Hi all, I’m new here on Lemmy and had never even heard of Matrix until I logged into Beehaw. I see frequent references to the “enshitification” of Discord, but I’m a bit OOTL on that.
What’s your preference between Matrix and Discord?
Any particular reasons or just a preference?
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as much as i love Matrix: it is not a suitable alternative to Discord for non-tech people, and my friends will never switch to it, and i think it would behoove tech people to be a lot more humble about this. many people–most of my friends included–will sooner to switch to what comes after Discord than Matrix, and if need be i’m almost certainly going to follow them (although my main community will probably switch to a forum if i get my way).
in fact: my own first experience with Matrix ended in an account i can’t use anymore for inscrutable reasons i don’t understand, and getting restarted ate a ton of messages someone sent me that thankfully weren’t too important. not a great first impression! comparatively i have never had issues with Discord on any meaningful level.
Honestly a forum is much better than the endless stream of live chat that is basically Discord and Matrix, et al.
for a lot of purposes yeah–in the example i used though it’d be a lot more about just having stability of community than anything, rather than some objection to live chatting. there’s very, very little cost to self-hosting a small forum and we’re a community of <100 people who mostly grew up on forums, so it’s a fairly natural switch to make.
My main problem with live chat is its ephemeral nature. So you can end up having people asking the same thing that someone else asked but the previous answer is buried/lost. Forums are good because you can index and search.
Agreed. I think it has it’s place, like, “we, a select and small group of people are doing this thing together right now and need someplace to chat about it in real time” or for very small groups of friends/family as an alternative to occasional group text messaging.
But, when I see FOSS teams use it as their primary mode of communication with each other and users, with multiple conversations going in parallel and talking over each other, I’m dumbfounded. How do they find that productive?
Hard agree. It’s like Eternal September but on steroids
I’m really glad Discourse has caught on because of how nice its UI/UX is. Although I’ve seen complaints in the Arch Linux community that it’s not as lightweight or no-javascript friendly as more traditional forum software.
UI/UX is incredibly important in on-boarding and retaining users.
IRC > XMPP > Matrix > Discord.
Matrix is heavy. I ran my own instance once and it is very resource intensive (even using Dendrite) even if you have only joined a handful of rooms. XMPP chat gives most of the same things I need for chat and is much lighter but no one uses it (sadly). IRC deserves a mention for something that is rock solid and simple and will still be around after Matrix and Discord (if they ever end), however people can’t post their meme pics or their emojis so it doesn’t appeal to younger people.
Concerning Discord. I literally only made an account because I had classmates that made a server.
I don’t know if we can blame Matrix for Synapse being slow since it’s written in Python. Dendrite (go) and Rome (rust) were the main alternative server implementations last I checked.
I didn’t know about Rome. I may check it out. I did run Dendrite but it’s still pretty intensive, but much better than Synapse.
It seems like the Matrix protocol is kind of a beast making it hard for Dendrite to finally replace it or alternatives to catch up, especially with how hard the encryption stuff is. Matrix is definitely the prime example of federation making development harder/slower.
I heard someone say that the messages on Matrix are basically replicated on every server that is federated with another. I don’t know if this is true, but that’s a crazy amount of network traffic if so. I’ve also heard anecdotally that the protocol itself is pretty complicated.
Just like… everything that’s federated? XMPP, Mastodon, Lemmy ?
As soon as you’re in the room (messaging) or following someone or something (social networking), you want to store all their content, so that you have it even if their server is down.
In XMPP old type rooms are not federated, that’s where the mantra of “but mah matrix collects more metadata” comes from. On XMPP if the server where the room was created goes down, then it foes down with the room, unlike in Matrix. There is a newer implementation of rooms in XMPP but it’s not widely used and, ding ding ding, it has to store content on all servers so it is not centralised
I might jump on IRC. I like XMPP so far, but I’ll need to spend a lot more time with it.
I like your ranking. I sit in a couple of xmpp muc for xmpp client projects, but there are virtually no public non-xmpp related xmpp rooms. But doesn’t really cost anything to start one I suppose.
Hi, I’m an xmpp user. If there’s something you like, please create a room for it, so that others can look it up and join and make our small xmpp family bigger :)
Matrix is open source and has the same ethos as other projects like Lemmy.
Discord is closed source and is similar to Reddit in principles.
From a privacy perspective, I use and prefer Matrix/Element. I also admit that setting matrix up isn’t the easiest thing to do and could keep people from adopting it.
I’ll only accesss Discord if I can find a good third party app that respects privacy. On my computer I use Webcord for this, but I haven’t found anything similar to use on a phone.
I’ll only accesss Discord if I can find a good third party app that respects privacy.
I don’t think I understand. Even using a third party app, you still have a discord account and all of your messages are still stored on discord servers and associated with that account. What privacy are you gaining?
You’re right, but I was speaking from the standpoint of someone who needs to be connected to Discord (although I admit that I probably didn’t make that point obvious). In those cases, a client such as Webcord, can block things such as telemetry, fingerprinting and third party website access which help lessen the information Discord can actually collect on you. Granted, it’s not ideal, but it is a better option for those who just can’t live without Discord in their lives.
A lot of gaming communities I’m involved in are centralized on Discord. That’s mostly what keeps me there. If I have a choice, I’d pick Matrix for anything personal or non-gaming focused.
I’d love to see Matrix grow, but right now all my less techy friends are using Discord. I’ve already abandoned almost every other social media site they were using to keep in contact with each other and tried to pull people over to Mastodon instead (with little success, people are stubborn) so I think I’ll have to keep Discord around as the one concession.
Yeah at this point Discord has achieved network effect on top of their superior user experience.
I find it interesting that people use “superior user experience” about Discord. Alternatives must really be poor, because everything about Discord feels poorly designed to me — and I hate using it every time I go there (thus, I don’t use it a lot). IRC is a calming quiet ocean in comparison.
It’s funny that you view IRC as the superior user experience because I’ve always just tolerated it as I don’t like it much at all. I prefer Matrix over IRC from a UX view. I never really used XMPP so I don’t know where that fits. Signal beats them both and is the only one I’ve convinced others to use on an individual basis. I’ve never tried an open group on signal though. People seem to prefer both Telegram and WhatsApp to all of the above. UI preference seems to be favoring WhatsApp in the general population.
If I had it “my way”, then I’d prefer my friends and I to just use Matrix + Mumble (and maybe drop mumble once voice channels are better implemented in Matrix) - however, that is definitely not going to happen because while I possibly have a chance of convincing my friends to do so, it’d be unlikely they could convince their group of friends to do so.
Matrix 100%
- It supports e2ee, which is a plus for privacy
- You can switch out your instance to a different one and still communicate with others (federation), this can be for speed since the default matrix.org is a bit slow at times, or for better privacy.
- All the tech communities are currently there which can be a plus or a negative for you
- It supports bridging to a tonne of different platforms. Want to use matrix, but you still want people from discord to be able to communicate to the server? Setup a discord <–> matrix bridge, which is literally as simple as just inviting a bot on matrix, and the same bot on discord. Then users can choose to use discord or matrix when joining the server, messages will be transmitted to both. (Theres also bridges for telegram, whatsapp, signal, IRC, and a bunch of other messaging platforms)
In terms of a client i would highly recommend cinny as a webclient, or fluffychat as a linux/mobile client. Though there’s also other clients for matrix, schildichat, nekochat, fractal, gotktrix, mirage, etc.
I do still keep a discord account though, since some servers i’m in haven’t setup a bridge.
Discord is terrible for privacy! I don’t mind using it for non-personal use but it’s an icky feeling having all of your text and voice convos being stored unencrypted, probably with the state monitoring and the company trying to figure out how to monetize it.
I happened to look at my Discord profile today. I’ve been on Discord for almost exactly 7yrs. I’m in several tens of servers, mainly gaming-related. Some of these are just Discords for specific games, other are for guilds/clans that I’m in, and I’m “required” to be in them (like for Eve Online).
In addition, my main friends group uses Discord. My brother (also a gamer) and I use Discord to chit chat with each other. Since us two were on there already, I convinced our parents to join us in a family Discord. Was way better than the Android vs iOS SMS/MMS texts we were doing before, which were terrible for videos and photos. And I tried to get my family on Signal; only my mom got on.
It basically doesn’t matter whether I like Matrix or Discord more (fwiw, I just created a Matrix account today today to see what it is). I and the communities I’m a part of, both IRL and/or online, are already on and invested in Discord. Like someone else said, Network Effect. I guess I could leave Discord and move to Matrix…but then I’m just sitting there by myself. Super useful for a communications platform.
I like discord currently but matrix is just far too inactive within the communities I have sought out from what I can see personally.
Discord is very frustrating to me, especially the Linux client which has had countless bugs outstanding for years. But everyone I want to talk to is on Discord. Every game I play has its community on Discord. Every tournament I enter is organized through Discord. I don’t see all of that packing up and moving to Matrix ever. I haven’t even tried Matrix at all, because nothing I’d use it for is over there.
Completely agree. I’d love to convince the masses to stop using it and migrate to Matrix, but I just don’t see that happening. Discord’s UI is so simple for the average person. It being a privately held for profit company definitely means some day it’ll go the same route as twitter/reddit/etc… And then maybe then we’ll see matrix fly up in popularity. Who knows.
Everyone I know uses Discord, even my 59 year old mother. It makes sharing stuff with her, including streams, super easy. I can’t imagine trying to convince her or anyone else to swap to Matrix. Plus I’m part of multiple art communities on Discord.
Discord. My non-technical friends are there, even the technical servers seem more populated by knowledgeable people than Matrix. Matrix has been very confusing to use, and personally, except for the servers that bridge everywhere, I found it lacked the people I actually want to talk to. I prefer even IRC to Matrix.
I prefer Matrix, but for me it seems harder to understand than Discord.