The matrix.org post-mortem... as written by the attacker.
Ouch:
@fribbledom I stopped wanting to be involved with matrix when I realized its leadership was behaving like a tech company and the architecture of the protocol reflected that. It already suffers from a mountain of technical debt and they don't even have the resources to address that to move forward with stabilization. Too much, too fragile, too fast.
@shaderphantom
Any suggestions for a replacement usable by non-geeks?
@skyguy i don't think "for non-geeks" is a useful way to categorize communications technology. the reason "non-geeks" use stuff like slack is being of concerted marketing efforts, not because they are functionally better.
matrix is attempting to be a competitor to slack. but slack was designed to centralize and replace IRC. they even pulled embrace, extend, extinguish by taking down their IRC protocol support a while back.
if i had a choice, the "replacement" would be IRC or XMPP.
@skyguy the reason being that both of those work fine and have always worked fine. XMPP even has widely supported extensions for mobile clients. they had install bases and they were willfully ripped apart by Slack, Discord, Google Talk et al for capitalistic reasons.
we don't need to reinvent the wheel for text chat every few years when these protocols worked.
@skyguy but ultimately, we're subject to the whims of wealthy capitalists that want us to keep moving from centralized platform to centralized platform for their own benefit. we just need society to recognize that these companies are bad actors and are not acting in our interests.