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The biggest grab for Discord is anonymous accounts. You can put in a username (even a conflicting one due to their #number system) and get going straight away.

Sign-up is a metric that your marketing team loves to track, but is a crazy user bottleneck.

Even if you only do it for, e.g. 6 months-1 year (spam concerns), let people chat with no account/sign-up. Let me give people a link that will let them chat with me, with no sign-up.

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Matrix has always supported "Guest" accounts, where a user can immediately join a room and start talking in there with a generated user_id. They have limitations, but for the "get going straight away" factor it was quite nice.

Element (back when we called it Riot) removed support for this a while ago BUT we are trying to design it back into the app, which you can follow https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/9264

And yeah as a developer on the project, getting users into rooms quickly and chatting is a desperate goal of mine.

I'm glad to hear that. You guys really seem to be willing to be wrong, and seriously listen to ideas. If you fail you will color me the strongest shade of surprised: everything you are doing is optimal.

I agree. Users want to jump into a discussion first and foremost. Discord facilitates this without adding any unnecessary friction.

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