YES!
THANK YOU!
I have been so limited in participating to conversations about great software only because they happened on Discord and I do not use it by choice.
Let us all use Matrix, instead!
Rather than trying to persuade people to use either incompatible or insufficient alternatives, we must call people to arms and actually create an alternative. Matrix/Element is getting very close and we need more people improving the ecosystem.
Element still needs a UX overhaul and voice channels and the basic building blocks are already there then.
At least Cinny is kinda close UI-wise to Discord.
it doesn’t have drop-in voice/video channels though, which is the #1 USP for Discord for gamers.
As an element user for about a year: the biggest thing element needs is to make E2E actually work consistently. Every day I see random “can’t decrypt this message for some reason” errors, and it makes me embarrassed whenever I convince someone to try using Matrix instead of proprietary platforms and then I have to tell them I can’t read their messages and the first three things we tried to fix it didn’t work. This is the biggest reason why I want to abandon Matrix for good as soon as possible, and am working on creating another federated chat protocol.
element (like discord) is using an electron wrapper, which is awful and there is no way around it. what we need is a real client. nheko is far behind in features, so if anything, we need more people involved in improving that client.
Nheko is the best alternative that I know for the desktop scene. Tbh I hate electron apps.
I used to use Mirage (fancy interface, multi-account, i liked it except for lack of support for edits and reactions) until one day it had some weird error connecting to my homeserver and no matter what I tried I could never get it to connect again, even while other clients could. Even tried reinstalling Mirage and removing and readding my account but I could never get it to connect again so I was forced to switch back to Element.
If you use GitHub, consider SourceHut or Codeberg. If you use Twitter, consider Mastodon instead. If you use YouTube, try PeerTube. If you use Facebook… don’t.
That last bit gave me a chuckle :D
About Discord, what is actually the appeal of using it? The short time I used it was always a huge hassle, with millions of captchas on every login. Then you need to answer weird questionnaires to join communities. And in the end the content was pretty mediocre. Plus the format sucks, you cant really read old messages (like you could do in a forum or on Reddit/Lemmy). And for new messages, it goes way too fast once a few people are participating. Its like combining the worst aspects of a forum with the worst aspects of a chat.
Discord combines a lot of use cases in to one package. You get voice chat, modern chatrooms, video sharing/streaming, direct messages, group messages/calls etc.
But more importantly it operates on a paradigm where a user joining a “server” means you join all the channels automatically, and access to certain channels can then be revoked or gated instead of granted. This is the exact opposite of what, for example IRC had done (and what Matrix/Element still does to a large extent), and it fosters communities as one group of people can have an n amount text/voice channels dedicated to different conversational topics. This is very useful, even if it’s just for a friend group of 5 people. It is no wonder FOSS projects use Discord when it is so useful for it.
Ironically, what Discord does would work incredibly well as a decentralized system. I cannot believe it’s taking this long for the FOSS community create an alternative.
