I will be upfront with this, and say that I’ve never been a huge fan. But I did reinstall a Matrix server, and some clients to see if it’d gotten better in the year or so since I’ve last used it.
This just… Kind of feels like a more centralized XMPP with group chat folders that sort of function? The spaces feature is neat, but I’ve tried 4-5 clients, and every single one of those throws all of them into the same screen as the DMs by default, and I can’t find a way to change that.
Am I missing something here? Like. I want to at least see what people like here, I just can’t.
Omg I love this thread and this post. Sometimes I feel like everyone is crazy when they suggest alternative software.
People will be like “hey the best burger place in town closed can anyone recommend an alternative?”
And then a bunch of farmers show up like “yeah dude buy this calf and then just raise it real quick and also plant some trees to get wood for your smoker, you have a smoker right? Anyways yeah it’s so easy bro I don’t even know why anyone buys corporate burgers tbh.”
And you say “hmmm okay sounds like a lot of work but I guess I can try it?”
And you try it and it’s the shittiest blandest burger and it doesn’t even have any sauce or lettuce or tomatoes because fuck you those things are for corporate burgers and if you want to complain why don’t you open up a tomato branch and start contributing tomatoes then and waaah waaah why won’t the stupid normies eat my shitty burger that takes 6 months to make and doesn’t have ketchup waaaaah it must be because everyone is dumb and lazy
Unfathomably based take. Holy shit.
I 100% agree with you and at the same time it’s important to remember that a lot of FOSS software is written by individuals as hobby projects. Implementing features, keeping everything up to date and secure, documentation and testing takes time, effort and skill.
Most people need money to survive so they have a full time job and can only dedicated very limited resources to these projects.
Too many people got used to free services that “just work” and forgot that they are the product now. If you don’t want that look for alternatives that charge (even then you might still be the product) or better yet donate to open source projects in the hopes they will one day be on-par with their closed alternatives (there’s examples where this worked). Until we have a UBI and people have the time to dedicate themselves to a cool project this is the only way.
I think it would be even better if companies and governments started shifting funds back to these projects when they switch from commercial to FOSS software (which is happening more recently) but most just happily pocket the savings and this will not change until a fundamental cultural shift happens
Yeah that does give me a lot of patience with a lot of FOSS in general, though as far as I can tell that’s never really applied to Matrix in particular. It was initially started by Amdocs, an Israeli communications firm, and then they gave it to a UK group that formed a company, and then crowd funded it.
Or a legal one. If it were cheaper to enforce licenses FOSS devs would actually be able to use a separate personal/commercial license in order to actually get companies/governments to pay them, while still allowing them to be free for personal use. It’s not exactly what WinRAR did (we were all breaking the TOS), but it’s practically what they did. The problem is that FOSS devs don’t have lawyer money, and you need lawyer money to do that
I don’t think (and also wouldn’t want) that this should be solved by the legal system. It would mean open source developers would have to deal with the whole legal side and implement telemetry into software which largely goes against the idea of many open source projects. How else would you be able to know that a company used your software?
You definitely have a point here. Software has to be usable if it going to have wide adoption by the people. Sometimes I see recommendations being thrown around without even thinking of it fits the needs and/or user expertise and willingness to make something work. But to be clear, just because one piece of software does not fit your needs does not mean it has to be changed to fit your needs. But if it is complex, clunkly and/or unintuitive, it is only going to be usable by a niche. And if this is the case, stop telling your grandma to spin a matrix server or xmpp and do not tell her she is an idiot because she does not have the expertise or time to make it work.
I’m not even personally opposed to getting my hands dirty (I run Arch and Emacs ffs) my bigger issue is that this just… Doesn’t feel like a Discord replacement. It feels more like a texting replacement out of the box. Someone pointed out you can make it not show all of the rooms in the DMs list, which would bring it closer to what I expect from a discord alternative.
I think it’s on the way there, but it’ll be a while on the order of years. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to self-host either.
It’s not a Discord replacement, full stop. Someone could make a Matrix client that was a Discord replacement, but no one has even attempted to do so as far as I know. Element (the reference client) was very clearly a Slack replacement. I know because I literally moved my small company to it from Slack. I think that Discord’s continued enshittification could lead to someone making such a client either for Matrix or XMPP. That being said, making something like this isn’t a small project and I wouldn’t expect one soon if one comes at all.
Discord hating rant here: Discord is kind of weird as far as these sorts of services go tbh. Its “weirdness” is part of why I have always has a dislike of it (the bigger part of why is the jerky users and company, just like Telegram). It focuses heavily on VoIP and video screen sharing in a way that most chat services so not, but is also a heavily emoji/sticker/whatever filled chat service. It was clearly made for the shit talking gamer crowd and it honestly excels there. If it had stayed there in that niche, I’d think nothing of it. Then many FOSS projects and small companies then decided to use it in lieu of a proper support forum, probably because they were already were, or had previously been, shit talking gamers and used it all the time.
Someone else pointed out Cinny, which is… Pretty close to a discord replacement on Matrix, actually. Also I know Stoat mentioned a few federation options that they’d use if they ever do federate (not on the roadmap), with XMPP being the one it seemed like they’d favor.
Also ngl it doesn’t even seem like Matrix would be a good slack replacement, unless the UI you’re using makes it more slack-like
Re: Discord section, yeah… I liked discord at the start. It was mostly for voice calls, with a decent chat interface (based on IRC’s). Then it started getting used wildly inappropriately, which annoyed me, and then all of the horrific privacy stuff came up and it’s just… Ah. Whelp. This ship’s sinking fast.
I should say that Element looks like it was heavily inspired by the OG Slack UI as it was at a specific point in time probably 7-8 years ago. Slack’s UI started getting tweaked and enshittified quite a bit, especially after Salesforce bought them. So I can totally get not seeing the direct resemblance, but as someone that was forced to be on Slack for a decade, Element felt like “ahh old Slack” in a good way, though obviously not exact.
Ahh, okay, we only started using Slack at work a couple of years ago, so I don’t remember the old UI