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Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

Slack/Zoom/Teams/Whatever Google is running now is mostly dictated by what the company uses for their email.

Pretty much no-one uses any of those for personal stuff, Slack does have some open-source project stuff in there.

FB Messenger seems to be highly siloed, I never use it and I know only one person who uses it as their main communication platform.

Whatsapp has reached critical mass in many countries outside of the US. People use it because everyone uses it - not because it's especially good in any way.

Signal, Matrix etc are for idealists, who have a future vision of what the platform will develop into in mind.

My personal favourite is Telegram. It has a good mix of bots, API, native clients and channel management tools.

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I don't actually use it yet myself, but my hope is that Matrix will eventually be the end of having to care about which app someone else uses. That an incumbent or two will switch, and no new app would gain significant market share with a non-Matrix silo.

I may just be dreaming though. Perhaps better bridges are the best we can realistically hope for.

I have almost no hope for matrix at least in the short term given that I recently tried joining Mozilla’s server and ended giving up and creating a new account with Mozilla login.

Matrix-the-technology is a really good idea, no complaints there.

But Matrix the ecosystem is a mess. Everything is almost there, but not quite. Pretty much anything you want to do is just a little bit too difficult compared to the amount of work you're willing to put in to adopt a new messaging system.

The worst part is, that it's been in this state for a few years now. It's not that much easier to run your own server, clients are just a bit too clunky, bridges are flaky and hard to use.

It'll get there someday, I hope.

I assume you're not American. Here everyone uses SMS by default. Failing that, everyone uses FB Messenger. Discord is used for gaming. That's about all the breadth you'll get outside of work. I guess I know three people who use Hangouts sometimes. Marco Polo and Snapchat are moderately popular things, though a bit different. Still, I have never met a single person who has used Whatsapp, Signal, Matrix, or Telegram. I doubt more than a handful have ever heard of any of them.

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