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Comment by sodality2 | Hacker News Reader

Matrix is miles behind discord which saddens me. It's a good UI but to consider them in the same ballpark is pretty uncomparable to me

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> Matrix is miles behind discord which saddens me.

In which way? Discord is miles behind Matrix in terms of privacy features. It does not even support e2ee for PMs or self-hosted servers or federation. They probably don't even plan to implement that ever.

That's an instant knockout for Discord for me. There is no way that I willingly let companies read my private communication in 2021 after everything that we learned over the last couple of years. No amount of nice productivity features can compensate for that.

For the average person who isn't as concerned about privacy, Discord is absolutely light years ahead. Personally, I don't mind that Discord doesn't have E2EE or self hosted servers, I think having those would severely degrade the experience. Discord works so well because it's unified and /I don't have to screw around with somebody's poorly self-hosted server on their rural internet. If I want to send top secret messages to people I'll just use Signal.

The 'average person' is not uncommonly switching to Matrix. Even non-technically savvy people are asking how to do it following Apple's PR disaster.

You clearly don't understand Matrix. Dendrite introduces a hybrid-P2P model, ergo home servers become largely irrelevant, and portable identities become a thing.

Can Discord work offline P2P via Bluetooth LE? Nope.

I rarely chat with people close enough to just talk to them IRL. Though I think it has merit and good use in some areas, like during HK protests, I heard Briar was used for local p2p chats.

You live in a bubble. Nobody I know has ever heard of matrix, and that's including the tech people.

No, I live in the UK where everyday 'normies' are becoming increasingly concerned about privacy and overreach by big-tech.

I can only speak as I find it.

> the average person who isn't as concerned about privacy

I think the average person does indeed care about privacy, otherwise we would use public bank accounts and would get rid of passwords, curtains and summer clothing.

Most likely, most people do not fully understand all implications of all technical details and aren't making fully informed decisions.

Only if you cleverly conflate social privacy with data privacy and conflate security with privacy.

Ask someone how much they care that their bank details are known to the machines at Intuit when they setup their Mint account, or how much they care that random bank employees can see & manage their entire financial life when they call customer support or visit a teller.

Ask them how much they care that some machine somewhere in a Google datacenter is running an algorithm on every email they get.

In my experience, most people just want to keep parts of their lives private from people they know. They will upload nudes to iCloud and make jokes about FBI agents finding them.

> In which way? Discord is miles behind Matrix in terms of privacy features. It does not even support e2ee for PMs or self-hosted servers or federation. They probably don't even plan to implement that ever.

I actually laughed out loud as I read this.

I mean I'm sure you're not wrong, it's just that vanishingly few people do or will care about self-hosted servers or federation. Hell, if anything those would be anti-selling points, since it almost invariably complicates the UX, especially for initial setup.

Matrix is a protocol, not a UI. There are many Matrix clients with vastly different UIs and UX. To distil Matrix down to a 'UI' is missing the entire point of Matrix. It is like email, it will inevitably become ubiquitous. 35m users so far: https://element.io/blog/element-raises-30m-as-matrix-explode...

There's a reason that governments, militaries and healthcare systems are choosing Matrix over Discord!

I've bridged all my other messaging apps to Matrix, now I just need a single messaging app. I even get my SMS via Matrix. Can Discord do that? Nope. If it could, would you trust it? Probably not.

> Can Discord do that? Nope.

I use discord to relay in game chat from the game Everquest to my phone. Surely it can relay other types of text, too.

I had very high hopes for matrix because of the bridging capabilities but I was sorely disappointed after spending a couple hours to set it all up. Some of the bridges require violating the TOS for other applications, or going into the dev tools to copy cookies. Basically completely unapproachable for non-programmers. Once you have a bridge it's impossible to start a new chat with someone in another app. You need to start the chat in the other app, wait for the matrix bridge to be notified of the chat, and then you can continue the conversation in matrix.

Of course it breaches plenty of ToS, they're third-party bridges for Matrix that are developed by people within the community. Do you really think that big corps are going to be happy about people not seeing ads? Of course not, ergo there are ToS clauses there to discourage people from doing so.

For non-programmers, there are cheap turn-key SaaS. Look at Beeper for example: https://www.beeper.com/

You also don't need to start the chat in another app, that's complete and utter bollocks, regardless of whether you use SaaS like Beeper, or your own home server.

I'll check back in with you in 5 years and we can laugh at each other: @hammy:matrix.splitanatom.com :- )

I bridge Signal/Whatsapp/Telegram and you can absolutely start chats through the bridge bot. It might be a little inconvenient, but for the rare occasion I do need it, it works absolutely fine.

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