Highly disagree! Though I would like the community to not be on discord, every other competitor has lost to discord.

Slack?

I often wonder if a mattermost community should be backstop an integrate into a slack and discord community to let people use what they want, but you have your own history owned.

Discord seems nice but it also has to fit the audience. I find it convoluted for business or support type chats, but it is excellent for community building around digital experiences (like gaming)

On the contrary everybody is on discord and not being on it will turn off the vast majority of people cause I wont open matrix just for your software.

And people will not use discord for the same gatekeeping reason.

Like I have tried discord a few times but I just cant "feel at home" with it. Its like too much content at once.

You can have bridge to discord from matrix so that solves one problem for now but again, discord and matrix feel like eons apart.

I use both discord and irc, I vastly prefer irc for project discussion, but haven't exactly been able to pinpoint why. I think perhaps, for me, it's that topics tend to stay much more focused, but I understand this probably has to do with discord having servers>channels>threads and boards, where projects use some, but not all of them in the same way.

Irc pretty simple, one project, one channel.

I wish you were right but you aren't.

What’s wrong with discord? I’m on several servers for open source projects and it’s pretty good.

ah sorry to hear that! where would you prefer it?

Matrix for IM, discourse for longer discussions, …

Plenty of open source alternatives. Can even bridge between matrix channels and discord

I wish an open standard won, but the reality is that in 2024 even in open source, it’s going to be easier to grow a Discord community than a Matrix one because more people habitually use Discord.

Matrix lost, or never even won, outside some unusually neckbeard-y communities. I gotta admit I kinda enjoyed watching someone try to make normies use it. Impossible. To be fair, discord is hard. But Matrix was really impossible.

Matrix is a protocol, not an app, and it's still evolving rapidly.

Meanwhile, Element as an app is also evolving rapidly too. Totally agreed that the onboarding has been awful in the past, but we're plugging away improving it and trying to make it more glossy and less neckbeardy, as per https://element.io/labs/element-x etc.

The fact is that Discord has raised $1B+ to run a centralised unencrypted comms platform; meanwhile Element is doing something ~10x harder (decentralised & E2EE) with a tiny fraction of the $. It takes longer, but the difference is that Matrix should last indefinitely, whereas Discord will get Eloned sooner or later.

I wouldn't say we've lost yet, but ymmv. I do wish we'd progressed faster though.

> Matrix is a protocol, not an app, and it's still evolving rapidly.

If your argument is at all trying to be even in the ballpark of “Matrix is accessible to normal folks” then you’ve immediately failed with this sentence alone.

And at the end of the day, that is what the comment you were replying to was saying, that Matrix will never win outside of niche spaces. And as long as it’s not as simple as a single app with a single brand for people to remember, it’s not going to succeed.

Matrix literally aims to be the missing communication layer of the Web.

Just as the Web won without a single app with a single brand for people to remember, Matrix will eventually succeed too.

The web was not competing with literally hundreds of other services with tighter branding and the weight of multi-billion dollar megacorporations pushing for their success. They have far more resources available to push their own services and have absolutely no incentive to integrate with any other service or protocol.

I wish you luck, but optimism and blind faith isn’t going to magically make WhatsApp et al go away.