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Comment by SubGenius | Hacker News Reader

Matrix is not only an exciting ecosystem to build on top off, the overall community is pretty amazing too. Fossdem went great and I liked a lot of the talks.

I'm beginning to build a couple of projects on matrix and am really hopeful for its long-term success.

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Same I think the Matrix community is amazing and very welcoming. Element is really trying to build a community behind Matrix and I think they doing it with a great success. They regularly invite community members to talk in video interview (This Week in Matrix). Alternative clients are actively encouraged and promoted and small business build around the Matrix ecosystem too.

Shameless plug to the Matrix client, I'm contributing too: https://invent.kde.org/network/neochat

Unfortunately I'm running a very minimal arch + i3 setup now, I wonder if I can install Neochat without pulling in a whole lot of KDE dependencies?

Neochat looks great by the way!

Nheko is quite good too, I mostly use gomuks and nheko, though I regularly fire up neochat too :)

Not sure which are packaged, though. You usually want the latest goodies, so AUR/flatpak it is for me.

NeoChat only needs Kirigami (for the UI), KCoreAddons (for the about screen), KNotifications/KWindowSystem (for the notifications), KConfig (for the configuration). Probably the KNotifications dependency could be made optional without too much ifdef but I'm not sure if this is something users want.

If you use Weechat for IRC, there is a Matrix bridge plugin that would allow you to connect to Matrix from the command line.

Apologies if this is offtopic, but why matrix over discord? I'm just starting to learn about both (still salty about IRC's demise).

Can't comment much on feature parity beyond the fact that Matrix has had most things I need, but Discord is proprietary software and is pretty hostile towards any third-party clients. Wouldn't be a good fit for FOSDEM, imo.

Well, Discord is proprietary.

I'm not super interested in the chat/IM aspects of Matrix. What I really like is the protocol and the built-in federation and pub/sub mechanism that you can use to build cool decentralized apps that pass events around.

Discord is a for-profit unencrypted proprietary centralised walled garden. It’s forbidden to connect unofficial clients to their server, and there’s nothing stopping them from monetising your data/metadata in future.

Matrix is a non-profit open source project that defines a decentralised communication protocol that forms an open global end-to-end encrypted communication network. Anyone can run a server to participate, and anyone can use whatever client they like. You could see Matrix as descended from IRC, and Discord from AOL chatrooms.

The only advantage to Discord is that historically it has slicker UX than flagship Matrix clients like Element, more users, better room management, and exposes voice/video chat as dedicated chatrooms. Matrix is steadily catching up however.

And they can run any server they like too, of which there are many up and coming options - synapse (official / reference python implementation), dendrite (go), conduit (rust), construct (C++).

If you're an IRC fan then you might also be interested to know that the matrix team has made a pretty good effort to ensure that matrix and irc can play nice together, vs discord being hostile to any sort of third party apps as mentioned, so if your main criteria is wanting to extend longevity of irc, matrix is certainly the better option.

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