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?
Other than voice chat, I think the big different between IRC and Discord is that Discord has the larger structure of the “server” (not to be confused with the actual server…) which acts as the main hub for a community of users.
I don’t think this can be overlooked, because to me the community aspects of Discord are a big part of the appeal and, I think, its lasting success.
On the other hand, IRC channels are kind of pretty much stand-alone. Obviously they exist on a IRC server (the actual server, like “libera.chat”…), but there’s no larger structure representing a community of users or tying multiple rooms together.
Matrix started just like IRC, where each chat channel stood alone. But eventually they added “spaces”, which basically represent a group of channels, or something slightly more akin to a Discord “server”. Although I’d still like to see Matrix do more with their “spaces” in terms of community-oriented features, like scheduling events, running polls, etc.