About Matrix Matrix is an open protocol for decentralised, secure communications.

Matrix Manifesto We believe:

People should have full control over their own communication. People should not be locked into centralised communication silos, but instead be free to pick who they choose to host their communication without limiting who they can reach. The ability to converse securely and privately is a basic human right. Communication should be available to everyone as a free and open, unencumbered, standard and global network.

  • Rokin@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I like Matrix but it’s far from Discord right now

    • half@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That’s a good thing. Discord is chugging its way through the last half of the Web 2.0 service to social media pipeline. It’s a VC-funded multimedia enterprise extended around a novel technology core optimized for its original service offering, real-time voice/text. Nobody is immune to bloat, but because Matrix is a protocol standard, not an app, users have the option of sticking with minimal clients and servers that won’t (necessarily) get destroyed by feature creep.

      If you’ve tried Element and thought “ah, slow Discord,” maybe have a scroll through https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/. I don’t want to get off topic but all my favorite software is standard/specification-based.

        • Anomalous_Llama@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Me and my boys have been using discord for years now to chat while we game and maybe stream what we’re doing just to each other.

          Discord has added features and shit I suppose but I haven’t changed how I use it at all since I first started.

          • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            Part of the reason I hate it now is they refuse to support Linux. In fact their support in general is pretty crappy.

              • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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                1 year ago

                On top of what the other guy said, it just doesn’t behave like a Linux app. It doesn’t respect the package manager, if there’s a new version but the package hasn’t been updated yet, the app just refuses to launch. Like the developers literally won’t even let you use the app if it’s not the current version.

                It’s also a electron app, so it doesn’t respect the window manager either. It has to have it’s own special window decorations that don’t match, and when I used i3 (tiling window manager) it was very difficult to get it to work normally in my setup like every other app did with no effort.

                Finally, it asks for super user access! Why in the name of unholy fuck is a userland app demanding administrative powers on my computer?

                • JusnJusn@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Funny you say that, I actually just noticed that today. I tried launching it and it refused to let me use it until I updated. It was super annoying.

                • apprehensively_human@lemmy.ca
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                  1 year ago

                  There was a bug with screen sharing sound on Linux (and maybe macOS as well?) for a LONG time, like years, before it was eventually fixed.

                  Wait, this was fixed? I haven’t been bothering with screen sharing because I thought this was still an issue.

            • kameecoding@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I mean I am not a fan of discord, but it’s just an Electron app, like Spotify, isn’t it? meaning you can just open it in a browser you probably have running anyways

    • Silkscreen
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      1 year ago

      The good thing is that Discord is actually kinda bad when compared to Guilded and Slack. It won’t be hard to catch up to Discord, since most of the features they add are fluff and not really needed.

      What we need are the more robust features that Guilded has.

  • PlexSheep@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Matrix isn’t the alternative for discord. Others have been named.

    Matrix is a chat with a high regard for encryption, more an alternative to Whatsapp and signal then discord.

    • themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Matrix is considerably more like discord than both Whatsapp or signal.

      You can get a WhatsApp/signal experience out of it but overall it is very similar to discord

        • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          Yes. There is voip. Also video and screen sharing.

          Both could work better, but they’re there, if the client you’re using supports them.

          • Secret300@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Wait since when. I’ve been waiting for VoIP. I am on Cinny tho so that might be why. The changed the way elements works on linux and it’s so cancer to use now

            • ninchuka@lemmy.one
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              1 year ago

              I think cinny is waiting to implement voip when group calls get merged into the spec, currently group calls are done via jitsi

            • manwichmakesameal@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              This is also dependent on who is running the server and how it’s set up. If it’s the matrix.org you’re using, I couldn’t tell you. If it’s someone hosting/you’re self-hosting, you need a STUN server for traversing NAT. It’s not part of the default Synapse docker install and I’m not sure about non-docker installs.

      • CrypticCoffee@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I would agree with this. Purpose of the application rather than technical implementation defines its use. Though it can do many things Signal and WA also do

    • red@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Matrix is the federated alternative to XMPP and IRC first and foremost, imho

      • ninchuka@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        Well xmpp is federated, it’s just slightly more centralised then matrix since if a server goes down the room/muc made on that server goes down as well

    • Kiruko@lemmy.world
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      I too am wondering what makes you say that. What is it missing?

      • vin@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Voice Channels would be a start. Game Streaming is another use-case of Discord my friend group uses which is missing.

        • themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Matrix has voice chat and screen sharing. I don’t think it implements audio passthrough like discord but I could be mistaken.

            • ninchuka@lemmy.one
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              1 year ago

              not yet, they are working on a native group calls stack, so once thats done and stable there will be voice channels in element and other clients

              • flop@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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                1 year ago

                There is a jitsi widget for rooms though, so you can convert any group chat into a drop in/drop out voice room similar to discord’s voice rooms. The biggest struggle I have with it is that it defaults to asking about video every time, and there is no hotkey support. 🤮

                • ninchuka@lemmy.one
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                  1 year ago

                  my friend has used signal, whatsapp, discord bridges with her conduit server and has had 0 issues

  • Fuzzypyro@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I would say it’s a lot more than discord. Putting it that way doesn’t give it as much credit as it deserves. My favorite out of the laundry list of features and benefits is that you can synchronize your messaging across all platforms into a single interoperable client if your choosing. You can use a better standard while not having to bug others to switch.

    • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I just had to go and look this up to get more details

      https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/

      Looks like you need to be hosting your own server, then you can install plugins for separate services. Very cool…

      I’d love to tie together a few different systems I’m using but I worry that the bridges will break every time a platform does an update

      Have long have you been using it? How’s your experience been? What bridges are you using?

      • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
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        1 year ago

        You don’t have to host your own, just join an instance with bridges. That being said, running your own is easy and nice with docker, including the bridges.

        • cousinofjah@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Where would be a good starting point to check out a list of instances with these bridges? And how safe are they?

          • Pika@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            this is why I never got into matrix. I don’t actually know how lol, the page doesn’t list servers available and i don’t really want to just spin up my own just for myself

              • Pika@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                I apperently had tried element out using a matrix.org account at some because when I went on the client I was already logged in, I vaugly remember it but it didn’t really give a great first impression.

                anyway, I decided to look around it again to give it another shot, I really don’t think it’s a good idea to relate it to Discord, the documentation itself says it’s more similar to IRC than Discord. It lacks fairly basic features that you would expect to see in a current day chat service, for permissions example: they do have basic permissions and they’ve stated that more coming but there’s no way to fine tune them for example if you want to give the ability to delete message you need to give the ability for every permission under the below the redact message permission (which is hard set at perm level 50 if I remember right). This in my opinion is actually worse than IRC in that matter, as with IRC I could fine tune someone to have Channel topic editing permissions and the ability to hide that they are there but I didn’t necessarily need to give them disconnect or Banning permissions at the same time and visa versa.

                I’m sure it’s perfect for some pieple but, I’ll stick with modern day implementations till they give a bit more control, but I’m pretty certain with the current spec it’s not possible at this time

          • lieuwex@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 year ago

            Beeper is a paid Matrix server that neatly integrates with many other chat services using a custom GUI specifically designed for integration with third party apps.

      • yamasaur@yamasaur.com
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        1 year ago

        Just sign up for beeper they host all major bridges including imessage and then if you need additional bridges you can self host them

      • ssorbom@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It integrates with jitsi, which is a fairly good tried and proven solution. Meanwhile, The matrix developers are working on their own implementation of voice and video that plays a bit nicer with their room permission system. For one to one conversations, there is a turn-based solution for voice and video.

  • complacent_jerboa@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago
    • matrix isn’t a fediverse thing, it’s its own thing. it does happen to be decentralized, like the fediverse.

    • matrix isn’t an alternative to discord. it’s an alternative to whatsapp/signal/telegram/etc.

    • matrix is nice (I use it with my friend group), but it’s not perfect. we’re looking for something better.

    • if you’re looking for a decentralized, self-hosted, open-source, secure alternative for discord, my friends and I use Mumble. It works great for VoIP (and its noise cancellation software actually seems to work noticeably better than Discord’s), but it doesn’t really have the advanced text chat features that Discord does. We make do with Matrix.

    • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      matrix isn’t an alternative to discord. it’s an alternative to whatsapp/signal/telegram/etc

      Yes and no.

      1. Matrix is a communication standard. More like SMTP, RSS or XMPP than those things. I don’t know why Matrix specifically has this problem because you’ll never see anyone say “I’ve joined ActivityPub”.

      2. Element is by far and away the most popular Matrix client (similar to how Mastodon is the most popular ActivityPub software) and it has “Spaces”, which functions similar to Discord “servers” (not actually servers). Better in some ways but mostly worse. Namely in terms of stability and the function of “spaces” specifically.

    • ech0@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The True selfhosted open source alternative to Discord are Mattermost and RocketChat. My friends and I use both

  • ZephrC@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    There is certainly some overlap in what Discord and Matrix can do, and personally I like Matrix about a thousand times better, but it’s not really a direct replacement. That’s not a criticism. I don’t really even want Matrix to be more like Discord. I just think presenting Matrix as a Discord replacement kinda sells it short and is likely to leave people looking for an alternative to Discord disappointed.

      • ssorbom@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        First, it’s federated, meaning that different instances of discord can talk to each other, much like Lemmy.

        Second, it allows for encryption. Matrix uses the same double ratchet algorithm present in signal.

        Third, joining groups is optional. This is perhaps the biggest user interface difference between discord and matrix. Each conversation exists in a independent channel, or room as they are called. Rooms can be grouped together the way you would see in discord, but they usually exist independently of the groupings. Incidentally, matrix groups are called spaces. There are edge cases where rooms are not independent from spaces, but by and large it is not something most users will have to worry about.

          • ssorbom@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yes. Matrix uses an integrated jitsi widget for voice and video. It is unfortunately not quite as polished as discord for voice and video, but it does work.

            • bouh@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Last time I tried, 3 years ago, jitsi was very much not ready. There were memory leaks, no sleep mode (one processor was fully used 100% of the time) and the video performances were bad (impossible to do a video conference with more than 3 people). How did it improved since then?

      • @lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        On Discord, you cannot host your own server, and you cannot use any third party clients (without the threat of being banned).

        You can host your own Matrix server, either on physical hardware, or a generic virtual machine you can rent from any number of ISPs. There are over a dozen compatible third-party clients (though many lack full feature coverage).

        In summary, Discord is strictly a service. Matrix is a tool you can apply however you see fit.

    • Chickerino@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      And, I guess, in general I am increasingly worried about people with bad opsec. A lot of the “fediverse” discussions are reminding me of the crypto crowd thinking it provides a high degree of security and anonymity because a corporation is not involved. And they really don’t realize just how much power and access instance owners/admins have.

      people should always think that everything they post on the internet can be searchable and viewable by anyone, it is public information

      • ItsMeSpez@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Exactly. Drives me a little crazy seeing all these posts and comments about how the Fediverse has poor privacy. It’s a public forum people, you should be considering everything you say here to be freely accessible information. At no point did anyone promise that your posts and comments would not be available to someone outside the service.

    • iZRBQEcWVXNdnPtTV@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Never say anything over chat/IM that a company knowing would hurt

      I used to work at Discord and I can tell you that this is, painfully, not the norm.

    • sol@thelemmy.club
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      1 year ago

      the orgs that prioritized it were shady as hell

      You literally have no idea who’s behind Discord.

    • Trapping5341@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      And I still wish there were an “open protocol” so that I could use the steam overlay to chat with a buddy playing elden ring on her xbox while I play trepang2 on my PC.

      I’m 99.99% sure that discord released an xbox app so you can chat on discord cross platform now. Haven’t used an xbox in ages though.

      Quick google

    • ninchuka@lemmy.one
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      what do you mean with “all of the orgs that prioritized it were shady as hell”?

    • Venia Silente@lemm.ee
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      And I still wish there were an “open protocol” so that I could use the steam overlay to chat with a buddy playing elden ring on her xbox while I play trepang2 on my PC.

      There are open chat protocols, like XMPP. The issue is corporations either don’t use them, or use them to enshittificate (that’s what happened to XMPP, even. As for open GUI protocols, which is needed for the second part of your message, same issue: there’s open protocols and open toolkits all over the place, but the corps that produce consoles and games won’t use them (or, when they do, they’ll still lock them behind an “ecosystem”).

      tl;dr: choose better (more open) games, and you can have p much all the chat you want.

  • lhx@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It is unfortunately such a PITA to self host. Spent hours a few weeks ago trying to set it up and failed.

    • MeanEYE@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Same experience. I wanted initially to make our own server for our company. So we could chat and communicate. Make public channels for support, etc. It’s such a nightmare to host and after days of trying I gave up. They also had bunch of problems when I tried using it. I even forced all of my developers to use it for work. Messages would get delayed, even lost. Signal is what we currently use for chat and it just works.

    • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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      Uh? You need a DB server/service, and it’s basically a python script that runs in a venv, which can be easily setup on anything vaguely linux related. If you don’t want to bother with the command to setup a venv, there’s also a docker image I believe. We set that up in an emergency when covid restrictions showed up and so far the worst issue we have is sometime the client takes a few minutes to refresh after long breaks.

        • Regular Human@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Bro you’ve just got to disentangle the gigabytes on the flux stack mainframe bro, it’s easy bro

        • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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          The average person does not self-host services yet. And if that comes to be, then yes, it will be common knowledge at that point. There’s also a fairly comprehensive documentation to get anyone with basic knowledge started.

      • lhx@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I tried to run it with the docker image. Still a PITA. I’m not a noob when it comes to self hosting services.

        • mesamune@lemmy.world
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          Same. We had three developers try to make it work for a local makerspace and we failed. The default instructions are too complex ATM. I want to make it work sometime but that experience makes me want to wait. I only have so many weekends.

          IRC is still a thing.

          • Pika@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Ain’t that the truth, IRC was arguably the easiest service for me to set up, it had all the defaults basically set I think I only have the change one or two settijgs and open the ports, anything else was optional and it came with all the bells and whistles (of what you can get out of IRC… lol)

    • tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk
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      Its requirements are insane… My little minipc which easily hosts my lemmy (multiple channels) and mastodon server (follow about 100 people plus retoots) without breaking a sweat couldn’t manage it. Installed matrix and subscribed to one channel and it simply buried the machine… I had trouble getting control back to shut it down.

      sheeet… just switched it back on for a test… 2 minutes in and the load average is >60 & it’s already consumed 14 gigabytes. Idle.

      • NoNatNovember@sopuli.xyz
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        I don’t think that’s normal. I run Synapse and Postgres, and they only take about 200mb of ram together. Load is less than 2% on a 2-core vm.

      • ninchuka@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        give conduit a try its a homeserver implementation written in rust and is alot more lightweight then synapse which is the first HS implementation for matrix

      • lhx@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I spent so much damn time banging my head against the wall with it too. I could host an email server easier and get DKIM and all the various dns configs up and runnjng easier.

    • vext01@lemmy.sdf.org
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      Right. I think we need something simpler.

      I’d be happy with something like irc, but with e2e, history and the ability to receive messages when offline.

      Don’t need stickers, voice chat, video chat etc.

    • ᗪᗩᗰᑎ@lemmy.ml
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      It doesn’t federate though. So if you stand your own “discord” server up, you can’t message anyone and have to ask people to join it. Matrix allows you to not just set up your own server but also interact with everyone else’s servers so you’re not isolated. Revolt is nice, but you’re, like discord, limiting yourself to a single instance who has access to everyone’s data.

      • ninchuka@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        yeah thats the main reason I’ve not given it a try myself, I dont want to have to make an account for every server if lots of projects decide to host it them selves

    • MeowdyPardner@kbin.social
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      Someone needs to hook revolt up to a matrix homeserver. I’m kinda surprised there still isn’t like a discord UI clone matrix client along the lines of how elk.zone is a twitter UI inspired frontend for mastodon. Having not used discord much I’m not sure what’s really missing, maybe it’s just the stricter adherence to spaces on the left bar and the lack of non-current-space-related channels listed above the current space’s channel list.

      Tbh I kinda hate how discord works (and how impossible it feels managing being in 30-40 servers and figuring out which server that doot-doot sound came from when at least 10-15 at a minimum have unread badges even 30 seconds after I mark everything everywhere as read), but I do love the look and feel.

      • hitagi@ani.social
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        I’m kinda surprised there still isn’t like a discord UI clone matrix client

        Check out cinny.in. I use this on my desktop browser and it looks similar to the Discord UI.

  • Mereo@lemmy.ca
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    Matrix is a great beginning… But it is still FAR from Discord right now.

  • jecxjo@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    Matrix is almost there but the last bit might make chat impossible to be federated. And i say this as a matrix user and a server maintainer.

    “Instant messaging” is a service with high demand. When all servers are in one location or have high bandwidth pipes between them its not much of an issue. But once you have a group chat with people on instances all over the place, some running on Raspberry Pis…you might as well be running an email mailing list.

      • ItsMeSpez@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I could very well be am wrong here, but I believe that IRC doesn’t have to solve this problem. IRC functions on a server/client model so someone sets up an IRC server and people connect to it and chat with one another. Every user is just connecting to a single server, rather than having users talking with one another who are not using the same provider. So long as you have a good connection with an IRC server, you will send and receive messages quickly and do not have to worry about messages hopping from one server to another over connections of unknown quality in order to reach their destination.

          • jecxjo@midwest.social
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            1 year ago

            There are a few major differences for IRC.

            First there isn’t any sort of message history or sequencing beyond what is implemented on a server. For IM if your phone is off and you turn it back on all the messages you miss are sent to you. This requires each message to be stored in a database or semi long term storage, keeping track of if everyone in the group had confirmed receiving it. IRC doesn’t track any of that, if you’re not connected you miss out which makes IRC have a lot less overhead.

            The other difference is that server to server was a concept for building a network of location based servers for a single network. Its not federation, but handling user overhead. You don’t have random individuals running their own servers on subpar hardware causing undue stress on the network. You dont have thousands of instances with huge degrees of latency difference to deal with. Server to server was made so you could connect to east.myirc.co and west.myirc.co.

          • ItsMeSpez@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Damn, knew I should have taken the 10 seconds this would have required to google. Thanks for the info!

  • Move to lemm.ee@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Personally I don’t think it’s quite there yet. Element is probably the best Matrix app but not quite at parity for ease of use to a regular user and the general design and feel of discord is better… For now

    I believe it will get there though. We’ve seen the enshittification cycle happen so many times to chat apps historically it’s basically the most inevitable that discord will collapse eventually. Is anyone still using AIM? MSN? Case in point.

    • joel_feila@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I remember how quickly furriea moved from groupme to telegram. Anyone remember skype or oovoo?

      Honestly doscord not being shit already is impressive

      • Chickerino@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        i’d give it one or two years before discord undergoes some serious enshittification, with the way most other social media websites have gone down, presumably due to them not being really profitable anymore, im sure discord will start pushing people into nitro more and more as time goes on, i mean as most other platforms discord is already taking advantage of our data, but so did twitter and look where twitter is going now lol

        • Move to lemm.ee@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Mostly true although I’d caution on the use of “profit” here. Profit isn’t the problem that causes this. Growth is. Almost all of these companies grow using investor money operating at a loss, radically cut costs then sell, netting their investors a packet.

          It’s when the growth slows that the enshittification occurs (via radically cutting costs).

          The only “profit” that matters is at the point of sale for the various company owners that invested.

  • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    I would say it’s more a Slack alternative, Discord does one click screen sharing, streaming, voice rooms, has a soundboard, and other stuff that’s fantastic for friend groups.

  • ryan659@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    I still don’t see why we can’t just use IRC anymore. The protocol itself is old but reliable, and just needs a good client or two to help people compare it to Discord a bit more favourably. Though I suppose the need for a BNC to fully match it is probably a bit much of an ask for most.

    • bamboo@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      IRC not allowing users to receive messages while offline, not having multiple synced clients, not natively supporting media, not supporting voice or video calls makes it a complete non-starter.

    • EthicalAI@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It takes a lot of work to support encryption and it’s definitely not end to end

      It’s not really federated, you make a new account for each server I think.

      needs rich messaging support. At very least markdown. Matrix supports images.