Comment by rglullis
2 years ago
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.
> 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.
What happened to open source?
> 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.
That’s a fair point, in that if consumers prioritized open infrastructure over convenience, a commercial enterprise would too. However this is back to the earlier point - there is no point railing about that. It’s just a fact that most people want to just buy the nicest thing they can with their money.
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