For all of you saying we should switch to Matrix, please outline the user sign up flow in your comment. Be detailed. Your audience is your 50 something aunt who calls her iPad her Facebook.
Wow I just had to reset my password and am stunned how broken this process is.
1. Click reset password
2. You enter your email and new password (already here!)
3. A password reset request has been received for your Matrix account. If this was you, please click the link below to confirm resetting your password: [link] If this was not you, do not click the link above and instead contact your server administrator. Thank you.
4. Text page with the sentence "You have requested to reset your Matrix account password" but a button saying "Confirm changing my password"
5. Button clicked, password is set to the one entered in step 2.
This just absolutely is waiting for abuse. Every other site asks you to enter the new password after you have clicked the link. Here it's before you have clicked and there is no option to see or confirm the password entered initially. There is no indication that that is what's happening. In addition the word 'reset' is confused with 'change'.
Super easy for anyone - even the most techie user - to be fooled by this workflow. Someone else initiates the request and enters a new password, grandma gets the reset link and clicks it, password is changed and the other party can login and change also the email.
Don’t worry. I already gave up on the sign-up flow when I entered my preferred username and password, then tapped register in the top right corner, only to be confronted with a prompt to —- again enter a username and password of my choice.
I would have to spend hours getting my family signed up for this thing.
> Anyone can host a server and talk to anyone on any Matrix server.
I host my web, my email, my XMPP, my TURN/STUN, etc, so I gave Matrix a try. In short: it's horrible. It's insanely resource hungry, both synapse and dendrite, plus dendrite is so not finished it hurts.
Stick to XMPP until Matrix is in an actually usable shape when one doesn't need a small power reactor to run it.
When was the last time you tried? My Synapse is stably hovering around 400M RSS with about 10-15% CPU usage. It has about 20 active users, each with 2-3 devices and is joined in hundreds of rooms on the federation.
https://app.element.io/ -> click "create account" -> create account. The default is for a matrix.org account which is totally fine for anyone who can't/won't dig deeper.
I tapped this link on my iPhone. There’s nothing that says create account. It says I have to download an app called Element. But you said it was called Matrix.
This is the level of technical ability that you need to be targeting.
If you install the Element app, its first-launch is quite simple and newbie-friendly. There are a couple more "options" than e.g. WhatsApp, but they're presented very clearly: "Join millions free on the largest public server" or "Premium hosting for organizations" or "Custom & advanced settings" -> tap the first + free one -> Sign up / Sign in with a totally-normal experience after that.
Re "you said it was called Matrix": fair, but I wouldn't send people to "matrix" / the protocol for any system with multiple implementations. I'd send them a link to one of the user-friendly apps (i.e. Element). Similarly, you wouldn't tell someone to join XMPP, you'd send them to the Google Hangouts or MSN Messenger or Playstation apps.
The first launch on iPhone asks me if I want to share my contacts, and then outlines a massive paragraph explaining something about identity servers that I’m expected to choose.
This is a friction-filled experience for someone coming from WhatsApp
This is the second opportunity Matrix has to win over users (the first one was when Signal decided to lock everyone out until they agree to their SGX-based cloud storage scheme), and I predict that they'll miss this one just like they missed their last one due to not being ready yet.
we’ve been working a lot on onboarding on Element, just as Signal have. it’s not perfect, but empirically it’s good enough for many non-technical users. comments like this are likely based on stale data (eg from when we forced e2ee setup during registration).
Compared to installing the Signal app and verifying your phone number over SMS, the difference is quite remarkable. Signal has had smooth and frictionless onboarding as part of the design.
But also, comparing Matrix to Signal is a bit like comparing apples to oranges IMO.
Why would I send my aunt to a page about how to join the mozilla community? Over half of that wiki page is mozilla specific information, and even most of the matrix info is irrelevant to most users if they just want to do a basic registration.
The real apples to oranges comparison is you thinking that this wiki page is somehow comparable to registering a signal account.
This is definitely the weakest point of Matrix. There are clients that have a nice setup flow (like FluffyChat) but the are missing some pretty important (to me) features such as sending images and video calling.
My mum is such an aunt, she makes no secret of often being baffled by her smart phone, she doesn't know all the right words, but she's curious, she tries, and really appreciates apps that are easy to use, with her in mind.
