Compelling reasons to switch: it's an open standard, it's federated (so you can own your own server and avoid vendor lock-in), it has end-to-end encryption, it supports bridging with many other protocols, there's quite a growing ecosystem of tools and libraries around it, etc.

The protocol itself is designed to be really flexible in the kind of data you can send through it (and therefore automatically propagated to and synchronized with other servers) so it can support a lot of different use cases. This includes standard chat app things like audio/video calls but it could also be used for stuff like forums or even serve as a backend for syncing information between organization (I'm thinking of things like medical information between health institutions).

All in all, there's a lot of potential in Matrix.

I try matrix on occasion (as in, I set up my own server from scratch). The last time I tried it, support for multi-participant audio and video calls (and screensharing) was still between terrible and nonexistant. Definitely much worse than Discord. Has it improved?

There were some bug fixes in the last year (IIRC) though nothing very substantial, I think. Then again, it's always worked reasonably well for me and I'm using it regularly. I heard it was going to get worked on soon, though.

There was a major upgrade to the conference calling about 6 months ago which took it from being "barely usable" to "almost as good as Zoom". It's different semantics to Discord in that it's classic conferencing rather than a voice channel, but it works well enough for the whole core Matrix team to use it basically constantly for remote collaboration.

The conferencing servers are currently in London however, so you may suffer from transatlantic traffic problems if you are elsewhere in the world.

Ah, thank you for the additional information. Is my grapevine information correct that more work will be done to improve video calls and screensharing in the coming months?

As an example of what could be improved, I do still encounter the occasional bug with call synchronization, the video stream of one of the sides not getting started on occasion and screensharing is hardly discoverable.

Good to know!

For background, see http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/

> Are there any other projects using this setup?

GNOME and KDE are also using Matrix.

Write up of reasons at this morning’s other FP here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21835749