I don't think it's stated enough just how easy signal is as a drop in replacement for WhatsApp, the main communication method for a significant portion of the world. The ability to install a new app, use your phones contact database, and be able to use the app nearly exactly the same way you used WhatsApp is an incredible feature. With almost zero effort you can significantly reduce (capitalist or nationstate) surveillance against you. It's not perfect but it's a lot of value for little effort.
All of these feature requests require less knowledgeable users to do new things or weigh alternative options which involves time spent developing onboarding. Having "one way," an opinionated way, to do a particular type of thing is a very useful engineering value especially if you have limited engineering resources. Simplicity is an extremely underrated feature.
Being 80% perfect for 20% of the work is laudable.
What's even better about Signal is that Facebook's competitive data is the list of people you know. Facebook wins every time a person adds a friend without adding their contact info to their phone. That means Facebook is the source of truth for who you know and Facebook is the intermediary for communicating with someone else. That's why, in retrospect, whatsapp was an obvious competitor worth spending a lot of money acquiring. WhatsApp drove people to use their phones contact list as the source of truth for you who communicate with, not Facebook's friend list.
A drop-in replacement would mean that you can still communicate with people on WhatsApp. Matrix protocol allows you to bridge WhatsApp and many other SaaS comms platforms to a single client, truly making is a drop-in replacement for WhatsApp.
I installed signal and it worked. I told a friend to install signal and it worked. I told my mom to install signal and it worked. The interface was basically the same. Any friend who installed it appeared the same way they would appear in WhatsApp. I didn't have to teach any of these people anything to get them to use it. I didn't have to talk them into making an account to use it. That is what I mean by drop in.
It's not a drop in for the behavior (talk to other people who use Facebook owned services in a way where Facebook can read all of your conversations), it's a drop in for interface (communicate with others who use the app in the same way you communicated with others using WhatsApp).
I just spent time looking at matrix.
google "matrix"
oh right, name space collision with popular 90s movie
google "matrix app"
oh, this is some library or something, not an app
searching the page for client. "Maybe under matrix live?"
see clients button in sub menu
see 10 plus options I don't recognize the name of and immediately lose interest
search "matrix" on app store
see apps with 2 stars or less than 10 reviews, nothing official.
Matrix is what you get from the people who say "isn't Dropbox just rsync?" "isn't a chat client just a GUI for a protocol?"
100 bespoke solutions to the same problem (10 different desktop clients) is an engineering nightmare and it robs a service of "economies of scale" enabled improvements.
I don't want to read a wall of text to understand something and neither does my mom. We want to search a keyword (or "best chat app"), download an app, and use it for its purpose. That might not be optimal, but you won't see wide spread adoption without it. If you tell me "matrix is best for chat" and I can't search for matrix on google, one click download a client, and be chatting with another person who did the same with minimal setup, it's not just a non starter as far as getting widespread adoption, but it's very far from "drop in." I don't personally have a single friend who has asked me to use matrix/a matrix client, or told me how awesome matrix is. Matrix supporters should ask themselves why the main place you ever see Matrix mentioned on hacker news is in posts about Signal.
Protocols don't win customers, user interfaces do. The average end user wants to download an app and use it without having to understand what "federation" or what the security implications of something is or who owns what data. They want their most knowledgeable friend (or reddit/hn) to tell them what to use and then use it and trust that they know what they are talking about.
I'm pretty confident that as long as this page: https://matrix.org/clients/ looks like that, matrix will never see widespread adoption and it will never be the obvious choice except among the people who prefer to move their documents around with rsync and know what IRC is.
Matrix being a brand for a protocol rather than a full chat app is another self harm. The customer for a protocol is software engineers. The customer for a chat app is all humans with a phone.
This is as daft as Googling "email" and expecting a de facto client. You're on HN, it's nerdville, expect more interest in the protocol than clients.
People search for "email clients. Try searching for "Matrix clients". Element is the best thus far, IMO.
"Widespread adoption" includes the EU's military, healthcare and government, so I wouldn't be so certain you'll end up being right. It's hit 60m publicly addressable accounts, which doesn't include any private servers or any kind of healthcare, gov or military: https://news.itsfoss.com/matrix-sixty-million-users/
EU is forcing interoperability standards. I have a gut feeling that you will look silly in five years time, but I'll buy you a very nice craft beer if I'm wrong. Hit me up on the bet in 5 years time: [email protected]
You were discussing "drop-in replacements", I gave you a drop-in replacement that still maintains interoperability with WhatsApp et al, which Signal does not. Classic shifting of the goalposts.
I think we meant different things when we said "drop in replacement" and therefore were referencing different ideas of what makes something a "drop in replacement," which is why it sounds like there are feelings of goal posts shifting.
If the messages are still sent via Facebook servers, that is not a WhatsApp replacement, it's an alternative WhatsApp Client, it's still at it's core "performing" WhatsApp. It is not a WhatsApp replacement, but a WhatsApp client replacement. I moved to signal specifically to sever my relationship with Facebook because I don't trust Facebook. Not communicating with Facebook is the feature that made signal appealing and made me want to replace WhatsApp (not the client, but the service as a whole) with something else.
I think conflating the idea of replacing "WhatsApp the service" and replacing "the WhatsApp Client" is the crux of our talking past each other and why my focus is on how it's UI compatible and ignoring the idea of protocol compatibility.
> You're on HN, it's nerdville, expect more interest in the protocol than clients.
We are on HN, and it's nerdville, it's true. It is the place where the very same comment (rsync files around) I am using to criticize the hubris of nerds (myself included) was made. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863). Plug and Play (referenced in the HN link) is a winning idea. The crux of my statements here is how amazingly plug and play signal is, specifically for WhatsApp users.
> This is as daft as Googling "email" and expecting a de facto client.
I am saying this in good faith and I hope you take it as a good faith comment and not an aggression, but have you googled "email"? I understand the point you were making and I think it applies to a lot of other protocols, but googling "email" returns gmail 1st and 2nd, then outlook 3rd. Wikipedia is the 4th result...
> Try searching for "Matrix clients". Element is the best thus far, IMO.
I hate to respond so directly to this too, but have you googled "matrix clients" because I did, and I am pretty confident the results don't prove the point you wish to be proven. The number 1 result is the matrix website matrix client page I had already found by searching "matrix app". The second and third results are top 10 lists. The 4th result which you have to scroll down to see is Element. How do top 10 lists outperform clients themselves? That paints a pretty bleak picture for the difference in quality between the best app and the worst app.
Engineers have a way of being arrogant when they think the thing they have is technically superior or have a grand vision. Betamax was better right? Being protocol first over customer first, to me, is a form of hubris. The customer experience is what wins, everything else is just an implementation detail for the vast majority of people, even engineers.
> Widespread adoption" includes the EU's military, healthcare and government, so I wouldn't be so certain you'll end up being right. It's hit 60m publicly addressable accounts, which doesn't include any private servers or any kind of healthcare, gov or military: https://news.itsfoss.com/matrix-sixty-million-users/
This is definitely interesting and something I find worth considering. I certainly have an American-centric view. Clearly it's in every countries best interest not to have all their communication going through foreign servers, so the idea of Europe migrating to their own chat, much like Korea chose Kakao, doesn't surprise me. I kind of suspect that the idea of federating chat before the balkanizing of it might be too forward thinking/pre-mature.
> EU is forcing interoperability standards.
It will be interesting to see if American fights this or embraces it.
> I have a gut feeling that you will look silly in five years time
I would not be surprised to see Element, for example, become the most popular client and obvious choice. All the comments, FAQ's, etc, already seem to acknowledge Element is the right choice, but the structures that make it easy to download (google ranking result, links from the main matrix page, people saying "use Element," not "use Matrix") are not yet in place. When Element eclipses Matrix or Matrix starts being talked about outside the context of chat apps I'll start to take matrix seriously. Certainly my criticisms are not based on immutable flaws, but what I think are strategic blunders.
As a final note this is directly from the matrix website:
Empowering the end-user
The user should be able to choose the server and clients they use
The user should be able to control how private their communication is
The user should know precisely where their data is stored
This means the user has to be informed about servers and clients, the user has to be informed about communication privacy levels, and the user needs to be informed about what data is and where it lives. While that might be nice, it's even more nice to trust someone to solve these problems for you so you can best think about how to spend quality time with the people you appreciate in your life, not the security level of your data.
`sum(dilemma) + sum(onboarding/required knowledge) <= resistance`. anything for which `reward < resistance` will probably not succeed. That's my calculus. Minimize choice, minimize required knowledge/onboarding, maximize reward. That is a winning combo. I don't think matrix is optimizing for that. I guess we'll see if I have to find the flaw in my reasoning or not in 5 years.
The flaw in your reasoning is that Matrix is like the web, and Element is like a browser. Just as mainstream folks don’t say “go look at my Chrome site”, but are smart enough to say “go look at my website with your web browser”, the same goes for Matrix too.
The only reason this doesn’t happen yet is that Matrix clients like Element are still too geeky, and joe public doesn’t care about the advantages of open decentralised e2ee comms. Our plan to fix that is to transform Element’s UX; hide the decentralisation complexities, and let it punch its own weight againdt the centralised alternatives - https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/15/the-matrix-summer-special... has more details.
The user would still need to understand it’s talking on an open network though, because that’s what it is. But they don’t need to care that much about it.
Not sorting by (and making visible) a popularity count or a preferred client per platform presents a potential interested person with an arbitrary decision. Rather than "let's experiment and see if I like the default experience," the marketing would have needed to win me over enough to make the work of researching a good client appealing.
Googling "matrix client" leads you to the matrix website clients page rather than Element or the domain of the most popular client. I have to scroll downward before I even see Element. Element showing up after 2 "best 10 matrix apps" articles is an ecosystem failure and to me communicates immaturity.
When I see signs of immaturity, I immediately assume weak/untested security. I want to know other people are trusting something before I trust it. Signs of immaturity also make me cautious about making recommendations to someone else because I don't want to become someone else's tech support.
FWIW, if you google either e-mail or SMS, there are client(s) in the first 3 results for both.
All of these feature requests require less knowledgeable users to do new things or weigh alternative options which involves time spent developing onboarding. Having "one way," an opinionated way, to do a particular type of thing is a very useful engineering value especially if you have limited engineering resources. Simplicity is an extremely underrated feature.
Being 80% perfect for 20% of the work is laudable.
What's even better about Signal is that Facebook's competitive data is the list of people you know. Facebook wins every time a person adds a friend without adding their contact info to their phone. That means Facebook is the source of truth for who you know and Facebook is the intermediary for communicating with someone else. That's why, in retrospect, whatsapp was an obvious competitor worth spending a lot of money acquiring. WhatsApp drove people to use their phones contact list as the source of truth for you who communicate with, not Facebook's friend list.