this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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Privacy
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The popularity of this tool is bonkers. Even conferences sometimes "create a discord".
It's easy to use, it's fast, it's cross-platform, it's free, it's capable of streaming E2EE video at high resolution and low latency to dozens to hundreds of people at the same time. That's not something you can say about many competitors.
Matrix is the same and no one wants to use it. Why?
Matrix has been struggling with the "fast" part of the equation for a long time, and it's more complex, technical, and visually overbearing than Discord.
For just one example, servers. In Discord, a "server" is the second level of hierarchy just below the app itself. Underneath that there are channel groups, then channels. The structure is simple, and a hierarchy is simple.
In Matrix, a server is something that runs an instance, and instances crosscut channels and channel groups. It's no longer necessarily clear which server "hosts" a channel, or how to correctly refer to it when inviting friends, or how mechanisms of censorship might work if someone gets kicked out of an instance, or federation is disrupted, etc.
Its not fast or easy to use.