I'm a huge dork for open standards, I frequently miss the days of Gaim/Pidgin and having Google Talk be Jabber/XMPP underneath, and being able to IM my friends wherever. Personally, I'm probably going to dork around with Matrix/Element because it sounds like my kind of thing.
But I can't figure why I'd switch to it for work.
I moved my company recently from Teams to Mattermost. The UX was the biggest selling point. Collaboration happens in Mattermost in ways it simply couldn't happen in Teams.
Putting aside the fact that we're not going to churn company comms every quarter for funzies, why would I switch us to Element? What can I do with Element that I can't do with Mattermost or Rocket.Chat or Slack or anything else?
* Have signal-style end-to-end encryption by default, if you care about keeping your data secure on the server.
* Pick from a huge range of alternative clients, including hooking up custom ones thanks to Element being built on the open Matrix standard. For instance, if you wanted to plonk an Intercom-style chat box on your website which funnelled into your support chatrooms, there are a a bunch of different matrix-as-chatbox clients you could use
* Bridge to other platforms as if you were using them natively (as per the sibling comment) - e.g. if you already have other chat systems flying around the place, you can easily unify them in Matrix
* Talk to people outside your company. If you care about collaborating with external people (other developers; customers; partners; suppliers; sibling companies etc) then Matrix's intrinsic decentralisation means you can just talk to them via the public Matrix network. For instance, I spend my life collaborating with folks on the mozilla, KDE, GNOME, Ansible etc Matrix servers without having to think (let alone manage a million different tabs and identities and crappy clients for their various communities).
So, that's the pitch.
This idea that Discord is accessible globally is such an America-centric naïvete.
Normal users fundamentally do not give a shit.
OP is contrasting Element as a client, and it is subpar in comparison to Discord's UI/UX. No protocol differences can paper over this.
FWIW, you can bridge Discord to Matrix.
It is more valuable to me to have a single universal messaging app across all my devices than it is to corksniff over UX across a couple dozen apps.
Furthermore, I'm autistic, the UI of Discord is atrocious. Completely overwhelming.
* End-to-end encryption
* Spaces as freeform hierarchies of rooms
* Widgets, to embed arbitrary webapps into your chatrooms
* Open standard API
However, the point is more that Matrix can do way more than this given it’s a protocol: Element Call is already a better UX for conferencing than Hangouts or Zoom; thirdroom.io is a super promising virtual world system built on Matrix, etc.
We probably do need to market it better though!