> Speaking as project lead for Matrix, I agree that Matrix clients tend not to be as polished as Discord - we are not blind to usability problems.

User interface issues are the least of the probelms of Matrix. Much bigger obstacle to its adoption are the performance and reliability issues. While on some fronts there have been progress: joining a room does not take hours or days anymore. On the other hand, some other problems - like Matrix's tendency to drop messages - have actually gotten worse in my experience.

No matter of polishing of the UI would help Matrix enough. You still need a solid technical foundation to build on. The "Sliding Sync" thing maybe could help, but being disappointed with Matrix once and once again, I don't have high exceptations.

> However, it’s not that clearcut - for instance, Element has a full product design team (albeit focused on making sure Element works for paying government customers rather than FOSS developer communities, currently). Does https://element.io/labs/element-x look like something from people who don’t care about usability?

Users don't care how much you spend money on it, they only care about results.

> So I am not convinced that blanket statements like “FOSS alternatives have awful usability” (N times over in the same thread) are helpful. They are often grounded in groupthink or completely outdated info - “my friend Alice tried Matrix in 2019 and it sucked”, or “all my friends say Matrix sucks so I’m going to copy them”.

And other times they are grounded on recent first-hand experience.

> Meanwhile, communities like Mozilla, FOSDEM, KDE, GNOME, Nix, Debian, Ubuntu etc all seem to manage to use Matrix successfully in practice. Some even like it.

Debian seems to be mostly still in IRC: https://wiki.debian.org/IRC

Same goes for Ubuntu. It is only "in the initial testing phases" for Matrix. https://ubuntu.com/community/communications/matrix

FOSDEM is a some sort of geek social club that doesn't really do anything.

Beyond FOSDEM, only Mozilla, KDE, Gnome and Nix are actually imposing Matrix on their respective communities. However, none of these are really success stories. Mozilla's downward spiral in market share has been particularly spectacular. Desktop Linux's market share on the other hand has slowly increased, but it still clearly a niche product.

> I suspect the bigger issue here are folks who refuse to use a system which doesn’t have total parity with every feature Discord has”, or who are annoyed at having to run more than one chat app; Discord is where my friends are.

More important than feature parity is reliability.

> Alternatively, can someone actually articulate the showstopping usability issues which are being referred to here (say, when using Element Web)? Weirdly enough we would like to fix them, as fun as it is reading the “Matrix has bad usability and they can’t even see it themselves” trope.

Curious. Previously you have admitted to ignoring problems in order to spite users you don't like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38351006

While I can believe the user in question can be, umm, a somewhat difficult person, self-sabotage is hardly good for anything.

If you have changed your mind, surley you can take a look at your bug tracker in order to find bug reports that need to be worked on.

My response may come up as confrontative. I really would like Matrix to be good, but so far it has been really disappointing, and the project's reactions to criticism have been historically outright hostile. While I am pleased of the recent change for better what it comes to Matrix project's communication style, I am afraid it is too little, too late.