Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

It's an attempt to get a handle on "does our documentation suck?"; we'll exclude it from the blog. It should go away when you click on it, but looks like there's a bug on some browser/tracker-blocker combos.

Try to not let it distract from the fact that the governments of 2 billion people want to outlaw end-to-end encryption though...




I've found the documentation to be excellent for developers and operators (maybe except for SDK documentation last I checked, but the source code is readable enough in that case).

However to be blunt (and with the utmost respect for the work that you're doing) it is really, really poor when it comes to documenting client features, e.g. there's a poverty of "how-tos" for certain common things, which is especially crucial for nontechnical users.

For example, just the other day I had a group jitsi call with everyone in my Matrix instance where I tried to onboard everyone on cross-signing. Most of the people in my community are non-technical and a couple barely understand what E2E encryption means. Unfortunately I didn't anticipate that the Element app would have significantly different menus between the Android and iOS apps, so I tried to consult the documentation... and couldn't find any whatsoever on cross-signing. I tried searching element.io, the `docs/` folders in each client's repo, and to be frank I ultimately gave up and turned it into a verification party

I really think there needs to be more investment on this front -- as it stands, the onus is on operators to justify the overhead of E2E, and to figure out how to do XYZ on all the various clients from outdated blog posts, issue threads, and reading source code. Very rarely have I been able to find answers to questions in the actual documentation itself.

Anyway, again, I appreciate the work that you're doing, and I'm confident this experience will improve given time. I'd love to help with it -- I've been building my own documentation as I go along, but not sure how to even get started contributing.


So the good news here is we're working on "implementation guides" which are basically developer friendly documentation on how to do X rather than a raw technical spec. I don't recall if it's actually hosted anywhere just yet, but you can see the progress in https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/tree/master/impleme...




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: