Anecdotal: I am having trouble getting anyone (nerdy/techy or otherwise, but let's stick to Linux-y friends, I'm a Linux professional) to set up an account and actually use the service. Even the friends who are very privacy and security leaning in nature who might embrace what Matrix offers in this realm. I generally steer them towards the Element clients (web/phone) which are easy to use.

A few have created accounts, logged on, a chat or two then walked away, never really came back. The federated non-tech channels I'm in are pretty dead as well (hobbies and the like). Couple hundred people... maybe a post or two a month. Point being, it's not getting adopted outside of software/tech circles (almost every happening room/channel is based around some sort of software or tech solution) from what I can tell, so I end up having no use for it other than communicating with random folks ala IRC general chat.

Speaking as the project lead for Matrix (and Element) - we are doing everything we can to improve Element's UX. If you're interested in the details, go watch the first 5 minutes of this week's Matrix Live (our weekly podcast), where Amandine and I spell out how important this is; it's literally an existential threat to the project; and what we're doing to fix it: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/13/this-week-in-matrix-2020-...

Our goal is of course to use it as a replacement to WhatsApp / Telegram / Discord for social stuff, even though it's dominated by developers today. And we will get there (despite all the negativity on this thread :|)

I would love to have a easy and fast deployable Element server for my companies internal network. IT tried it twice already and failed somewhere along the way which took them too long to fix the problems they had with it. Mattermosts Omnibus installation is something we'd be looking for.

[1]: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy