It's fediverse but for chat. It has group chats, but netsplits somehow behave even worse than they do on IRC and if you join public ones you'll get sent extremely unwanted images by bots on a regular basis.
There are a million clients because the official one has horrible UX and everyone thinks they can make a better one.
I know quite a few people who think it's the future of chat but every time I've tried to use it I've ended up having a bad time. I'd advise against trying personally.
I'm wearing a Matrix T-Shirt right now and can't disagree much about the experience not being great.
> There are a million clients because the official one has horrible UX and everyone thinks they can make a better one.
I wish. My experience is that there are few clients and a lot of them have similarly ... beginner-unfriendly UX due to the SDKs, the protocol itself and cultural factors (there seems to be a good amount of "this is good enough"/"you don't actually need that" hubris in the community).
Matrix, besides XMPP, is the only federated chat protocol with any kind of traction, so I figure that it makes sense to invest in improving it rather than building something new. Ideally using it would be a no-brainer choice for delivering chat apps: Why would you invent something new when you could use a protocol that already exists and already has a vast ecosystem of libraries and users? That's where I wish it was, reality unfortunately looks quite different.
> Why would you invent something new when you could use a protocol that already exists and already has a vast ecosystem of libraries and users?
Unfortunately that's exactly what Matrix did, and people keep repeating the same mistake. Just this week, i was seeing a new federated IM protocol whose main selling point is "not XMPP/Matrix":
If only these Matrix/Tinode people spent their energy on making a decent XMPP client, Discord would not even be born. Alas, my interpretation is it's a hard-sell to investors to make a client for an existing network and these devs want to put bread on their tables.
i mean it is also totally fair enough to just make another version of something that already exists for the sake of it, making things is fun and that's a good enough reason imo.
personally i'm really not a fan of the "x already exists so everybody should always use that and nobody should ever spend time making a different one" school of thought that seems to be so prevalent here. i just think it goes without saying that if their thing isn't obviously better and easy to adopt, it probably won't gain any traction.
There are a million clients because the official one has horrible UX and everyone thinks they can make a better one.
I know quite a few people who think it's the future of chat but every time I've tried to use it I've ended up having a bad time. I'd advise against trying personally.