Comment by discard124
2 years ago
With all due respect, it seems that you have conceded that a convenient, spam free, open option not only doesn’t exist in practice, but can’t in principle.
That’s more than even I believe. I just think nobody in the OSS space has put the work in to figure it out yet.
> I could get my parents who are nearing their 70s to use Element (Matrix) and it took them less than 10 minutes, even with me asking them to register to a non-default homeserver.
Well in that case Element would be the solution we’re looking for, except that not everyone’s parents have someone like you to help them.
And as for the desire for convenience, it’s hard to imagine you seriously believe that only Americans value convenience over resilience. If that were true, the rest of the world would be using Element rather than WhatsApp.
Simply railing against people’s needs doesn’t change them.
No, you got me wrong. I think that Matrix is convenient enough to be practical, and I think that the issue is that we keep holding it back because we keep waiting for "someone else in the OSS space to put in the work" to make it as convenient as the leading closed alternatives, which is a fool's errand.
> Well in that case Element would be the solution we’re looking for, except that not everyone’s parents have someone like you to help them.
Yet they manage just fine to get a sales rep from Best Buy to help them setup FaceTime on their shiny iPhones that they get to buy every two years. Why can't that Best Buy rep be trained to setup Element instead?
> "someone else in the OSS space to put in the work" to make it as convenient as the leading closed alternatives, which is a fool's errand.
I don’t think I got you wrong at all - you’ve just reiterated that it isn’t as convenient, and can’t be made so.
> Why can't that Best Buy rep be trained to setup Element instead?
No reason. If some organization was willing to pay Best Buy to do that, I’m expect they would.
> can’t be made so.
It can in principle, but not in practice. To become something attainable in practice we would have to start supporting the companies that are focused on the more important things first until they are mature enough to be able to dedicate time and resources to optimize for convenience. The problem is that when we prize convenience above other things and we end up with stupid things like customers arguing about the color of their speech bubbles.
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