To be fair, unlike Signal, Matrix forces users to manage their own encryption keys across devices (or at the very least, be aware of them), so a client-protocol confusion is relatively a lesser concern. It hasn't proven too confusing for many people to form a distinction between "the web" and their choice of browser.
> It hasn't proven too confusing for many people to form a distinction between "the web" and their choice of browser.
That’s because swathes of people simply conflate the two. To a lot of people the icon for their web browser may as well just be called “The Internet”. I’ve heard that some single digit percentage of Google searches are people searching for Facebook.
I think you give too much credit to the level of technical knowledge of the average person.
The average person can't figure out bookmarks now? Do you suppose they also don't know how to tie their own shoes? Most people aren't imbeciles and using bookmarks is well within their capabilities.
Shoelaces are a strawman. We've had laceable shoes for at least a century.
Work any sort of tech support and you'll find that many people who are otherwise intelligent, capable, and at the top of their field look at a computer as a box that they do certain specific things to, and it does those few things that they understand. They've never needed to delve, so they don't, and things even as simple as Windows shortcut keys outside of Ctrl-X/C/V, or any browser use beyond open it, type in the search box can be utterly mystifying.
Then take a person at that level of understanding who is paranoid that if they do something wrong they won't know how to get back, or that they'll lose their very carefully memorized workflow, and try to teach them something new. Even one small change that would save them surprising amounts of effort.
Most people _aren't_ imbeciles, but when it comes to things they don't know on "that box", the edge of the world is very sharp and bottomless.
Apparently you have never done support to non-technical users.
They understand mouse, keyboard, screen,... and Internet, which is their browser.
This is not to make fun of them. I drive a car and only know where to pour gas. I have zero interest in anything else in the car, I just want it to work. Carburator? Spare tire? Not interested.
"Doing support" gives you a very obvious selection bias: The people who come to you are the people who need help. The people who don't need help don't come to you and go unnoticed. I strongly encourage you to reflect on this and rethink your misanthropic attitude.
If you like car analogies so much, the car equivalent of bookmarks is programming the radio's bookmark buttons to tune your favorite stations. I am not a car mechanic, but I sure as shit can do that much. For that matter, I also know that my car doesn't have a carburetor but has a spare 'donut' tire in the trunk. You too probably know these things of your own car. Again, I am not a car mechanic and neither am I some sort of polymath genius with advanced general knowledge across a broad number of domains. Cars interest me about as much as American football, which is to say not even remotely. I'm just a regular Joe who's not a complete imbecile.
Look, I do not know your experience but I am glad you can say that I am a misanthrope. This helps in the discussion.
I work for 25+ years in IT in huge technological companies. I can tell you that in these technological companies the level of knowledge about things above the very basics (and how to use a bookmark is way above that) is poor to say the least.
This is something I know very well, not some kind of vague deliberation. If you have managed IT operations in a large company you would know. I therefore assume that you do not.
Now - expand this to the whole population.
And as for the car - I had to check if I had a spare a few weeks ago, when the car mechanic who was coming to fix my punctured tire asked me. He had to direct me as to where to look. I am probably an idiot, of the kind of idiots who are not interested in cars. But I do not call the ones who are not the same.
There is no doubt that not all facts are known by all people, and that all people are incapable of some things. The contention here is a matter of degree. One one extreme, one might say that any person is capable of performing brain surgery without training. Anybody who takes that position is clearly optimistic to the point of derangement. On the other extreme are statements like "most people can't tie their own shoelaces" or "most people don't know how to bookmark a webpage". These are excessively cynical outlooks on humanity. It's misanthropy.
If you were stranded with a punctured tire in an area without cell service, would you have died from exposure? Or would you have figured out how to change your tire? I don't think you're an imbecile, so I think you would have figured it out. It's an easy sort of problem for an adult human to solve using little more than common sense, even if you've never been taught how to do it and never cared to learn anything about it before. The general population is capable of much more than you give them credit for.
Capable, yes. Unafraid to try something new in an area they believe they can't understand? Much more rare.
You introduced the shoelaces level unnecessarily at the start of this whole debacle. Computers are, to the people we're holding under discussion here, a BAZILLION times more complicated. You can't make your shoes vanish by holding a lace slightly wrong. You can make your work 'disappear' in any of myriad ways, by accidentally mistaking a single keystroke, or leaving out a step, or doing something 'extra' as one person put it to me.
And the tire analogy is also skewed. Tires are another thing that's phenomenally less complicated than computer use, to someone who hasn't studied it yet.
You're holding up much simpler concepts and saying that if people can figure out a 10^3 complicated situation, they can figure out a 10^50 complicated situation.
I consider myself quite experienced in technology, and I do that whenever I go to a popular website that it's not in my browser history. I simply don't trust the variety of .com, .org, .net, .io, .tv... domains to know which one is the right one, but Google organic first results below the ads are usually accurate.
For downloading software for which I don't know the publisher's name, I usually look for the Wikipedia article and check the "official website" external link. Sometimes I even double-check the article's history, just to be sure.
A lot of people who are not particularly computer literate do not really grasp the difference between the web, the browser, and the search engine. Generally it's all just "the google" or similar. At least from my limited tech support experience.
