matrix
XMPP has lots of viable clients. IRC has lots of viable clients. *Mastodon* has lots of viable clients.
Why doesn't Matrix? That seems like a kind of important question for certain core folks to be asking themselves.
(The emphasis here is on 'viable'.)
matrix
@joepie91 what viable clients are there for XMPP, except Dino and Conversations?
matrix
@ytvwld Most of them, really. I'm not saying they are *good* clients by a particular value judgment, to be clear, just that they are *viable* - there is a pretty wide variety of client usage, showing that all of these clients are considered to be good enough by the XMPP userbase to be used in practice.
Whereas in Matrix, other client options technically exist, but "people who are not using Element or a fork thereof" are a rounding error, and even people using other clients usually still run Element on the side.
matrix
@joepie91 oh, interesting. I've managed to convince a good portion of the people I know of nheko
matrix
@joepie91 its almost like if your protocol is fundamentally awful then it's rather difficult to make a good client for it!
matrix
@Qyriad Honestly that's the most frustrating part to me - the protocol isn't *fundamentally* awful, it's just awful because they got the 'last mile' wrong!
The spec is incomplete, the docs are bad, the governance is crap, the libraries unreliable, the endpoints inconsistent. These are all solvable problems, they're just not... solved.
It would be entirely possible to have a governance change and issue a new revision of the protocol and solve all of these issues overnight without a server compatibility break. If the people in charge were actually willing to commit to it. Which they're clearly not.
matrix (2)
(The joke, of course, is that I have already told them exactly why this is, some 4-5 years ago, but they didn't want to hear it.)