For whatever reason I’ve never been a huge chatroom person, but the recently renewed conversation over Discord’s identity verification system has got me thinking once again about free, open, and community-run alternatives–with Matrix being the one that I think stands out the most.
For those who aren’t familiar, for better or worse Matrix isn’t a 1:1 clone of Discord (like you mostly see with Stoat or Fluxer), but an open protocol for federated messaging and voice chat. Instead of a centralized service run by any one company or group, Matrix is a lot like email or “the fediverse”: a network of different servers, run by different people, communicating with each other using a single protocol and visualized through various apps (like Element or FluffyChat).
But for as much as Matrix feels like the fediverse in spirit, to me it also feels very separate from the fediverse, like it’s not a part of the “same conversation”, so to speak. The ethos is similar. The background is similar. The mission is similar. But, despite that, I feel like I don’t see as much overlap between fediverse communities and matrix communities as I would expect.
Maybe it’s purely because of the near-ubiquity of Reddit and Discord in modern net culture, but it seems pretty common to see Reddit communities that advertise links to Discord communities. Whereas it seems a lot more rare for “threadiverse” communities to advertise links to Matrix communities. Which leads me to my question…
What do you all think of Matrix?
Have you been aware of it? Have you tried it?
Are you an active Discord user? Are you an active Matrix user? If so, what do you like/dislike about it? If not, why not?
Broadly speaking, do you think there is value in what Matrix is doing? How do you see it fitting in with the rest of the Fediverse?
Have you been aware of it? Have you tried it?
I’ve been aware of it more or less since the beginning of the project. General thoughts:
- They seem to have looked at XMPP and thought to themselves “let’s reinvent this, but with an even more complicated tech stack and less clear specification”.
- When asked about allowing proper account deletion their response was… well, judge for yourself.
Are you an active Discord user?
No, it’s a proprietary system with an unacceptable privacy policy.
Are you an active Matrix user? If so, what do you like/dislike about it?
No. Their approach to privacy is unacceptable to me in any circumstance other than being paid to use it (as part of a job).
Broadly speaking, do you think there is value in what Matrix is doing?
In general? Sure, it has users that could be using something else, so it seems to have value to them. To me personally? No.
How do you see it fitting in with the rest of the Fediverse?
Afaiu there are bridges people can use to connect services, should they want to. So, like every other part of a federated network?
Personally, I’d much rather use Zulip or Mattermost, given the option.
I barely have enough tech literacy to be here, as much as I’d love to explore options like you’re talking about it feels overwhelming or even impenetrable to get into these things.
You can always just use a public instance like matrix.org to get into it. Like here with lemmy.world for example.
I got on Lemmy as an alternative to Reddit. Understood it one meme at a time.
I’ve been using matrix (almost exclusively, besides signal and IRC) for about two years now and it has been flawless. I host my own server for a group of 12-15 people, and have federated my server. Write me a reply if you have any questions.
Does it do anything for you that couldn’t be achieved reasonably on XMPP?
Dito, been hosting a small service for friends and family for a few years as well. We federate with a smaller group of people cosplaying as sysadmins. Set-up was a bit of effort, we opted to not set up the relay server for voice/video, but thats just because we are lazy. As with above, feel free to reach out if yall need assistance.
If Matrix was here, he’d laugh too.
All the anti matrix sentiment is so strange to me especially from people on the fediverse…
I use and host matrix, I love it, I wouldn’t even consider any other alternative as they all lack core must have features
It’s non-corporate Discord. It’s great if you want real-time chat and not a forum.
Except it’s not Discord, it’s closer to IRC.
Discord is also basically IRC. But with more shit tacked onto it and the inability to host a whole actual server and not just a room on a corporate server.
Other than voice chat, I think the big different between IRC and Discord is that Discord has the larger structure of the “server” (not to be confused with the actual server…) which acts as the main hub for a community of users.
I don’t think this can be overlooked, because to me the community aspects of Discord are a big part of the appeal and, I think, its lasting success.
On the other hand, IRC channels are kind of pretty much stand-alone. Obviously they exist on a IRC server (the actual server, like “libera.chat”…), but there’s no larger structure representing a community of users or tying multiple rooms together.
Matrix started just like IRC, where each chat channel stood alone. But eventually they added “spaces”, which basically represent a group of channels, or something slightly more akin to a Discord “server”. Although I’d still like to see Matrix do more with their “spaces” in terms of community-oriented features, like scheduling events, running polls, etc.
So you’re saying it can’t be closer to IRC because discord is already basically IRC except actually it’s not. So it could be closer to IRC. Bad argument.
i want it to work well but it simply sucks. the ux is terrible, federation is buggy, etc… i’m quite tolerant of hard to use softwares but i couldn’t continue using it. had a techie friend try it out with me for a while as a potential discord alternative but he had such bad experience that he doesn’t wanna try other foss messengers unless they’re proven to be very good. i just lurk on irc and telegram these days. (ik telegram is shit, but i prefer it over discord)
I’m curious what issues you guys had. I setup my own homeserver via synapse with livekit earlier this year when discord started all this shit, and two of my friends joined me. We are all technical people and its honestly been flawless since the start for us. Chat, voice, video, and screen sharing has worked perfectly
- E2EE would suddenly stop working at some point and rendered older messages unreadable.
- client (element) stuck on synchronization. there were hardly any new messages but clients were stuck for more than an hour for some reason and needed reinstall…
- text messages randomly wouldn’t send, or get sent twice
- etc many glitches i don’t remember…
this was around 2022~2023 and we haven’t tested video or screen sharing. we were all on matrix.org homeserver
Interesting… I wonder if they fixed those issues since then, or if the matrix.org homeserver has more issues from their massive user count. Or I could have just been lucky with a small sample size haha
I think their experience was common about that time. Move to today, synapse is way better, the x clients are way better, encryption tends to “just work”, etc.
Might still not be what people want entirely but I can vouch for the marked improvements.
Matrix is actually aimed at enterprise services which is where they make most of their income to keep running. Parts of the French and German governments use it for communication, for example.
I think part of the issue is that people want it to replace Discord when it’s really meant to replace Microsoft Teams.
I use it everyday with the Sable client
Hadn’t checked out Sable before… Looks like it’s a fork of Cinny? Have you tried both, and if so why did you end up with Sable? I’m in the process of setting up a chat/community space for my friend group, and am trying to figure out the stack 😅 Had already looked at Cinny, as it looked modern and usable (not all my friends are techy), but it’s so hard to get a good overview of what’s out there!
Not the OP, but also use Matrix with Sable. I think Cinny was forked because some people wanted to add more features and change the UI direction, but the main project didn’t want to.
Coming from discord, Sable feels much more familiar than for example Element
Yeah, Cinny is really slow adding anything.
Thanks! Yeah, Element has been out of the question from the start. Right now I’m leaning toward Continuwuity as the server and FlyffyChat as the (main) client, but I’ll have to take a look at Sable as well!
I went the synapse route at the start, mainly because I didnt know about all the other ones, but it has worked pretty well. I have been interested in experimenting with others and just seeing how they work though
I liked using Matrix. I was lazy and didn’t fully set up the configuration. But it was really easy to replace discord with Element.
I’ve seen comments complaining that Element is the most used and if everyone uses Element it’ll be vulnerable to bad actors.
I like that I get to host the file and data myself. In my perfect world the local Internet Service Provider Co-op would host a matrix server so the town could still communicate/talk in case my town loses connection to the big city.
Matrix is a good idea in principle and the 2.0 protocol (as well as the implementation) is in very good shape. Sadly Element is the most feature complete client for using it and frankly: it’s trash. Both desktop and app, X and non-X. It’s buggy, unreliable and unpolished. It certainly has gotten better, seeing how they went from borderline unusable to at least the core stuff working, but they move incredibly slow. If you think Signal is moving slow, you haven’t waited for Element features (to properly work) yet.
I personally find Fluffy Chat to be more enjoyable, but tbf I basically have to use it, because I need to use multiple accounts. Element just straight up doesn’t support that for whatever reason - I don’t think any other client either. It comes with its own set of issues and shortcomings however. There simply is no app that supports everything and works flawlessly at the same time. To stick with my Signal comparison: Signal just works. It self-explanatory and you need to do next to nothing for it to work. This is not the experience you can expect from Matrix in general, because the way the protocol works makes everything more complicated.
The only major alternative I know is XMPP, which in my experience next to no one uses. I have very limited experience with it, but ‘Conversations’ seemed fantastic on the surface. Much, much simpler and cleaner than anything Matrix. But again, couldn’t actually test it, because no one uses it lol
I don’t think any other client either
Commet supports multiple accounts.
sable also supports multiple accounts. element x too, but its hidden in labs
I’ve been using matrix as a drop-in replacement for discord for a couple years now and I really love it, personally. It could definitely move a little faster when it comes to development and I wouldn’t be mad, but for me at least the major features are there and the day to day experience is really good so I don’t feel like I’m missing much waiting on new features.
I’ve personally been much happier with matrix than I ever was with discord, and the only annoyances I really run into related to it are more to do with the network problem of everyone else being on discord than matrix itself.I tried it briefly, but in addition to the software itself feeling rather behind, I don’t think it can solve the major problems I have with Discord.
The biggest problem I have with Discord is that it is ‘underground’, siloed away from the open web and unable to be indexed by search engines. I don’t want a Discord Alternative that is just the same thing but federated, I want all the communities that have moved to Discord to come back to the open web, whether that’s traditional forums or here on the Threadiverse or something else. In fact, I think Threadi would be a very good fit for a lot of the improper use cases Discord currently gets used for.
And the secondary problem, of course, is the network effect. Nobody I want to talk to is using Matrix. All the communities that have kept me tied to Discord against my will, are on Discord. And sadly I don’t see much chance for that to ever be overcome.
The biggest problem I have with Discord is that it is ‘underground’, siloed away from the open web and unable to be indexed by search engines. I don’t want a Discord Alternative that is just the same thing but federated, I want all the communities that have moved to Discord to come back to the open web, whether that’s traditional forums or here on the Threadiverse or something else. In fact, I think Threadi would be a very good fit for a lot of the improper use cases Discord currently gets used for.
I can understand this. I think that’s there’s definitely a place for siloed (or better yet, private, especially in the age of AI scrapers) communities and real-time chat rooms on the internet, but it definitely feels like Discord has sucked up a lot of the community and conversations that used to be on forums and more visible spaces.
And the secondary problem, of course, is the network effect. Nobody I want to talk to is using Matrix. All the communities that have kept me tied to Discord against my will, are on Discord. And sadly I don’t see much chance for that to ever be overcome.
This is obviously one of the biggest issues facing Matrix (or any Discord alternative for that matter), though it’s also something that we have to deal with all over the Fediverse as alternatives to the more mainstream social media platforms.
I don’t think there’s a quick and easy solution to this, other than just those of us who care taking the initiative by putting in the required time and effort to make spaces and start conversations that we want to see. Whether it’s the threadiverse or matrix, it’s just a matter of getting the ball rolling, I guess…
I have the same issue with Matrix that I had with Discord and all the other silo’d chats, cannot find any active communities. Just walls of people joining and leaving empty rooms.
I’ve been using matrix with a few people, and I like it conceptually. However, it’s definitely got some very rough edges. Mobile clients don’t seem to even support calling, and as I found out recently some homeservers just don’t support calling? custom emote/sticker support is client dependent and somewhat janky on all of them (no favoriting emotes, fluffychat not showing custom emotes with other emojis, etc.). I want it to be great but I just don’t see it being user friendly enough for mass adoption right now.
On the other hand, I’ve also been trying Fluxer. It’s a lot smoother of an experience, (aside from screen share), and I really see it as a great drop in replacement for discord with friend groups. But, it’s not got federation yet, and I don’t believe E2EE for DMs or voice calls is here yet either. I hope it can keep developing and deliver on these promises.
