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Comment on A fresh install of Signal takes up 410MB, blowing both Firefox and Chromium out of the water

discount_door_garlic@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

as a big proponent of FOSS I see where you’re coming from - but the reality will always be that apps which have a significant learning curve to even install are obviously hugely off-putting to the majority of users. While the rest of us might be comfortable cloning a repository and building from a tar file, expecting the average person who wants to talk with friends and family to jump through those kind of hoops is exactly what has held back wider adoption of better standards.

Things like flatpacks and snaps have gone a long way to making this less daunting, but when matrix isn’t a ‘self-hosted decentralised chat’, it’s a *‘version of whatsapp that isn’t always online, and i don’t know where to download it and have to learn what the terminal is to even get it on my laptop’ * - we can’t be surprised people stick with the less secure, private, easy options. That’s why I’m a big advocate of signal - it’s not perfect and part of me wishes it was matrix or threema or one of the other standards, but getting people comfortable with the idea of free and open source software, while making it as simple for them to install on their phone or computer as anything meta makes is a really good first step - in the meantime, it’s up to us in the wider community to make the other solutions more intuitive, simple, secure, and trust that if a good enough job is done of that - they will come.

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Cryophilia@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I managed to get my parents on signal because it’s functionally a WhatsApp clone

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KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

as a big proponent of FOSS I see where you’re coming from - but the reality will always be that apps which have a significant learning curve to even install are obviously hugely off-putting to the majority of users.

i think part of the problem is that stuff like matrix is built for a very specific interface. Where as we could build something like matrix, in a different design meta, more akin to something like mumble, which not only greatly simplifies the construction of it, but also greatly simplifies administration of it. The protocol itself shouldn’t innately require an obtuse arbitrary system that makes it a nightmare.

Anything that is remotely related to “web apps” or web in general, seems to be an utter fucking nightmare these days. I think we need a healthy dose of dedicated native applications.

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philpo@feddit.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Sorry,but have you at least read the wikipedia article before writing this post?

Matrix is a standard. Not an App. Just like Lemmy is.

There are dozens of clients (Element, Schildichat, Fuzzychat, Beeper) available to download for basically every system imaginable and in all major Appstores.

You can easily join an existing instance - and with beeper there is even one existing that handles all the bridges for you.

Only when you self-host it gets more tricky-just like it does with Lemmy(as a matter of fact Matrix is far easier to selfhost than Lemmy). And again there are various distributions available. They aren’t as easy as the clients and not as easy as flatpacks, but someone who has done their due diligence can absolutely handle them easily. (And self-hosting should absolutely not be “as easy as flatpacks/snaps” - the risk for both the admin and the net itself is too high). But again: The average user has little incentive to selfhost. Just like you don’t selfhost your Lemmy instance.

The Matrix environment is as easy to use as Signal, Threema, WhatsApp for ages now. In some points I would even argue that it’s more user friendly than Signal,btw.

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