HN Distilled

Essential insights from Hacker News discussions

Matrix v1.15

Original Article

Hacker News Discussion

Here's a summary of the themes discussed in the Hacker News thread, with direct quotes:

Feature Parity with Discord

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around Matrix's perceived lack of features compared to Discord, particularly detailed permissions and voice channels. Users express disappointment that these features, which they believe are crucial for competing with Discord, are not yet fully implemented or as user-friendly.

  • "Every new release or 'This week in Matrix' post I check to see if Discord style detailed permissions and voice channels get added and every time I get disappointed." - fishgoesblub
  • "I really want to love matrix but at least last time I tried it, the app was very noticeably more clunky and featureless." - spencerflem
  • "No one is gonna leave discord for it though....not yet in my circles at least." - waymon
  • "I know of nobody who even knows of Matrix, if I haven't told them beforehand. Discord is so much better than all alternatives, that I just don't see why anyone would leave it." - freilanzer
  • "Maybe that's served by a different feature in Matrix for user groups. If so, that's still not quite as useful, because sometimes later on you decide the group needs a permission (e.g. a casual gaming group has grown enough to justify having it's own channel)." - martindevans
  • "None of these things are why I and everyone I know doesn’t use Matrix." - sneak

Usability and User Experience

Closely tied to feature parity is the perceived difference in usability and overall user experience between Matrix and Discord. Users consistently describe Discord as more polished, intuitive, and "slicker." The clunkiness of Matrix clients, especially the official Electron client, is a recurring complaint.

  • "Even without that, its just a much slicker and more useable system." - spencerflem
  • "I really want to love matrix but at least last time I tried it, the app was very noticeably more clunky and featureless." - spencerflem
  • "Idc about permissions, but the usability difference is astronomical." - freilanzer
  • "The official client is clunky and being electron on the desktop doesn't make it better. Messengers live and die on UX. Since it's an open protocol alternative clients exist of course, but are often not feature complete. Things are often slow, especially with large group channels with lots of messages." - hashworks
  • "When choosing a messenger, I go to Signal for security, to IRC for simplicity and to Telegram for UX. I never thought "Oh let's use Matrix"..." - hashworks

Friction in User Adoption and Inertia

A major hurdle for Matrix adoption is the difficulty of migrating users away from established platforms like Discord, WhatsApp, and Telegram. This is attributed to network effects, user investment in existing platform features (like Discord Nitro), and general inertia.

  • "if people actually cared about freedom/privacy, Discord wouldn't be a thing, right?" - luqtas
  • "and even harder to leave Discord now when a lot of users invested in Nitro fancy emoticons and profile enchantments" - luqtas
  • "Because it entails getting people away from WhatsApp/Telegram/etc. - I speak from experience." - panki27
  • "Why don't we all speak Esperanto? Inertia." - paulryanrogers
  • "Smells like baby duck syndrome. You're used to what you're used to, and you'll never get used to anything else if you don't switch." - switknee

Discussion on Permissions Systems

The thread features an in-depth debate about Matrix's permission system (power levels) versus Discord's role-based permissions. While Arathorn (working on Element) defends the flexibility of power levels, others find them overly simplistic, awkward to manage, and harder to map to users' mental models for defining roles.

  • "In terms of permissions: I'm a bit surprised that folks feel limited by Matrix's freeform hierarchy of permissions. Every user can have a 'power level' from 0 to 100, and you can then customise the threshold required for literally permission (e.g. you need power level 54 or higher to kick users, or whatever)." - Arathorn
  • "The only difference with Discord is that Discord lets you pick entirely arbitrary combinations of permissions (e.g. have one user able to kick but not ban, but another user able to ban but not kick, or whatever). How useful really is this in real life usage though?" - Arathorn
  • "The power level model of permissions feels to me a bit overly simplified. It’s so easy to imagine scenarios where you need exceptions to the rule of permissions existing on a single axis that it seems very limiting from the outset." - have_faith
  • "The idea of ever increasing and overlapping scopes I don’t think maps well to most people’s mental model of who should be allowed to do what. People mostly want to define an arbitrary role; admin, user, team leader, whatever, and just pick what that role is allowed to do in isolation." - have_faith
  • "matrix permissions forces a hierarchy that is awkward and more difficult to apply because i have to force permissions into a hierarchy. on discord i don't have to think about the hierarchy." - em-bee
  • "I think hierarchical permission systems are awkward. Role based is easy to understand and setup, even if more complex technically." - paulryanrogers
  • "However I'm constantly adding new roles which are really just groups of users. I would say 90% of all the Discord roles I've ever created have no permissions associated with them at all and just exist to ping a group of users (or act as a tag for bots)." - martindevans
  • "Right - this matches my hunch; that folks want to define groups of users (which you can already in Matrix in 'spaces', but the UX in most clients is awful) - and what they really want is group-based permissions (which isn't part of the protocol, and instead gets layered on at the application layer today." - Arathorn

Privacy vs. Usability Compromise

The discussion touches on the balance between privacy concerns and the need for user-friendly social tools. While some users prioritize privacy, others argue that a complete sacrifice of usability for the sake of absolute privacy would render platforms impractical for widespread social interaction.

  • "I care for privacy. But there has to be a compromise between privacy and socializing otherwise we would all use letters with encrypted text, no?" - 7bit
  • "The security of Discord is guaranteed by some private citizens based in the US. At least on paper the state exists for the benefit of the people. Discord exists for the benefit of investors who primarily seem to operate out of China and the US - foreign countries to me." - alisonatwork

Open Source Alternatives and Development

There's a desire for better, more polished, non-Electron Matrix clients, with users mentioning alternatives like Cinny and Nheko. The discussion also touches on the server-side (and potential for scaling) with mentions of Synapse and Dendrite.

  • "I know of nobody who uses nheko desktop client. It's often unmaintained or buggy." - WD-42 (This quote was from a slightly earlier part of the discussion, but relevant to the client discussion.)
  • "There's cinny, which is a pretty polished Matrix client that is very, uh, inspired by Discord in its look, that might soon add voice rooms: https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny/pull/2335" - NanoCoaster
  • "Can't wait until MAS is just part of synapse/dendrite, will be a lot easier to install and maintain than the extra moving parts." - jedahan
  • "The QT client for Matrix is called Nheko: https://nheko-reborn.github.io/ There's a client in just about every toolkit. Just takes a cursory internet search..." - WD-42