I like discord currently but matrix is just far too inactive within the communities I have sought out from what I can see personally.
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
8 points (100.0% liked)
Chat
7535 readers
33 users here now
Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I use Matrix with friends. I don't have Discord account but if I will have to talk to a stranger or join a public chatroom I could make it, Matrix isn't really suitable for rooms of hundreds of people yet, in my opinion. I hope it will change soon with the development of new clients and servers
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.
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.
I wish I could start using Matrix for personal communication, but the fact that every friend and family member I have are already on Discord and the fact that Matrix has non-trivial technical hurdles immediately kills any possibility of using Matrix.
I think at this point, I only use Matrix to engage in a few community chats from time to time.
discord is absolute trash for me no matter where I use it but alas the network effect keeps me on it. I'm only there because all of my friends are there😮💨
ive tried matrix with fluffychat a while back but somehow it was a little intimidating to me. besides I prefer forums, especially with strangers. chats feel too personal lol
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 because its UI, customization ability (per $$ ofc) and the ease-of-use. I am not really keen on matrix yet. Seems clunky and slow. Revolt is seeming promising so far.
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.
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 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 use Discord almost entirely to communicate with family, they all have it, and we have our own server just for family.