First I’m hearing about it
Yeah seems really weird that a service with 2/3rds or more of the users than Discord is completely unknown to me or any of my fellas on the group discord when I asked them.
Can’t tell if I am falling out of touch, the service is aimed at a completely different demographic than me, or these numbers are bullshit.
A lot of IRC communities migrated, and it’s pretty much the go to option now if you want live communications for your project or org, but don’t want something proprietary. It’s a pretty good replacement for Teams or Slack.
Many communities went back to IRC, though, because Matrix still is a hot mess, and the most visible ones which didn’t (Mozilla, KDE, …) are not hosting their own Matrix instance but letting New Vector do that for them, which makes in practice a disproportionate amount of users and accounts be managed by a single organization. I do think it’s better than discord, but barely so.
Matrix is great as a discord alternative, I’d just wish it wouldn’t light my Server on fire every time I open element. Like I can live stream 4K to multiple people over that thing, but reading messages takes 30 seconds of fan screaming?
Don’t ever bring this to the people in charge or you might be told “sorry for that” “but now it’s been fixed, deployed any week now” “you are a liar, this has never been true” and “it doesn’t really matter for the general case” either in the same post or few responses apart. Matrix has been in a permanent state of unstable mess, and the leadership disingenuous attitude made me lose hope that this will ever change. More people should start reading through the fanfare and superlative blog posts, which, admittedly is the thing they do the best and much better than the other projects out there.
