this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2026
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Oh by gods just fucking do it! All year I've had friends say shit like this, but then it turns out me and one friend of mine were the only ones with the balls to do it.
We set up a Matrix server for everyone, but then the excuses come rolling in, and they're still going "I will close down my Discord account...! If it gets any worse..."
Edit: anyway, they're not my friends anymore. I had hoped they were better people. They certainly talk like better people.
Many people are exhausted, lazy, do not actually have any real principles or discipline, and are unwilling to endure inconvenience.
Unreliable entitled self-centered hypocrites.
I am glad you realized your former friends were lacking in character. It sucks to lose friends, but in the long run, bad people will just drag you down to their own level of miserable mediocrity.
It's hard to leave when a huge chunk of your interpersonal connections are tangled in its web. It's the same reason Facebook and Twitter still exist.
That's part of the reason why these platforms have such high valuations per capita, opposed to non- or less-social apps. There's a lot of momentum.
I host a Matrix server myself and even I still use Discord more because that's where people are. Matrix has its own issues and, frankly, it's a shitshow; discord offers a lot of features with better UX and it has a lot of people.
The only reason Skype and team speak died* was because Discord provided a better value. Now it has the momentum, and the only way it will die is if something else offers even more value. Enshitification helps shift, but the momentum fights against it; momentum is like a small multiplier on top of its feature value.
Even if the app enshitifies, even if their base value drops; the product is still larger because of the userbase. So it becomes a chicken and egg problem. Until an inflection point is hit, their sheer mass buys them room to enshittify.
People who can walk away early are the exception, not the rule. It's why people still use Reddit more than Lemmy. I may get some hate for this, but I don't think the people on Lemmy are inherently "better." There are selection biases, and I'm sure that holds true by some metrics, but not in totality.
"If everyone accelerated at the same time, there wouldn't be a traffic jam" is true, but that's not how the world or its people work; you just need to come to terms with that before you can do anything about it.
Edit: speech to text typos. Probably missed some.
For what it's worth, I use it daily with no significant trouble.
I guess it depends on your usage patterns.
My complaints are mostly about UX and privacy. If all you need is simple messaging, it works fine if not just a little clunky. I hate signal as far as I'm concerned it's basically a sigint op; but I'd usually recommend it if the simple messaging case is all you care about.
For matrix, the client landscape is a clusterfuck and feature adoption is lousy at best. How those features are communicated to a user is plainly bad, or lacking even in the best cases.
Use element and try to make a voice call with your friends: Is it encrypted? How do you know? Is it only the one-on-one call or is the Jitsi group encrypted too? Just TLS or e2e and when can your homeserver or other federated servers see? What about video streams? message reactions? Are media attachments? On disk? Has there been any work at all towards obfuscating or otherwise protecting metadata? What relays are being used and for what features? On and on and on.
All of these questions have answers. The problem is that they are communicated very differently and the answers vary per feature, per client, per room.
I vaguely remember, when I was testing clients, a one-to-one call had encryption drop silently because the other client didn't support it, and there was no visual signal of that fact in the app at all. Frankly, it's just disturbing.
And that's just the technical things that I care about, that I don't want to dig into the source code or pull out wireshark for. Normies care less, but will get tripped up by the recovery key and verification systems before even having to worry about that. Not to mention that the key hygiene of most people is absolutely terrible. Even some of my very technical sysadmin friends wind up with a bunch of unused device identities in their chains; some clients don't even show them at all.
/matrix rant
But yeah it's a fine substitute for discord if you're willing to give up some features. With a good home server, it can be pretty painless day-to-day.
The issue is many groups only have a presence on Discord, like community groups. I'm part of a couple local communities, and there's no way you're going to get hundreds of people to migrate over without something that affects functionality in a major way finally prompting people to make the switch.
This feels relevant for those people
Maybe, but I think it really boils down to convenience and ease of use. People will stick around until the pain of moving to a new platform is less than the pain of staying there.
Yes. I agree. Lol.
Another one for you. Basically, it's gas prices for the individualists:
I think you're preaching to the choir though. Most people on Lemmy aren't here because its got the best memes OE anything. It just sucks when it seems like almost everyone in your life shrugs at doing the right thing because it is inconvenient.
Yeah, I agree. Like I said with the first one though, I think it's relevant to those people who choose not to support their friends, not so much us here.
"It's one more app" was the answer I got with signal. "I don't want one more app." Not an hour later we talked about how they had just downloaded like 4 different airline apps. But one app for me was too much?
Presumably they don't have to open all those apps every time they want to chat to their friends, i.e. every day. Presumably they think friendship with you is a two-way street and that you'll hear their needs and reach a compromise in a way that is impossible with a big corporation like an airline.
But more than any of that, people reference their behaviour to what everyone else is doing. You're the outlier because you're asking for something that none of their other friends ask for.
Checks out.
You ask someone to see or find some cool alternative thing you've been using, they'll insist it's either one more app or come up with excuses to stay with the corporate thing. It's always the corporate thing.
Literally this whenever I mention what Discord has been caught with.
My friend reached out to some people I used to know on Discord now that it's AI and age verification is finally fully active, and the response he got was "I know, but, I didn't notice any change".
This comic is referring to holding positions in political context where there is an active genocide being perpetrated by the US on 2 fronts both in Gaza and at home via ICE detention centers. Comparing it to people who are struggling to find a rellacement for a chat app because of age verification is either a gross misue of your ability to comprehend analogy, or you really see consumption on par with mass violence and terrorism.
Maybe you need to sit this out for a bit.
Using Discord is giving your data to AI for its training and to the American government, which is enacting all these terrible things. Ergo, staying on Discord because going onto Matrix is mildly inconvenient is taking a privileged and complacent political stance.
Even if America wasn't doing these things and Discord wasn't feeding your data to them, using Discord with their they AI scanning all your messages and activities is still being tolerant towards authoritarian surveillance.
And Matrix isn't the only option out there
and good ole IRC
More fragmentation isn't really a selling point of alternatives to a market player with a big critical mass and network effects.
Fluxer is still behind on Matrix with clients like Sable.
Sable used to be behind on Fluxer, but Sable made a lot of updates over the months, and Fluxer is more or less currently focusing entirely on the mobile app, while missing some rather important key features, like Federation and E2EE for private chats.
Fluxer is, however, far more easy to set up a self hosted server with. You cna get it done within an hour.
For anyone else thinking about Matrix for public chat rooms, consider setting them up without encryption. This will remove friction for your less patient and less technical users, and may avoid frustrating glitches in some client apps.
There's not really much point in encrypting a public room anyway, so you might as well keep it simple. The client-to-server connection will still be encrypted, which is the same level of privacy that Discord has. (And you can enable encryption on a room later if you want.)
And for the love of all the gods, don't make an account on Matrix.org and complain that it's slow and sluggish. You cannot and should not treat Matrix like a centralised service.
I do agree, but the thing is vendor lock-in is real. Indoctrination by the powerful capitalists does wonders for masses to never leave the app at all. It really takes a changed mindset to switch to alternatives or to quit it entirely.
Vendor loyalty, or letting yourself be in what is essentially an abusive relationship with a corporate product who doesn't even care you exist, is something ill never understand.
I am still waiting on the teamseak6 fixing the linux screen share or fluxer allowing the desktop app connect to my self hosted server. Then I will leave this ahit behind. Both features should release soonish