@lina I think people tell themselves that sunk cost fallacies are valid in social media because of "network effects" ie. that we *have* to push the solution that has the most users because it's the only thing that stands a chance.

But something badly designed that makes new users recoil will never grow. It has already peaked and will not attract the *next* million, or thousand, or hundred users.

@lina I do find it interesting how people suddenly care about E2E now that they're considering jumping ship when Discord STILL does everything in plain text.

@lina a lot of that seems to be focused on E2EE. but also, even ignoring E2EE, matrix is still a jank mess, honestly

I'm in a matrix community that isn't primarily about a tech project, and there has been a lot of jank. room splits (and handling those), clients needing a clear cache and initial sync, inadequate moderation tooling only made reactively against (the very bad media) spam (this impacted the whole of matrix, not just this specific community), the community's synapse homeserver falling over for the weirdest issues (I count 2 only somewhat recently), room upgrades being still a pretty meh experience, the whole thing of room v12 too (how much of matrix rooms have even upgraded to that?), and probably even more I did not remember to include here. oh, and I'm not even an admin or anything too, just been a participant who's been there for some time.

I've also ran into E2EE issues too. unable to decrypt, etc., with the worst one being sending an unencrypted message in an encrypted room, because my client for some reason got really confused about the state of room encryption (it's also a thing that's manually doable, and can also done the other way)

I also personally have 6 clients installed on my phone, and 2 per computer. just because not all clients implement wanted functionality. I could probably reduce the clients count to 3 for my phone at best while still keeping roughly all the feature sets I use.

probably a lot of this jank is how matrix kinda just does not have much communities that isn't about a tech project (not related to general tech oriented communities). the matrix.org room directory is by my rough estimation 99.9% tech projects. (compare that to stoat where I was able to instantly find a general stuff community in the discover section, and multiple of them, and many of them.)

@lina Not sure why you wouldn't want E2EE by default for text? Maybe in a 'public forum' context it doesn't make sense, but I wouldn't call most Discord rooms that, exactly. If anything video and audio are less information dense and more expensive/difficult to analyse, ergo less valuable and less in need of E2EE.

I for one don't really want advertisers and LLMs crawling all my private chats.

It's definitely not a Discord replacement, and has a lot of warts, though, I agree with you there.