Can it be any more enshitified tho?

Matrix really needs to add channels.

I'm not sure why they don't just copy the features that should be standard from Discord.

But, none of the FOSS alternatives work well enough to move my friends over there, in my experience.

Been slowly moving to Matrix/Element and was able to convince two buddies to at least make accounts, currently the biggest struggle we’ve had was with the voice channels.

There appears to be two types of voice channels; Jitsi & Element Call, Jitsi works okay but screen sharing appears to not work on either Windows or Linux and also doesn’t appear to allow mobile users to connect with desktop users and vice versa. Meanwhile Element Call seems to work perfectly but there is an unnecessary extra step to install the Element X beta app for mobile for it to work.

Another gripe about Matrix is spaces/room permissions, to my understanding Spaces are like discord servers so when I make a user an Admin you expect them to get admin privilege over every room right? Welp, it’s not and you have to give them admin for every single room also, once you give someone Admin you can’t remove it and they have to do it themselves. While I understand why it’s done this way I find it quite dumb.

The fact that Matrix is apart of the fediverse is enough for me to disregard the issues I mentioned above however, for others it can be seen as a deal-breaker.

"No. Fuck you. Pay me. Now pay me more. Now enjoy ads. Pay me again. We're now introducing fees associated with the privilege of paying me. So pay that while paying me."

-- approximately everything

Dude i am so glad. Discord was always a cancer, i hope this will spell the beginning of the end of discord. Its the number one biggest offender in terms of limiting access to information on the internet right now. It needs to die.

I don't know why people trusted Discord, it's one of the worst platforms and I say this while I use it because I had to settle for that (friends) like I had to settle for WhatsApp (family and work)

Irc was better for chat, ventilo and mumble better for audio, and matrix is pretty much the same but better. Discord sucks like Twitter did and I can't wait for it to go away. And forums are a better platform for help and documentation.

Thank God I convinced my fiancee to move our VCs to Wire, away from WhatsApp and Discord.

Matrix needs more time in the oven before it's ready for widespread adoption.

I really did try to make it work (for months) but it's a buggy and unpolished experience, everyone that tried it with me ended up going back to Discord and Signal for communication.

Catch me firing up Mumble again

Check out Revolt. They're trying to mimic Discord.

https://revolt.chat/

I've been wanting a replacement for ages now. The problem is that Discord does everything it does very well (with a few exceptions), way better than any of its competitors. It's incredibly hard to replace, because no other product really matches it in any category. Cost, ease of use, feature set, cross-app API support... Nobody else comes close; even if you paid a ton of money for premium services to replace Discord, you're still likely going to downgrade your overall experience.

I really want to see more competition in this space.

accelerates

The worst part about discord to me is that it’s used as a knowledge base for open source projects and games and such. This puts things in a walled garden. I instantly get turned off by a thing when the homepage is “join our discord” or I see a comment like “oh it’s explained in the discord.”

It’s only a matter of time before discord becomes paywalled, and all the knowledge out there ceases to be public.

“Obviously better” this isn’t obvious to me at all. Just because you don’t use the many features it offers doesn’t mean other people don’t.

it's literally just money

It's about money, specifically with a near-term "exit strategy" for investors.

It lets them push the company into choices that will pump up the stock price so that early shareholders can sell their stock and walk away with profits... without any concern over how those choices will impact the company, its employees, its customers, or the new shareholders in the long term.

I won't shed a tear for Discord, though. They are a parasitic corporation that extracts profit from the world's online communities by using the network effect to lock our communications and collected knowledge behind their terms of service. No company should have control over so much of humanity's cultural development and history.

It’s the path for the startup industry to rewards the venture capitalist investor basically either IPO by going public or M&A by being bought (like instagram by meta).

Here some more info on the different startup stages https://www.latitud.com/blog/stages-of-a-startup

Also proprietary and requires a "Gamer License" to host servers for more than 32 users.

Mumble is, and has always been, the king of voice chat apps and is completely FOSS. Also it works a lot better.