Matrix.org: Switching to Curated Room Directories
Matrix.org: Switching to Curated Room Directories
Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications
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This is a bad move. While I don't disagree with the issue they are trying to solve, centralizing the directory control is literally against the goal of the protocol itself. They should have created a proper replacement system instead.
Did you read the same post that I did? Where does it say they're centralizing the directory control? This post reads to me like it's about an individual server instance, not the whole network.
It's not centralized by implementation, but that's what it does in practice. matrix.org is by far the biggest instance and now all the other public rooms will be hidden on there unless someone manually approves it. If more instances move to the same offered default preference now, discoverability is dead.
I don't think discoverability would be dead even if there were no other Matrix servers.
Rooms/spaces can be announced and found in other places. I generally find them through various projects' own web sites, just as I do forums, email lists, IRC channels, etc. They could also be catalogued separately, much as is done for Lemmy, which has terrible built-in discovery.
Lack of discoverability was always the primary issue for federated services adoption. Sure you can still find it from somehwere else, but that is not what most people expect. They type in the search and they expect to find it, and if they don't then it doesn't exist.
Heck, even Discord who for most of its existance swore to never implement public server list (due to their inability to deal with spam) caved because it's a mandatory feature for any platform focused on social communications.
Your examples just proves my point.
- IRC is a niche protocol because of its unfriendliness to new users.
- Forums died to be replaced by social media because those centralized platforms offered easy discoverability.
- Lemmy communities are dominated by
lemmy.worldfor the same lack of discoverability. - Email being the exception due to lucky timing of it becoming mandatory ID for all internet services.
You or me can work around it, regular Joe/Jane won't bother and move to something else.
im just going to say, obsession with things like discoverability and growth are mistaken lessons from corporate social media. they have their place, but are not in fact all that important.
Unlimited growth is definitely not the metric federated services should lean towards, but discoverability is just basic user design concept that is mandatory for success. It doesn't have to involve the same methods as those used by corporate social media, but there needs to be a user-friendly way for people to find each other or topics they are interested in. Going to external site is the opposite of user-friendly.
I don't know if I would classify it as a bad move, but it's definitely disappointing. Something like this should have only been deployed as a last resort. Perhaps it was.