I'm annoyed that the comments here pile on the "ease of use" part, while largely ignoring what is more original here. (I don't know what I expected.)
The critiques of p2p identity leaking and big hungry servers are valid and I'm glad they are raised. As a Matrix user, I could respond to the first point that yes, it's a tradeoff depending on your threat model. I think that having a tractable identity is less bad than having one point of failure and moderation, on the broad social scale. If you are more concerned about very strong security now, you may decide differently. I think in the future, you could use an unfederated server of Matrix if you want something like Signal for sensitive connections. And yes, maybe pure p2p with no server nodes will never be viable for some use cases, with some threat models.
I do hope that in the future there will be an optimized Matrix server implementation in a faster language. (I'm saying Matrix, but of course my "loyalty" is ultimately more to the type of vision than some specific project.) I'm willing to cut some slack (pun unintended) to people having to iron out their big visions in an easier, more lenient language first. It's more important to have the features people want first.
As to the difficulty part, again, this is a legitimate concern, but I feel in HN comments and similar places it degenerated into a complete meme. All technology is "hard" for most/some people. I know older folks who drive to a clerk in a store to ask them to show how to do stuff on IPhone. There is always some greasing and other people having to tell you how to use it, not everything can be intuited. But you can simplify: point folks to a specific client (Element), which will point them to one server (Matrix.org). (Or, say, a random wallet like Ethereum does it?) I've done it with success with a bunch of "non-technical" people. No decisions needed on their part, but they could make them if they wanted to research (and not everyone has to want to!). It was no different in the era of email expansion and Outlook.
> you could use an unfederated server of Matrix if you want something like Signal for sensitive connections
In the Jabber federation, we've had servers federating over tor onion services for about 8 years now, if that can be of interest to you (see prosody's mod_onions).
I use Element with some people and the reason they do not like it is that it takes a noticeable amount of time to send a message. It is annoying to me, too. What exactly is the reason for it? Can it be improved? This happens with both the desktop and Android client.
The critiques of p2p identity leaking and big hungry servers are valid and I'm glad they are raised. As a Matrix user, I could respond to the first point that yes, it's a tradeoff depending on your threat model. I think that having a tractable identity is less bad than having one point of failure and moderation, on the broad social scale. If you are more concerned about very strong security now, you may decide differently. I think in the future, you could use an unfederated server of Matrix if you want something like Signal for sensitive connections. And yes, maybe pure p2p with no server nodes will never be viable for some use cases, with some threat models.
I do hope that in the future there will be an optimized Matrix server implementation in a faster language. (I'm saying Matrix, but of course my "loyalty" is ultimately more to the type of vision than some specific project.) I'm willing to cut some slack (pun unintended) to people having to iron out their big visions in an easier, more lenient language first. It's more important to have the features people want first.
As to the difficulty part, again, this is a legitimate concern, but I feel in HN comments and similar places it degenerated into a complete meme. All technology is "hard" for most/some people. I know older folks who drive to a clerk in a store to ask them to show how to do stuff on IPhone. There is always some greasing and other people having to tell you how to use it, not everything can be intuited. But you can simplify: point folks to a specific client (Element), which will point them to one server (Matrix.org). (Or, say, a random wallet like Ethereum does it?) I've done it with success with a bunch of "non-technical" people. No decisions needed on their part, but they could make them if they wanted to research (and not everyone has to want to!). It was no different in the era of email expansion and Outlook.