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 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.
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.
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…