Can someone explain to me why some communities do their communication using something like Matrix? I’m a member of some open source/ tech channels on Matrix that I am somewhat interested in or need suppport from. Every time I check my app I have line 1k unread messages. Like, does anyone have the time to read all that? Besides trying to find if a question I have has already been answered is pretty cumbersome.
That doesn’t mean I don’t think Matrix is great, but it just doesn’t seem like the best fit for that application
Few layers to this
The reason to use a discord/matrix is the same reason to use social media. You aren’t going to read and engage with every single message. You are going to pop back in, respond to something that seems interesting, and then go on with your life.
From a support perspective? It is no different than message boards. You have a few knowledgeable (possibly paid) individuals and then you rely on The Community to help debug a lot of it.
Yeah I guess, but because it’s so linear all the discussions are running through each other and messy. So if someone asked a question I’m interested in I then have to read a whole lot of messages to see if maybe someone said something relevant about it.
Also, the messages are not indexed by search engines, which has its advantages, but for a tech/ support channel it doesn’t make much sense.
I don’t use matrix specifically (basically everything I have seen that uses it comes across as “shady”, at best) but discord very much has a search functionality in each chat channel. Same with slack.
But also: What magical wonderland of tech support do you live in where people read context and don’t just make the same suggestion hundreds of times in a row?
First I’m hearing about it
Yeah seems really weird that a service with 2/3rds or more of the users than Discord is completely unknown to me or any of my fellas on the group discord when I asked them.
Can’t tell if I am falling out of touch, the service is aimed at a completely different demographic than me, or these numbers are bullshit.
A lot of IRC communities migrated, and it’s pretty much the go to option now if you want live communications for your project or org, but don’t want something proprietary. It’s a pretty good replacement for Teams or Slack.
Many communities went back to IRC, though, because Matrix still is a hot mess, and the most visible ones which didn’t (Mozilla, KDE, …) are not hosting their own Matrix instance but letting New Vector do that for them, which makes in practice a disproportionate amount of users and accounts be managed by a single organization. I do think it’s better than discord, but barely so.
I’m going to assume the bridged users count as well, but a lot of it is going to be private organizations.
Element is used by entities where safety of communications is critical, like NATO, the United Nations, the US Department of Defense, the German Armed Forces, the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the UK Ministry of Defense, and the French Government.
Ah that explains it, ty.
It’s used by a lot by organisations who want an alternative to Slack/Teams. Have a look at the client list for Element, arguably the biggest Matrix client/platform - https://element.io/
And as someone else mentioned there’s also a huge influx of IRC folks especially in the last year.
Although many clients use the Matrix protocol, the foundation suggests new users pick up the ElementX app, which incorporates all the latest features and reflects what Matrix 2.0 can achieve.
The Element X is a stripped-down messenger app built based on the standard Element but completely rewritten for performance.
Intetesting, I’ll give it a try.
Element X is faster but extremely barebones, definitely stick to regular Element for now
I tried the app but it doesn’t even have a way to register an account. Nor any directions in doing so. I went to matrix.org, nothing there either. I had to Google it. Which led me to app.element.io. So I tried to register and it failed. I’ll give it another year to develop and see how things are going.
I tried the app but it doesn’t even have a way to register an account.
That sounds like you tried Element X app, which is beta (it says so everywhere). One should still be using the Element app for now.
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