To make it clear to those who are misunderstanding: that’s a list of companies that host matrix for you. They do it at a good price.
If you and your friends chip, it’ll be a few bucks a pop per month to have your own private server with voice chat rooms and video chat rooms.
It’s all opensource and contributes to the ecosystem. Best of all, no age verification because the data is yours.
This kind of lack of perspective is why open services always struggle. It seems like it’s the only tool the advocates of it use since they fall into the “I have a hammer to everything that isn’t a nail doesn’t matter” trap.
This post could have been a list of free instances to join. But instead it offers people to learn hosting and sysadmin stuff.
I’m sure there will be a bunch of replies trying to teach me how easy it is… But I am a sysadmin. I’m not your audience, and some people don’t see a difference.
People who use corporate platforms do it because it’s easy. Joining matrix instances is pretty easy. Presenting Matrix like people need to host servers to use it is detrimental.
It does not. The post says paying for a hosted matrix server. That means you pay for somebody to host it. There’s nothing more to it.
The full discord nitro plan costs 10$/month. That can get you a server for your friends and you can communicate with other servers. If everybody chips in, it’s the cost of discord nitro minimum if you’re 5 friends.
I think they’re complaining you don’t list where to host it/managed hosting.
This is also why bluesky picked up over all the other twitter alternatives. The average user doesn’t want to learn all this shit, they just want to use something that works (which in that situation is unfortunate, because Mastodon is right there and works perfectly fine out of the box with their default public instance, but it is what it is I guess).
Realistically I don’t see Matrix picking up as a widespread discord clone. Just the entire idea of Matrix needing a protocol and having different clients to choose from is enough to turn a lot of folks away from it. Meanwhile, Stoat is practically building a 1:1 discord clone, and is much easier for the average user to understand.
This isn’t that, though.
OP’s link is to a list of companies you can pay to host a matrix instance for you, so you don’t have to deal with any of the hosting yourself.
But I agree most people would be sufficiently served by an account on a public instance.
Yeay its maybe not that bad. Sorry I think I might be chasing the argument. I’m an old bastard who still has friends on IRC from 35 years ago and they STILL argue IRC serves the role of Twitter, discord, etc. I share their passion but more often than not I feel like they turn away allies.
I’m also still in some IRC channels from way back, and I can’t deny I hate what discord did to the IRC community. (“Look how they massacred my boy…”)
Of course, Discord pulled it off for a good reason - the experience was seamless, featureful, rich, and modern - none of which IRC can claim. And it’s only cantankerous sticks in the mud such as I who care about ideological concerns like interoperability and open standards.
And another thing that Discord did is to absolutely explode the channel count. In the IRC days, a particular community or friend group would make do with one single channel. But that group moves to Discord, and suddenly creates a general channel, announcements channel, music channel, games channel, cooking channel - all for one single friend group, and multiply that by the number of groups you are in - because the Discord model permitted it and made it frictionless.
And I think that’s why for some people who use Discord at the moment, it wouldn’t be enough to simply have a channel on a public Matrix instance. People are used to having a whole ‘server’ to themselves (of course discord ‘servers’ aren’t servers, but let’s set that aside) and so they’d need at least a ‘space’ in Matrix, being the more reasonably named analogue.
How do hosts of those instances afford to make them free?