I played around with reactivating my #Matrix / #riot accounts / sessions over the weekend. It’s so much better than it used to be, but it’s still not ready to replace Signal (as much as I am desperate for a good Signal replacement). It was far less painful to get set back up this time around, but there are still too many rough edges for me to ask my mother to switch to it.

I don’t want to verify every single session for every single user in an ad-hoc group we formed. This means we either skip verification (bad) or put in a huge effort every time somebody adds a device (bad). How about we verify a user instead of every single one of a user’s sessions?
It was so excited to generate recovery keys, it did it three times. This lead to it being impossible to recover for all three devices (a stress test) and I had to delete backup keys more than once. This is a roadblock for the users I’m trying to convince to switch from SMS / Signal.
Waaay too many choices for clients, platforms, bridges and servers. Choice is good, but all of those come with giant caveats about compatibility and functionality, so hide that away from new users. Even having ‘Matrix’ vs ‘Riot.im’ is confusing.

It’s so close. Just a bit more usability, please…