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.
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?
Any providers that have hosted Matrix servers?
Cooool. Now just convince everyone else on discord and we’re good.
What’s that, you say? You can’t? You’re still trying to convince people to get off Facebook after 10 years? Huh.
From everything I’ve seen matrix is not comparable to Discord, but instead like a slightly amped Signal. What am I missing?
Actually I did just ask the same thing, and the TL;DR is that most clients do handle it as signal with group chat folders. Cinny does look like Discord, but currently lacks voice calling. It’s currently web only with PWA support for mobile, though.
Okay, then if it really is not discord, or to be specific, not self-hosted discord (because I don’t care about the upfront cost of self-hosting), then I’m gonna start ignoring these matrix posts because they seem to be trying to convince people who want - someone in your link used burgers as a metaphor - A burger to instead get a hot dog.
I don’t want a hot dog.
I’m on over 40 Discord servers. And yes I had one for my own group which I moved to Matrix. That still means I’m in over 40 Discord servers. Plus I also run Matrix.
People pay for Discord Nitro?
I pay for Discord Nitro because it’s where the vast majority of the people I have real interactions with online are and I like being able to send my own emojis outside of my own server. I also like having better audio and video quality for my server’s voice chat. Dumb, maybe, but it’s literally less than a club cover fee per month.
wait for the free trial, sign up with it using like a gift card that has a few cents on it or an empty paypal account. trial lasts like 2 weeks but you’ll get more than a month as they email you daily “we can’t charge your account, you’ll lose nitro in 3 weeks”
Repeat this every time they offer you a trial, which they will, without verifying that you’ve already had a free trial. I’ve had Nitro for months doing this and have never paid them a dime.
Seems like a lot of hassle to go through for something I absolutely don’t care for.
The higher file size limitations are pretty handy for sending videos and high res pictures in chat
I’d rather not deal with those arbitrary limitations. And be nickel-and-dimed at every turn.
But why?
dumb reasons really. I like having an animated avatar but don’t want to pay for it. It’s stupid I know.
Haha, hey at least you recognize it for what it is. Can’t knock you for that. Eff it, enjoy your animated avatar. Don’t let anyone take that away from you.
Actually, I privately think ill of someone when I see they have Nitro, because I don’t care for the corporation ever since they took My username
Unfortunately, yes.
I dunno, I recently read it’s not that simple and feasible.
I read somewhere that you’re wrong.
I think I read what I just wrote back to myself.
It’s settled then. That human is wrong, and should probably be mocked for that.
