Time for a #discord alternatives thread, for no particular reason.

(matrix cont.) You can choose to self-host but not federate, but the major apps don't support multiple accounts, so it feels like an unfederated homeserver has quite limited use.

It's call support is currently in flux, with two methods that different apps support in different ways, plus some calls break out to external services in non-obvious ways.

It also has fundamentally weak moderation tools, at least from a community standpoint, with basically no viable equivalent to roles or scopes.

(matrix cont.) Overall Matrix feels like a brilliant evolution on IRC, in a wonderfully old-school kind of way. Unfortunately that brings with it some goofyness and hard to understand intricacies.

Matrix is one of the few options that lets you self-host *and* still connect with all the other communities, and that's wonderful.

I want it to succeed, and it'll probably be my choice, but it's gonna take work to operate communities in it effectively.

Here's hoping all that was useful to someone. I spent some time looking for a thread/post/blog like this when I first went searching, but couldn't find it, so here's me paying it forward for the next person.

@mdiluz It was helpful to me.

I’m looking to replace a few different Discord communities that operate differently, and I think Zulip might be a good fit for one, and Matrix (& Element) might be a good fit for another.

@shoren18 glad to hear it and good luck!

@mdiluz
Anything else? >:3c

Mac'n'Cheese but you use a bag of store bought elbow macaroni and a can of nacho cheese sauce.

Also I think Matrix might be worth investing some time into. I do miss IRC.

@mdiluz @MossyStone48 Heck yeah

@mdiluz based on their website they seems to have E2E encryption (but not by default)
Thank you for your thread!

@mdiluz As someone who spent almost twenty years on IRC and fled the Freenode implosion in May 2021, I now sort of wish I had stuck it out with Matrix (which was hella jank almost five years ago) instead of going to Discord. I wonder how/if this will impact how we run REAC and the Advances chat this year, what a mess.

@mdiluz how does Threema fare?

@philipdrobar to me Threema is more of a Signal competitor, I hadn't really considered it in the context of community building. I should really give it a try though so that opinion is more informed! Do you use it?

@philipdrobar ah I forgot it's paid too with no free tier, that also makes it kind of a hard no unfortunately for me, tho I'm sure it might work for others

@mdiluz how about we go back to TeamSpeak for voice and IRC for text

@mdiluz Element? Or does that fall under the same category as Matrix? Also, SimpleX but I had a hard time figuring that one out.

@mdiluz I don't but have seen it mentioned here and there ( but yes, more as a Signal/Messenger alternative).

The payment is a hurdle, but pricing seems reasonable. As you criticized this with Stoat, I figured the cost requirement might actually give some assurance.

Again though, I haven't used it at all.

@mdiluz Thank you for this valuable thread!

For what it’s worth… I have been lurking on Zulip after being introduced to it through the @CoMaps project. I have been really impressed with the quality of discussion (credit to the contributors!) and how the tool helps keep the conversations organized (threaded). I’m now testing Zulip for another nonprofit I’m involved with. I think as chat for that specific use case — mission-driven, distributed, goal-oriented collaboration — it’s a pretty great solution. Much more accessible to me than, say, Slack or Discord, which hurt my head. ‍️ I also like how Zulip lets you “resolve” threads like issues — so you can note when a discussion is over. (Threads don’t linger forever!)

@rvaweather @mdiluz yeah element is a client for matrix

@cyberia @mdiluz

Some IRC clients do link embeds and image embeds too. Honestly if they had voice/video calls IRC would probably still be on top (with public).

@YourShadowDani @mdiluz

IRC is intentionally narrow and lightweight, that’s why it still runs on ancient hardware. Like my old BlackBerry 8800

Voice/video would have to live outside IRC via something like WebRTC, with IRC reduced to signaling. At that point only wrapped clients participate, and you’ve traded universality for feature creep.

I've looked into options and really matrix could work but older hardware is left behind due to feature creep

@mdiluz alright, so I'm gonna point out a few things about matrix in here, which are a bit wrong or inaccurate.

First, you don't have to host the full history of a room whatsoever, that'd require huge storage which I don't have for one, and neither would probably a lot of the people hosting matrix homeservers today. In theory all events are duplicated, but in practice all events from the point of joining only are duplicated, and old events, especially media because that's the biggest stuff in your matrix installation, can be forgotten from the room representation depending on the server. Also depending on the server, you can have a very space and memory efficient server if you're looking for that, and in that case I recommend continuwuity, but do note that you will lose some features specific to synapse if you go that route. So no, you don't have to defederate or avoid federation, however avoiding open signup is recommended indeed, because if you don't, spammers would easily overwhelm your server and use it as a spam vector, which will make the whole server appear on blocklists, like here on the fedi.

Second, calls. Yeah...that's a bit of a sore spot for sure, we have two standards, but everyone pretty much agrees that the first one is the legacy standard because it wasn't really good. The second one keeps evolving because it's an actual rethink of the whole thing, which takes time to get right, but element, gomux and probably some other clients here and there support it in its current form, even if a new major version of that unstable MSC which remodeled some of the transport again exists and the reference implementation is migrating to it.

Third, moderation, well I'd say we actually have it better than discord in many cases, because we rely on the federated nature of matrix, and then external and swappable tooling for moderation, essentially bots, and we also have another powerful thing called policy servers.
There's a lot one could say about how it works, what policy lists are and how we deal with spammers, but I think the documentation of the draupnir project, which is the moderation bot a lot of people use, explains this stuff quite well.
Another thing you mentioned is scoped permissions, well that's what power levels are for. You can modify the state of a room, so that a specific power level is required to send a kind of event, and critically, any event. can be restricted by that. That way, you can have telegram stile channels, rooms in which people can't start voice calls, stuff like that. In this also go the join rules, which instruct a server in what circumstances a person can join a room. This could be something like, you can't join this room unless you were a member of another room specified by the person who makes the rule, most often this is used to limit rooms which are part of a space, like a discord server, to be only joinable by the people in that space, but that's not the only use.
Sure, all this sounds complicated, but I'm saying this stuff exists, we just need good UI for it and that's challenging. But also, I think we don't really need the roles thing in matrix, because we can split our space into as many subspaces as we want, and then invite the people who should belong to a specific subspace straight there, because spaces are just rooms at the end of the day. It also helps that once a person is joined to a space, they aren't automatically joined to all rooms the way they're joined to all channels @everyone has access to on the discord side for example. So yeah, the thinking is slightly different here, but I think it's a bit better and more organized, I might just be biased though which is definitely a thing that can happen