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Comment by rubinlinux | Hacker News Reader

Surprised no one even mentioned the matrix protocol yet. Its still very rough around the edges, but for an old school IRC person talk of Discord as an alternative just hurts me.

Do I want my community to be completely owned by a corporation, so that all the work we put into the network effect belongs to a company and they can impose/change rules at any moment? Have we learned nothing?

Matrix is the modern IRC alternative, not discord. And in some cases, you can run a bridge between the two, so I use a matrix client as my daily IRC interface -- best of both worlds.

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>Matrix is the modern IRC alternative, not discord.

But simultaneously Matrix is not a good enough Discord alternative.

Too much friction, too many issues, and still difficult for non-technical users.

The reason Discord won out is you can just send a link to somebody and they're already on-boarded.

Even Discord is too hard for non-technical people. My attempt at a family server has dozens of stale accounts belonging to my parents. As much as it infuriates me, I now understand why WhatsApp is phone-only.

If you want a family server you will have to set it up for your non-technical family members if you want them to use it. You have to be the IT person and create the accounts, join the rooms, and so forth. Then you get them to install the app, give them the login, and help them change the password.

Once that's all out of the way they should be able to just click on the app and chat hassle free.

> You have to be the IT person and create the accounts, join the rooms, and so forth. Then you get them to install the app, give them the login, and help them change the password.

I did all that. It wasn't enough. They kept getting another family member to send them a new invite and then manage to somehow create a new account in the web UI each time. I guess that workflow worked for them so they didn't want to change it.

I don't think being phone-only is the key there. Telegram is not phone-only and I'd say it's as easy to use as WhatsApp. In fact, for non-technical people it essentially behaves as a blue WhatsApp and I've heard it described exactly like that, but if you want to go beyond that, the functionality is there. This kind of software that can accommodate several "levels" of users is sadly becoming rarer and rarer.

Discord is IMO quite a mess. I am definitely a technical user (also lived in IRC for years, that's why I'm on this thread) and as someone who just uses Discord from time to time, I regularly get confused by it and find a nontrivial amount of friction to get things done there. No wonder your parents struggle with it.

Not convinced - I certainly don't find Discord any more complex or harder to use than Telegram. The main problem my parents had was they kept losing their account details and creating new accounts, and I think any system that isn't phone-only will have that problem (yes you can make accounts unique by email address, but my parents have multiple email addresses that they mix up, so that doesn't solve the problem). Disabling web browser use and making it harder to sign up (or harder to use without signing up, or locking down server invites even more strictly) would "help" a bit, but I like having a chat system that people can try out in the browser before they commit to it.

Discord is annoying AF for highly technical users like myself.

The company itself seems to be riddled with problems so honestly I wouldn't be surprised if it was dead in the next 48 months.

>just send a link to somebody and they're already on-boarded

Yes, after you give Discord Inc. your phone number.

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