This is actually the use case I've been trying to get to for some time. Unfortunately, I need it to "just work" to get my non-techy friends interested, otherwise they'll go right back to Discord.

Like I said, it's close, I just don't think it's there yet.

I'd say it's almost in "just works" territory for everyone except the person who has to actually administer the homeserver (me). I absorb a lot of the complexity for my friends.

The only thing that's a little cumbersome is requiring them to enter a custom server URL when the register/log in for the first time.

For competing with Discord, it seems like it would benefit from a more robust free offering to compete with Discord. Being able to create a free Discord server is great, and it is incredibly capable for most communities that don't need the fancy perks of Discord Nitro etc.

> The free Discord plan provides virtually all the core functionality of the platform with very few limitations. Free users get unlimited message history, screen sharing, unlimited server storage, up to eight users in a video call, and as many as 5,000 concurrent (i.e., online at the same time) users.

For a lot of small communities that aren't focused around commerce of any kind, Discord's free offering blows Element Matrix Services out the water. It's a non starter. If I could create a server with feature parity to Discord's free server, any new community I'd create I would definitely jump on EMS in a heartbeat, and I'd start trying to recreate communities currently within Discord, to be on EMS.

So like a very normal progression for Discord servers is that some niche sub-community wants to gather, and so they create a free server, and people join and there's all kinds of rich content that gets posted and curated and great discussions and then as it gets bigger, people running the community or people who want to support the community will boost the server with Discord Nitro for additional features like more slots for custom emojis (I can't communicate enough how important of a feature this is to Discord's success, even though it seems like minor window dressing).

That kind of model is what would justify a server starting to shell out money every month for EMS. I would note that Discord's pricing for this kind of level of community is tiered and not a per-user thing. You unlock more features based on how many users are paying for Nitro, going up a tier based on breakpoints of 2/15/30 Nitro Boosts per month. It doesn't cost more to have a tier 3 server if you gain more users. This is a big deal for fostering growth and unseating incumbent social networks (which is what Discord and Slack are).

Just some thoughts. I really want stuff like Element/Matrix to succeed!

Actually that’s the same with slack, each slack server has a unique url too.

    and use it to communicate with a group of about 20
    friends. Most of them aren't "technical" people. 

I'm insanely curious about the human side of things here. How did you get them to buy into this idea in the first place? That sounds like quite an achievement.

The non-technical folks in my life generally struggle with paths of least resistance (iMessage, etc) and it's hard to imagine getting them onto some alternative platform/protocol.

It did take some persuading. I think the main reason I was able to pull it off was ironically because they're not that technical. I bet most of my friends don't even know what Slack or Discord is. That's not to say they're dumb or anything - they just don't spend as much time online as one would think.

Previously, we were mostly using group texts or Snapchat/Instagram to communicate, so the biggest selling point was the fact that we can share full quality pictures and videos between iOS and Android people.

This is awesome. I have always wanted to self-host a Matrix instance as well, but I imagine it's going to be very hard to convince them to move over, from Telegram. Is there a blog post that I can read about homeserver setup? I am keen on seeing how easy it was, and keen on seeing what level of technical and financial resources you had to invest to get going.

That's interesting. Thank you for sharing that!

For my part, I don't have buy in yet (Because I'm not convinced Matrix is ready) but I think I could get it. I have 7 or 8 friends who do not use Discord except to talk with me and a few other friends that I know can be convinced to at least start using Element next to Discord. Once I feel like my homeserver is in a state that I can invite these non-technical people in, I'll be in the same place.