What's wrong with Discord?

Discord is the ultimate gatekeeper of information these days, and the company behind it cannot be trusted with its user data.

"ultimate gatekeeper" seems a bit strong for a niche group chat program.

200,000,000+ monthly active users is not niche at all, it is among the most widely used communications platforms on the planet. That userbase is comparable in size to Uber or Steam.

Besides being a centralized, proprietary data harvesting operation that has slowly started selectively enforcing mandatory identity verification requirements, despite their previous identity verification provider already getting hacked and leaking 70,000 people's PII?

Nothing says "hacker culture" like voluntarily submitting your photo ID and a real-time facial scan to big brother so your de-anonymized communications can be permanently logged and used against you by the state as soon as a future administration decides you're a disfavored person.

Too bad nobody actually uses Matrix. Less odious, bit you're gonna be talking to yourself.

> you're gonna be talking to yourself.

IMO, Matrix is definitely the best protocol for sending oneself messages in a running thread across all of one's devices.

That is one excellent use case, and it's a real one.

It is also great for the same thing, but with other users, too. I have no idea why its uptake is so slow. Is it the apps?

The adoption issues are basically that the team who created Matrix (led by me) have ended up burning a lot of energy making the core protocol and implementations work well, and then chasing govtech revenue as a way to fund development: https://element.io/blog/digital-sovereignty-is-built-on-an-o... etc. As a result consumer uptake doesn’t have the focus it should have. We will return to it as soon as we can, however; meanwhile there’s nothing stopping others doing it too.

Thank you for all of your work.

Thanks for the insight, and, as the sibling wrote, all the work.