What is a gif keyboard? What's wrong with copy and pasting from ~/Pictures/memes/?
(Yes, I realize my old is showing)
And then they complain about not enough users switching.
A good experience for the noob is essential.
Well, when it comes to Matrix, they can't really "compromise" in a way that other platforms may be able to, as their protocol is designed to be as private and secure as possible first, then the features come later.
While "nobody cares about privacy" and features are king, I personally have a lot of respect for the Matrix developers for sticking true to their vision instead of compromising for the sake of adoption. Matrix and Element DO want to be feature-rich, but they will only accept things if they work with their principles.
Furthermore, the Matrix team aren't the ones "complaining" about adoption, they're actually quite happy with how much adoption there is - it isn't insignificant as there's over 80 million known accounts, which is much bigger than the ActivityPub social media platforms, and many people use Matrix independently which they can't track.
While all of that is great and true it’s almost irrelevant because adding gif support doesn’t hamstring the privacy of the application.
SimpleX is newer, has arguably better privacy and already supports gif keyboards etc..
I use them both honestly, but I wouldn’t pretend missing some basic features is because of some higher privacy principle.
This feature was requested for the matrix client on desktop. A workaround mentioned was the macos gif keyboard. There have been multiple implementations by users, mine included, but all of them where rejected because of privacy concerns and that the core team hasn’t decided how they wanted it to be designed.
