In this situation, however, they are, in the sense that the ecosystem surrounding them does not integrate anything like that straight into their product. The only fallacy in what I said was that, even if arguably most people that use Matrix also use Element, this does not apply to the Haiku ecosystem. I’m a fan of gradually rolling out things before figuring out that they don’t work instead of giving everyone something new and then taking it away from me – although I should’ve probably led with putting an Etherpad link in the description first, instead of following an approach that isn’t Haiku-first.
Either way, this sort of integration is more of a neat “huh, nice, I didn’t expect that!” that we wouldn’t otherwise get with, say, Google Docs, and not something that hinders collaboration in any particular way. I already had Etherpad in the back of my head, as other teams developing free and open-source software that I’ve been tangentially involved with, which predominantly used IRC as a tool of real-time communication, also used Etherpad and/or similar solutions and it seemed to work.
Just use etherpad without the matrix box around it…?
I specifically asked before whether etherpad works in WebPositive, I did not get a response to that.
The “product” is not matrix, it is a specific matrix client and basically the worst there is, the widgets are literally just wrappers around websites, if your argument is “XMPP does not force you to use a webrowser” I think we can stop here.
Element widgets are basically impossible to support in other matrix clients without including a webrowser, this is not really an integration either, it does not use matrix for anything aside from new vector hosting the etherpafd instance for you (and the matrix accounts for auth), in essence it is a cheap trick to say “matrix supports ” while using readily available software for that usecase and tricking you into having to work in an iframe.
This is what I was reffering to:
Exactly, matrix and irc are unrelated to this, so please don’t force a matrix centralized solution for no reason.
The only problem is that the provider is vector.im, I can just immediately get rid of it and switch to another provider and NOT use the Element integration, but I seriously don’t see a reason to do this and lose a bonus point, because nobody without a Matrix account is prohibited from interacting with files, as long as they have a URL with write access permissions. Good time to carefully review whether their privacy policy is good enough and compare it against other hosts.