I won't argue with that, and I would certainly like for Matrix to get good enough to use as a primary messaging system. Right now, I think if I tried to convince non-technical people to use it, they would find the experience unsatisfactory.

Very true. I like it. I wouldn’t want to explain to my extended family how to contact me through it.

I really really wish Mastodon had E2E messaging. Non-techies are using it today. I’d much rather get my sibling set up on that.

That’s the opposite of my experience. I’ve gotten most of my (very non-technical) family to use matrix through my home server. It’s a simple sign up and tell me your username type of thing and that’s it. One major advantage is that it works perfectly fine even in China which means there is one platform that everyone can use (WeChat is invite only, WhatsApp is blocked).

I find the barrier isn't usually lack of technical skill, but lack of interest and patience. The average American can reach everyone they know by SMS and it's hard to convince them to use Signal or WhatsApp, which take under a minute to set up, are fast and reliable, and have almost no learning curve for people already used to SMS.

You describe a situation where people can't reach everyone all of their family members in the popular ways, and Matrix offers a way to keep in touch you can guide them through and admin for them.

I've had speed and reliability issues with Matrix myself, so I wouldn't try to talk people into using it.

Signal was much easier in that regard back when they had SMS support on Android - then it was just a "better texting app" that also gave you E2EE when both parties used it. Much easier to sell on.

Anecdotally, ever since they dropped this feature, I have seen a significant reduction in Signal use among my own contacts.

historically matrix has had perf problems for sure; we are in the final stages of fixing that tho. to quote someone earlier today in one of the community rooms:

> just downloaded element x from f-droid and wowza it just.. loads instantly? can't believe i now live in the age of element being faster than discord

I think federation is currently the biggest tax on performance. Joining even medium sized groups with only a hundred users takes a few minutes and eats up a ton of resources on the server. It got so bad that I had to turn federation off completely. That said, I only have ~1GB of RAM.

I may be missing something, but why would you only have 1Gb of RAM on a server?

1GB is enough for most things and it has been running smoothly since I turned off federation. You’d be surprised how much you can do with 512 MB of RAM. 1 GB is pretty generous

To weed out badly writen apps that need > 1 GIB to serve just 100 users.

I'm imagining a budget VPS or a Raspberry Pi.

was that before we landed Faster Remote Room Joins in March 2023?

Has that landed in Dendrite?