Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

What do you hope they'll figure out by ambiguous feedback like this? What exactly is worse? Is it possible it's just different, and that translates to "worse" although maybe it's actually on purpose? What specifically is it that doesn't work well for you?
 help



As an example, deuxfleurs.fr, a french non-profit host, mentions issues with notifications, message history, and message searching as reasons to leave matrix in their latest newsletter: https://blog.deuxfleurs.fr/2026-bilan-de-la-rencontre-ete-20...

Acute awareness of and attention to the overarching problem. Almost all of the individual issues are likely already known, but too often hand-waved away as minor inconveniences. This is common in the FOSS world and IMO the #1 hurdle for wider adoption.

That said, it would not be fair to not acknowledge that the Matrix 2.0 efforts have been real and massive improvements. Refocusing like this is a massive organizational effort and takes a non-trivial amount of resources. I’d like to take the opportunity to really commend that.

(That said, I have paused my close following of the project due to my frustration with the state of things and rate of progress, but I totally understand some of the reasons for it. It is only becoming more and more important to have an open standard for instant messaging, but I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point something new appeared and immediately captured all attention)


I mean... just use it for a while and see? It's death by a thousand paper cuts. There's no single big problem. It does get messages from A to B.

For instance when you click on a new room and the messages are stuck in a loading state forever. Or when you sign out and sign back in and need to reset decryption keys and can't read message you received before signing in


Or when someone gives you a link to a Space and you click on it and get a loading spinner for a while and then an obscure error. What is a Space anyway? Why can't I organise my own channels into groups but only the admin of a Space can do that? It isn't intuitive. Obviously it makes sense to have groups of channels like Discord guilds, in some way, but it's currently confusing.

When I know the address of a channel I can never find the right textbox to put this in. And when it is the right one, it doesn't give feedback that it's the right one. IIRC it's the same box that searches channels on the current home server, but if you put an address there it shows 0 results, but if you click on continue then it joins the channel anyway. But there's another box somewhere in the app that also does this search thing but can't join a channel address. I think. And neither of them are in obvious places. In Discord, at the end of your list of guilds, is a big + button, which opens a text box asking for the address of a guild.

I really think you should just sit down with some inexperienced or first-time users and watch them do some basic tasks while thinking aloud. This used to be the bread and butter of the UX industry, which has atrophied.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2026 batch! Applications are open till July 27.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: