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?
I didn’t use Matrix much but a couple of years ago I installed and fucked around a little with encryption, different devices and multiple local accounts, thinking I might suggest is as a Discord alternative in my friend group or at least use it for sending notes between PC and phone (Syncthing was never quick or reliable for me, even though I only tried to sync my modest amount of phone camera pictures and a couple of text documents). The clients/apps were kinda shitty and the best one was an electron app (i.e. uses way more computer resources than necessary) and chat encryption, especially for group chats and trying to use the same account on multiple devices, was really clunky.
If this blog post is to be believed, the clients and possibly server didn’t improve sufficiently since then: https://マリウス.com/giving-up-on-element-and-matrixorg/ That blogger recommends xmpp/jabber as an alternative that is reliable and has resource-efficient servers and clients. But IDK, probably better to listen to someone who actually tried using Matrix in a Fediverse-context.