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| title | date | type | tags | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Matrix: Less Degenerate than Discord? | 2021-04-22 | post |
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Originally posted on my old blog
Matrix is great. It's secure. it's decentralized. The perfect free and open source replacement for Discord, right?
Well, there's a few problems with this vision of the future. The first? To put it simply, no one uses Matrix. OK, maybe 100000 people use it at most, but that's nothing compared to the tens of millions of Discord users. The Arch Linux Matrix room recently hit a major milestone: 10000 people. And it's the third largest Matrix room! A sad reminder about how small Matrix still is.
Arch's status as the third largest Matrix room should also send a message about Matrix's current demographics. Most of the top rooms are either cryptocurrency or Linux focused. So if you want to chat with smart people, hang out on Matrix! The thing about all conversations is that they devolve to the lowest common denominator of the participants involved, so Matrix conversations can get pretty degenerate sometimes, but nowhere as idiotic as Discord.
There are occasional spammers, but large rooms usually have mods that will quickly ban them. Basically, never accept a DM from someone unknown and you'll be fine. Also, don't listen to anyone offering free cryptocurrency in public rooms either.
Matrix also has a thriving developer community, and there's some great bot frameworks out there (maybe even better than Discord!) but most public rooms hate bots, so you'll probably get banned.
Well anyways, that's a brief overview of Matrix. It has all the ingredients of a great free and open source chat service: a large hosted server at matrix.org, the option to self-host, a great amount of developer tools, end-to-end encryption, and more. The only thing missing is the people. Until more people start using it, you'll be held hostage to the network effect of other chat services. We've been making some progress, such as the Arch room hitting 10k, but it's a long and difficult road ahead. The vision is there; whether it's possible to accomplish is being answered right now.