Asking because I value opinions here.
Personally I don’t think anyone can influence what the general audience of chat users ultimately coalesces around. That’s going to happen, and it’s going to be out of anyone’s control as people discuss and compare and decide which they prefer of the dozens of alternatives appearing.
This however looks interesting to me. I know it’s not Matrix and thus not secure like everyone here wants. But it is fully open source and it is AGPLv3.
It feels like it’s getting some traction and interest. If it has problems that anyone here can spot (besides the full encryption which isn’t something the rest of the discord users looking to leave are going to demand), I am interested in hearing them.
Matrix already exists, so… why?
i hate matrix… its an unintuitive mess. we need more of an IRC type experience rather than that jumbled mess of whatever its trying to do
I don’t understand this take, I have two matrix accounts in different servers and have played with a handful of clients, and the only issues I’ve run into have been either of my own making or due to impatience.
Not an experience that is ever going to find mass appeal. It’s good for security but it’s not going to get wide adoption like this.
I am not looking for the most secure one, I’m looking for what’s most likely to get adopted at scale. I have ruled matrix options out. What matters is community adoptions, subreddits that make a discord, twitch streamers that make a discord, patreons that make a discord, youtubers that make a discord. The next app that is mass adopted will be determined by these communities coalescing around an alternative and making the switch.
realistically, they’re mostly going to grumble about ID verification but ultimately stay on Discord, for the same reasons people are still using the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
I will say, every encryption issue I’ve encountered has been fixable either by giving it a moment to think or by restarting my chat client, which isn’t too different from when Discord has periodic blips.
I don’t think so. Groups that want to chat go where community leadership determines they go. If people want to participate in the x twitch streamer’s off-stream chat they are forced to go where that community decides to be. They do not have to follow an audience by going to discord, they make the audience go where they prefer. They don’t get the audience from discord, discord gets the audience from them.
For this reason chat programs are uniquely vulnerable to people going elsewhere. They have no inherent audience of their own, they are not social networks, they are tools and they can be replaced by another tool at literally any moment. People will run discord and an alternative side by side until they can drop discord altogether. That’s exactly how other chat tools died historically as well.
Messaging particularly benefits from a smooth UX and I think matrix has accepted certain trade offs for the aspects it’s strong in.
Matrix’s UX has a bit of friction, but that’s the cost of an open, federated, encrypted platform where you own your own encryption keys. Every closed-source, centralized alternative is very much a “trust me bro” situation when it comes to message encryption and backdoors.
Element sucks as a client, I always recommend FluffyChat or SchildiChat to first-timers. On desktop/web, Cinny and Commet are fantastic options for people who want a Discord-like UI.
I’m not an engineer or programmer so I’m ignorant, but I use Delta Chat as a Whatsapp replacement and its 500x less friction than Matrix when it comes to usability but also security. Everything is encrypted by default and it leaks much less metadata. I don’t know what it is about their encryption implementation, but everything works in Delta, so I’m left to wonder what is their problem that they can’t get a handle on this and also implement basic features people have asked for for years? When they do put them in, they make boneheaded decisions like defaulting to your camera on for Video Calls and no option to change defaults for on/off. Zoom has been sitting right there to copy these things from. If Signal is encrypted in any meaningful capacity and not backdoored, it also doesn’t have any of the encryption issues Matrix users seem to run into.
Delta Chat looks fascinating, it’s literally email-based with some extra bits and bobs to make it behave like chat software.
If anyone is checking it out, I recommend Arcane Chat for Android. It’s from one of Delta developers but it’s their own frontend. I use it on my phone and the regular Delta flatpak on my computer. Never any problems syncing.
Right that’s the vibe I have too. I’ve heard deltachat is a decent replacement for self-hosted messaging.
Edit: after reading more about deltachat, it seems like it is pretty well suited to being Hexbear’s main messenger instead of matrix, no? It is almost a Signal replacement where I don’t need a phone number to sign up.
I might give it a go, but it sounds like it isn’t a replacement for a heavy duty messenger like Discord/Slack, unforuntately.
I would say it’s more of an instant messenger replacement for something like Signal or WhatsApp. I migrated all my family to it from Signal. I mostly brought it up to mention that it really seems like the Matrix developers are bad at their jobs when other apps are out there that don’t have the UI and encryption problems Matrix has.