and your barber can all pick up and start using.
All it takes is a catalyst. Before covid, “normies” didn’t give two rips about QR codes. Everyone said they were too nerdy, too techy. One pandemic later and now you run into QR codes everywhere you go. Every phone ships with the ability to scan them, and essentially everyone knows how to use them.
I think the same could be true for something like Matrix. And I think it’s true not only for direct chats or small groups (like RCS/SMS/iMessage does now), but also for larger room-based groups, which is already one of Matrix’s big advantages. (Although I must admit, I fundamentally don’t understand the desire to use a tool like Discord, and I don’t have an intimate knowledge of the features that Discord has compared to Matrix, or what gaps there are that may need to be filled).
In any case, I always joke that I tease the people I love the most. In some ways, that’s true for technology, too. I love the idea of Matrix. And on some days, I almost love Matrix itself. I want to see it grow and thrive. The project has such a fundamental role to fill. It just has to get out of its own way first.