One reason which I chose Matrix over Signal, other than being forced fo tie my identify to a phone number and depend on a smartphone for receiving mesaages.
Same. There's also the fact that Signal never really convinced me that it's better than Matrix.
Though if I compare Matrix and Keybase, there's a clear winner in terms of UX and depth of features. I will be missing that but there's no indication Matrix or Signal will reach feature parity before it's replaced. (A new messaging protocol and no isolated subservers with their own chat rooms? Really? This is why people are switching to Discord in increasing numbers)
Also the reason I have 80+ contacts in Signal, but 1 (one) in Matrix. Federation just doesn't work for the average person in practice. Email being the large exception because it's been around for so long.
why does federation not work for the average person?
how would they know the difference?
what does cause friction is if clients expect the users to enter their own server details beyond their email address.
i find that very annoying in irc clients for example, where i have to know the details for the network to connect to. jabber/xmpp clients generally did a bit better. and i don't know how well matrix is doing it. but making this easy for the user is a matter of interface design.
there is nothing inherent in federation that makes this hard for users. the only thing is having to choose a server. but for my family for example i would choose the same server as myself, and i'd want to send them a link to sign up. that link could then provide a way to open the messaging client with proper settings in place.
if it is more complicated now, then that's a problem, but one that can be fixed
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