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Comment by idle_zealot | Hacker News Reader

It's not about the cute icons. It's about meeting users where they are. Discord is popular, and users are reticent to migrate or begin using other community-hosting software. That's not to say that I'm against using Free community software, quite the opposite, but the problem is real; if you exclusively host your own Matrix community you will have less participation than if you make a Discord space. That is simply the state of things. I don't know how we get to a better state here, but I'd love to hear ideas. Perhaps just boycotting Discord and encouraging other FOSS projects to do the same could eventually turn the tide?

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Discord is not the problem. Discord isn’t loved by its users, there is no particular loyalty to it. The users like the product, but not the company that makes it.

The problem is entirely that the alternatives are worse than Discord.

There’s no point in a boycott if there’s no destination to boycott to. The reason that the Digg->Reddit boycott was successful was that there was a better place to migrate to.

Matrix chose to prioritize security, censorship resistance, privacy, and decentralization and be a bit slower with UX, and Discord chose UX over everything else.

In the short term people want pretty but enough bad outcomes will push people to consider that UX is not the only thing to value in a communications tool.

https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/339#issuec... is another facet, too.

Tim OReilly used to say follow the alpha geeks.

There's nothing concrete that Discord holds that makes them remotely better for the users. Discord isn't even mutable, can't be heavily changed or swayed; it's someone else's closed proprietary product. Where-as Matrix or XMPP or irc can be bent, extended, changed to do more, to meet users where they are.

I don't know how any of these assertions that it's Discord or bust are made. This is an article of faith that Discord is simply the one and only way to go, or else, and the tautological definition of an article of faith is that which relies on no external support to maintain itself.

I do think there's a lot of possibility to figure out how to better bring users onto matrix or XMPP or irc, with easy to use web clients & better feature sets. But I also think culture shifts because culture does. For whatever reason there's doctrine that Discord is how it's done, and it's easy as fuck, but if we tried doing other maybe this Discord manifest destiny would not look so horrifically locked in as it is. But that would require not accepting the dogma of Discord crit-hype, that would require multiple folks trying.

> easy as fuck

Behold, for the answer has revealed itself.

This is just three paragraphs of saying the same sentiment: "I don't understand why Discord is appealing despite there being alternatives that I believe are better."

People use what they think is best, where "best" has a wide variety of answers and very rarely is the answer "a feature set that programmers think are good".

Matrix needs to improve the UX a lot. I’m a big supporter and I’ve donated a ton in the past, but I just don’t use it anymore because it mostly doesn’t work properly and a ton of features technically exist but are so painful to use that they may as well not.

Yeah I've been using them for my indie conferences since 2020. I recently argued [0] that it's not the Year for Matrix, even if Discord now has ads and is doing sketchy stuff typical of enshitification.

Unfortunately I just don't see Matrix's priorities going towards UX. I'm dropping them. Revolt has promise [1], at the very least as a stopgap.

[0] https://youtu.be/WxAO4xDPpkg

[1] https://revolt.chat

It feels a lot like “the last 10% is 99% of the work”. On paper matrix seems like a pretty perfect discord replacement. I think we just don’t realise the incredible feat of engineering that makes discord just work all the time.

fwiw, https://element.io/labs/element-x is Element’s attempt to spell out that we our priorities are absolutely going towards UX.

Meanwhile the old Element apps aren’t improving because all our (limited) bandwidth is going into Element X, which we hope to be ready this summer.

Good thing there are alternatives to Matrix that use a lot less resources. It’s not just UX… Matrix by design is wasteful by requiring replication of all messages & attachments of all users in all chats across every server. Most can’t afford to host a multiuser server with the storage bills for this.

My team and I strive to create software dramatically better at security and privacy than anything else that exists, but we offer support exclusively on Matrix and bridged rooms to IRC.

We offer free software and free support. We do not feel it is an unreasonable ask that people use open standards to collaborate with us on open software.

Many have created accounts on Matrix because they wanted our help. It works.

There are also moderation issues. This shouldn't surprise anybody by now, but it turns out that a decentralized platform that doesn't do captchas, phone number verification, advanced, closed-source abuse mitigation strategies etc is very much prone to abuse.

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