Riot is now Element

I still dont understand why Slack is popular when there is a free open source solution matrix/riot/element that works just as well.

Because normal people don’t care about open source and slack is cheap enough.

Sales and marketing. Also, the cost of Slack is insignificant to most companies and most others start by using the free tier, so the price isn't even a consideration.

The open source selling point is also irrelevant to most people outside of HN.

Even if you wanna still keep 'proprietary', there are better alternatives to Slack, like Discord.

Despite all of slacks flaws it still works better for most people IMO. I am very interested in matrix and personally use it, but there are a few areas where it is weaker to slack/discord.

1. Network effects. All your friends are already on slack/discord.

2. Difficulty to get started. Simply understanding what Matrix does, especially for someone non-technical, is more complex than setting up an entire slack workspace and inviting your friends.

3. Clients. While the slack client is a resource hog, for most people it is better than Riot/Element or other 3rd party options such as weechat.

I think all of these things are improving and Matrix absolutely will gain ground, but it will take time.

I wouldn't call Discord "better" for enterprise. No SSO, bad uptime, no paid support, very few business-related third party integrations, and more.

Slack and Matrix solve different problems. Slack is "a company wants it's employees and select outside parties to communicate with themselves." Matrix is "we want everyone to communicate with each other." A broader solution is almost always less efficient for a specific constrained sub-problem.

For example, a Slack instance can be configured to log every conversation (including DMs) for audit purposes by company admins. Matrix enforces e2e encryption for peer-to-peer conversations and I believe disabling room encryption requires code changes.

never underestimate how many people will use something purely because it has a pretty UI :)

Stress on most in that, I found out about the name change due to actively rolling it out to replace slack.

Charging that sort of price for just chat felt wrong, so we transitioned to keep message history.

I use both Slack and Riot (in browser). Slack is slow, but it manages threading and notifications much better than Riot.

You can disable e2e on your server if you wish so. The option already exists in Synapse and it is part of Element Matrix Services customers.

For those who are legally required to be on record, there are other ways to keep track of the conversations for audit purposes without compromising the e2e encryption. For example, every room could have an audit bot invited by default, visible by the users, and which would record everything being said. Then you can setup the access to the logs from the audit bot to only be unencrypted in certain conditions, e.g. if the 2 halves of a key giving access to the account are put together. It's secure, clear for the users and legally compliant.

[disclaimer: I'm from the Element team]

Your comment reinforces my initial point: "A broader solution is almost always less efficient for a specific constrained sub-problem."

It all sounds very complicated compared to paying a bit of money and toggling a setting. For example, googling for "elements/riot/matrix audit bot" results in no pertinent results from what I can tell. Being possible is not the same thing as being easy to use.

edit: Also companies don't care about being clear to users except as legally required or beneficial to the company. Employees not being constantly aware that they're being watched all the time is a positive and not a negative.

I want urgency hint set upon receiving new messages, and yes, desktop notifications. I am not sure what browsers do differently, but I use `dunst` notification daemon, and `notify-send` (and other programs) works well with it. I wish Riot (or Element) supported both. Of course only with with proper customizability.