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.
Hard agree. It’s like Eternal September but on steroids
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 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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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 like discord currently but matrix is just far too inactive within the communities I have sought out from what I can see personally.
