Can someone explain to me why some communities do their communication using something like Matrix? I’m a member of some open source/ tech channels on Matrix that I am somewhat interested in or need suppport from. Every time I check my app I have line 1k unread messages. Like, does anyone have the time to read all that? Besides trying to find if a question I have has already been answered is pretty cumbersome.
That doesn’t mean I don’t think Matrix is great, but it just doesn’t seem like the best fit for that application
Discord is cancer for having any meaningful discussions in larger communities. I don’t understand the appeal outside of casual chatting or asking a quick question that might get noticed and responded to during busy chat floods.
My master’s program uses slack over the built in forums and it enrages me to no end. If I need help I need to put the course channel and search for the week I’m on and hope useful info didn’t make a typo. So terrible.
Discord is absolutely TERRIBLE as a support forum, yet still that’s what it gets used for.
Apple released Sonoma 14.1 today, which, as it turns out, doesn’t play nicely with OpenCore Legacy Patcher. So loads of people tried to install it on their unsupported Macs, only to find it failing to boot. Myself included.
If OCLP’s support was a regular ol’ forum, they could have put a sticky at the top warning people that something was off and to await a fix. But Discord ain’t a forum, so the post the admins put in the Announcements section was almost completely ignored by the hundreds of users who flooded the support boards asking why their Mac was bricked.
Any useful information was lost in the noise of folks panicking. Because Discord is wholly unsuited to being used as a support forum. But still people insist on using it that way.
I largely agree with you, but does the Discord forum channel not do what you ask? Aside from that, personally I have had greater degrees of success finding weird random issues and their solutions through Discord, most likely because it’s just “easier” for people to say they have a problem on the platform. 50% of the time they never bother responding to assistance/provide useful details, but at least they’re somewhat searchable.
The reason to use a discord/matrix is the same reason to use social media. You aren’t going to read and engage with every single message. You are going to pop back in, respond to something that seems interesting, and then go on with your life.
From a support perspective? It is no different than message boards. You have a few knowledgeable (possibly paid) individuals and then you rely on The Community to help debug a lot of it.
Yeah I guess, but because it’s so linear all the discussions are running through each other and messy. So if someone asked a question I’m interested in I then have to read a whole lot of messages to see if maybe someone said something relevant about it.
Also, the messages are not indexed by search engines, which has its advantages, but for a tech/ support channel it doesn’t make much sense.
I don’t use matrix specifically (basically everything I have seen that uses it comes across as “shady”, at best) but discord very much has a search functionality in each chat channel. Same with slack.
But also: What magical wonderland of tech support do you live in where people read context and don’t just make the same suggestion hundreds of times in a row?
Yeah seems really weird that a service with 2/3rds or more of the users than Discord is completely unknown to me or any of my fellas on the group discord when I asked them.
Can’t tell if I am falling out of touch, the service is aimed at a completely different demographic than me, or these numbers are bullshit.
I’m going to assume the bridged users count as well, but a lot of it is going to be private organizations.
Element is used by entities where safety of communications is critical, like NATO, the United Nations, the US Department of Defense, the German Armed Forces, the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the UK Ministry of Defense, and the French Government.
It’s used by a lot by organisations who want an alternative to Slack/Teams. Have a look at the client list for Element, arguably the biggest Matrix client/platform - element.io
And as someone else mentioned there’s also a huge influx of IRC folks especially in the last year.
A lot of IRC communities migrated, and it’s pretty much the go to option now if you want live communications for your project or org, but don’t want something proprietary. It’s a pretty good replacement for Teams or Slack.
Many communities went back to IRC, though, because Matrix still is a hot mess, and the most visible ones which didn’t (Mozilla, KDE, …) are not hosting their own Matrix instance but letting New Vector do that for them, which makes in practice a disproportionate amount of users and accounts be managed by a single organization. I do think it’s better than discord, but barely so.
I think they’re aimed at very different demographics. In my experience, Discord is full of people who call themselves server admins when they moderate a group while Matrix-admins is actually self-hosting their own servers.
I have been running my own server for a few years now. I would describe it more as an alternative for What’s App or Signal than an alternative to discord. I think it’s more used in a professional/and or government setting for organisations who need to run their own services.
Also, Matrix is just the protocol behind it and there are quite a few different clients for it, the most popular one is element. Lemmy.world also has a link to their Matrix instance.
Matrix is great as a discord alternative, I’d just wish it wouldn’t light my Server on fire every time I open element. Like I can live stream 4K to multiple people over that thing, but reading messages takes 30 seconds of fan screaming?
For this reason I hope the element X rewrite also replaces element on desktop eventually. The element X beta android app is so much snappier than element with the new sliding sync, it’s supposedly 6000x faster but it just feels on par with signal or any other performant app, not being impacted by how many rooms you’re in or how big those rooms are anymore.
Sliding sync is just your client running on the server. Now your server’s load is even worse. If you self host, well, too bad. Be a New Vector customer I guess?
It still has the issue that joining a popular channel can bury a server for a couple of hours whilst it downloads the entire history since it was created (hillariously trying to connect to thousands of servers that no longer exist… the error log was… impressive).
The new protocol was announced on here recently but synapse is stull running the old protocol with a proxy in front and the proxy just means clients can log off whilst it’s updating, it doesn’t fix the issue.
It’s probably fine if you don’t federate it, but I could just use my IRC server for that…
Don’t ever bring this to the people in charge or you might be told “sorry for that” “but now it’s been fixed, deployed any week now” “you are a liar, this has never been true” and “it doesn’t really matter for the general case” either in the same post or few responses apart. Matrix has been in a permanent state of unstable mess, and the leadership disingenuous attitude made me lose hope that this will ever change. More people should start reading through the fanfare and superlative blog posts, which, admittedly is the thing they do the best and much better than the other projects out there.
I tried the app but it doesn’t even have a way to register an account. Nor any directions in doing so. I went to matrix.org, nothing there either. I had to Google it. Which led me to app.element.io. So I tried to register and it failed. I’ll give it another year to develop and see how things are going.
people have gotten used to the way registering for a service works: 1. Install app 2. Use Google or Facebook quick login
Although many apps ( we call them Clients ) support this “usage trajectory”, some understanding of how this service works is a good thing, and saves you a lot of trouble later on
One major advantage of these decentralized services, is they give freedom back to the user, freedom of choice and freedom of speech…
Many services trap you into using their ecosystem ( uhm rEddiT… ), we don’t do that here! If you don’t like a particular client, or find it buggy, choose another one…
And while these clients ( aka apps ) chose a default server for you ( for convenience ), it is best to select a different one… why ?
many reasons, maybe you don’t like the moderation, maybe the server being US based is problematic to you, ( subject to one of the stupid acts, e.g. Cloud Act ), also it can be safe for others, smaller servers are less likely to be a target for hackers
Also, you didn’t mention which client you used, I assume you used Element ( or Element X ), Element is buggy and slow, the devs are working on Element X, once they finish Element X will become Element
Matrix misrepresenting its users base… By counting users that ever connected once, test accounts, spam accounts, bot accounts, bridged accounts, single ever used nicks… as a marketing strategy to give an illusion of relevance… that would be a first! /s
Although many clients use the Matrix protocol, the foundation suggests new users pick up the ElementX app, which incorporates all the latest features and reflects what Matrix 2.0 can achieve.
The Element X is a stripped-down messenger app built based on the standard Element but completely rewritten for performance.
Don’t install “Element X” as it’s their beta app. They already have released a normal one called just “Element” from same company. Element X doesn’t have any way to sign up, so it’ll just be super confusing.
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