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Comment by muzzio | Hacker News Reader

Does Matrix have the equivalent of voice chat rooms that Discord has? I find as a user of Discord that being able to see who's just hanging out is the killer feature there. (As are things like game streaming and bots, ofc)

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yes, albeit in beta in Element: https://element.io/blog/drop-in-drop-out-chats-with-video-ro...

I saw this and got excited but no, this isn't discord voice channels. This is an integrated jitsi meet call. It looks like some sort of prototype has been merged to develop though:

https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/pull/21476

What do you mean it's not discord voice channels? Looking at the screenshot[0] their Jitsi Meet integration is identical, because discord voice channels are essentially voice conference calls.

[0] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/48614497/159062202...

There's still a "join" page every time before you can actually enter a room. And the participants in the room aren't shown as nicely when you're not in it.

Both are very important for replicating Discord's low friction. Opening a full window when it's just a voice channel anyway is also distracting and increases friction.

$5/user/month = no way in hell I can get all my friends on board to use it. Impossible to get network effects going like that, as much as I wanted to try it.

It looks like it's a b2b app anyway

It's $0/user/infinity if you host your own Matrix server[0]. You don't have that option with Discord. Your data will remain with discord servers.

Element is hardly b2b lol.

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[0]: https://matrix.org/

A good starting point if you're tech literate is this:

https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

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