This conversation happens to me almost on a weekly basis as I meet new people online, on games, social media, chat channels, etc.:
Them: Do you have
#Discord?
Me: I have a bridge to Discord, so I can talk to you on it if you want, but I use
#Matrix.
Them: What's that?
Me: Decentralized encrypted chat. Rather chat there just for the sake of privacy and stuff.
Them: Neat. I'll look into it.
Me: I'm
@ferret:workersofthe.world if you end up there, or otherwise we can just use Discord.
Them:
messages me about a minute later on MatrixAnd out of the...I just counted, fourteen people who have been through essentially this exact conversation with me in the last short time, every one of them still uses it, chats with me, seems to enjoy the platform. Several of them are on my server and using bridges. On top of that, I have local orgs running off my server, which includes people who are entirely technologically illiterate and may not even own a laptop. It blows me away that people think Matrix is inaccessible or hard. It really reeks of the same nonsense Windows people say about Linux being too hard for the average user.
