I dip my toes in regularly for the last two years. Every time I do, Matrix has been an extremely janky experience with negligible command of good UX principles. It's awful, and I'm only trying to use two devices.

If folks want to convince less ideologically motivated people to switch and support The Cause it still needs so much TLC. It's barely competing on table stakes features for a chat platform.

This is my exact experience. The tech underlying Matrix is very interesting, but they really need to hire a proper UX person.

More importantly, it is indexable by search engines (if you use view.matrix.org). But it's not as simple to use as discord quite yet. I say this as a self-hosted matrix user, but it's not quite as simple to call someone else (until element call becomes a thing) or use custom emojis, to show a few problems.