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?
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
