I 100% agree with you and at the same time it's important to remember that a lot of FOSS software is written by individuals as hobby projects. Implementing features, keeping everything up to date and secure, documentation and testing takes time, effort and skill.
Most people need money to survive so they have a full time job and can only dedicated very limited resources to these projects.
Too many people got used to free services that "just work" and forgot that they are the product now. If you don't want that look for alternatives that charge (even then you might still be the product) or better yet donate to open source projects in the hopes they will one day be on-par with their closed alternatives (there's examples where this worked). Until we have a UBI and people have the time to dedicate themselves to a cool project this is the only way.

I think it would be even better if companies and governments started shifting funds back to these projects when they switch from commercial to FOSS software (which is happening more recently) but most just happily pocket the savings and this will not change until a fundamental cultural shift happens

Unfathomably based take. Holy shit.

You definitely have a point here. Software has to be usable if it going to have wide adoption by the people. Sometimes I see recommendations being thrown around without even thinking of it fits the needs and/or user expertise and willingness to make something work. But to be clear, just because one piece of software does not fit your needs does not mean it has to be changed to fit your needs. But if it is complex, clunkly and/or unintuitive, it is only going to be usable by a niche. And if this is the case, stop telling your grandma to spin a matrix server or xmpp and do not tell her she is an idiot because she does not have the expertise or time to make it work.

I'm not even personally opposed to getting my hands dirty (I run Arch and Emacs ffs) my bigger issue is that this just... Doesn't feel like a Discord replacement. It feels more like a texting replacement out of the box. Someone pointed out you can make it not show all of the rooms in the DMs list, which would bring it closer to what I expect from a discord alternative.

As far as convincing normies I've had limited success (still working on it) getting them to use Delta Chat, just due to the easy onboarding, just pick a name and go, no password even. Got a few on it including my mom who cannot computer to save her life.

So far the holdouts are a few people of the "I don't want to download a free app, you should spend a fucking grand on an iPhone so we can use iMessage" opinion (literally), and, idk I'm working on it but for people that out of touch and stupid there may be no hope except to be mercifully euthanized.

This. I'm not judging the program based on if I can use it. I need to get my non tech savvy friends onto it as well and this is where so many alternatives fail the litmus test

Yeah, that seems to be the big issue nowadays. Doesn't matter if your friends use Google Calendar, they can send a link and I can subscribe to it with something else. Doesn't matter if my friends use GDrive, I have Nextcloud. But discord? I can't talk to my friends on XMPP unless they're also on XMPP. There are bridges, but that still requires feeding every message to discord, which defeats the purpose. Also my friends would need to be the ones to set those up, and they are not.

Yeah, it is. It's not what I intended with this, I did actually just wanna see if I was missing something, but I did figure it'd happen.

Conversations and Dino for mobile and desktop respectively.

Fluffy does have a separator for groups, but from what I can tell it does show all of the space group chats in there. Not a huge deal for me (I don't use a lot of group DMs on discord), but will be for some friends

Schildi I'd need to redownload to check, but it had the same look as ElementX

Cinny, though... That's promising. Thank you!

Bump for Delta Chat. Onboarding is easy as dick, just have them use the default server (nine.testrun.org iirc) unless you have a preference, and pick a uname, don't even need a password. The "invite friends" tab in DC is handy as hell. Modernish feeling chat to boot, and experimental video calling (works pretty fucking well tbh, better for me than Element's calling on Graphene without push notifs actually.)

I do like XMPP but it's still too hard for the normals still unfortunately, no easy "invite friends" that sends them directly to their app store and points them at my acct for me to send, and generally harder onboarding for them. And when I do get someone they complain about the outdated apps. And OMEMO is good but most apps use an outdated implementation and updating it would break compatibility with whoever didn't. I still use it as a fallback, but Delta has so far been what I've been needing.

if you don't wanna deal with that arcanechat/deltachat is amazing tech that stays almost entirely on device. the arcanechat dev adb is cuban and YOU SHOULD GIVE HIM YOUR MONEY NOW

❤️