About Matrix Matrix is an open protocol for decentralised, secure communications.
Matrix Manifesto We believe:
People should have full control over their own communication. People should not be locked into centralised communication silos, but instead be free to pick who they choose to host their communication without limiting who they can reach. The ability to converse securely and privately is a basic human right. Communication should be available to everyone as a free and open, unencumbered, standard and global network.
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matrix isn’t a fediverse thing, it’s its own thing. it does happen to be decentralized, like the fediverse.
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matrix isn’t an alternative to discord. it’s an alternative to whatsapp/signal/telegram/etc.
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matrix is nice (I use it with my friend group), but it’s not perfect. we’re looking for something better.
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if you’re looking for a decentralized, self-hosted, open-source, secure alternative for discord, my friends and I use Mumble. It works great for VoIP (and its noise cancellation software actually seems to work noticeably better than Discord’s), but it doesn’t really have the advanced text chat features that Discord does. We make do with Matrix.
matrix isn’t an alternative to discord. it’s an alternative to whatsapp/signal/telegram/etc
Yes and no.
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Matrix is a communication standard. More like SMTP, RSS or XMPP than those things. I don’t know why Matrix specifically has this problem because you’ll never see anyone say “I’ve joined ActivityPub”.
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Element is by far and away the most popular Matrix client (similar to how Mastodon is the most popular ActivityPub software) and it has “Spaces”, which functions similar to Discord “servers” (not actually servers). Better in some ways but mostly worse. Namely in terms of stability and the function of “spaces” specifically.
While it’s true people don’t say “I’ve joined ActivityPub”, isn’t that synonymous with “I’ve joined the Fediverse”? Besides, the organization behind it does market it that way — they themselves refer to it as “joining Matrix, using one of these clients” (Element, Fluffychat, etc). Like, that’s what their website is called, and so is the Matrix server they host.
Their centralization is, I think, a little more advanced than Mastodon’s. The organization that maintains the protocol regularly adds features to it, and then of course immediately updates their own client and server implementations to have those same, recently added features, meaning the other client and server implementations are always behind on at least a few features. It’s becoming reminiscent of how the web browser spec is so bloated, and gets new stuff added to it with such regularity, that new browsers are basically impractical.
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The True selfhosted open source alternative to Discord are Mattermost and RocketChat. My friends and I use both
not a replacement for Discord
A lot of people only use it chat and never touch the voice features.
Really?
Yeah! My wife does. There are communities she chats with there.
Hi! How much a matrix and mumble server costs?
For matrix it depends on how big rooms you join, the way matrix federates the more servers in a room the more resources it’ll take to join it and send messages in it since you send a message to every server in a room, conduit is a much more efficient homeserver implementation compared to synapse
Well, if you host a server, you can either host it on the cloud (which costs $$$), or you can host it by yourself (if you have a spare computer that you can just use as a server). If you host it yourself, all you’re really paying is the same stuff you already pay — internet and electricity.
Hosting a server for something like mumble, matrix, or lemmy only has the costs I mentioned above.
Does Mumble have an equivalent to PluralKit? PK is one of the biggest things keeping me and my friends on discord atm
what’s PluralKit?
tbh, Mumble pretty much just does voice chat and only voice chat, and just focuses on doing it well.
what’s PluralKit?
tbh, Mumble pretty much just does voice chat and only voice chat, and just focuses on doing it well.
It’s a bot that allows multiple people sharing an account to appear as though they each had their own pfp and username, using webhooks. It’s mostly used by plural systems, which are groups of people who live in the same head. You assign a proxy to each member, which might be something like prefacing your message with a certain emoji, and whenever you type a message using that proxy (prefacing with that emoji), PluralKit deletes your account’s message and gets a webhook with a name and pfp of your choice to re-send the message. The bot makes it way easier to talk to a plural system and know who’s speaking.
Why is it an alternative to telegram but not to discord?
It allows you to have personal 1 to 1 conversations and group chats, just like WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal.
Discord isn’t exactly the same thing as Telegram, that’s why Matrix.org is usually mentioned as an alternative to WhatsApp or Telegram but not Discord
On Discord you can have 1:1 chats and rooms as well.
But I feel both Discord and Matrix are better suited to room chats than 1:1, if for nothing else because the registration is a tad more complex than just receiving an sms, and you’re not sharing your phone number with a 1000 people.
I think the general vibe is that WA or Signal is for small friends groups exactly because of reliance on phone number, while the others aren’t.
Ed: also the E2E doesn’t “just work” like on WA/Signal.
Yes, you can have 1:1 and rooms on Discord too, but the level of customization of rooms, roles and permissions Discord has is much more advanced than what you can find in WA, Telegram or Matrix.org.
On Discord when you’re in a server you can see (usually) every other user that’s on the same server, and in every room you’ll see some of those people, depending on the permissions. That’s not how the other options mentioned before work.
Also, on Discord you can have specific rooms dedicated to audio/video chats, on the rest (WA, Telegram, Matrix) it works differently.
I think it’s mainly because of those reasons that people compare Matrix to WA and/or Telegram instead of saying it’s a “Discord alternative”.
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This will be a harder sell than Lemmy because I need to convince my friends to move too
The great thing, you actually don’t have to. There are so called bridges which can simply bridge your friends into your matrix chat. I for example can talk to all my whatsapp, discord and signal contacts from the same app. Very convenient.
What app is that? It’s matrix?
Matrix is the protocol.
Synapse is the server software.
Element (among others) is the client software.
Bridges (WhatsApp, Signal, Google Chat, etc) are extra servers that run next to the main server. Generally text only. Any Matrix client should be able to make use of a bridge. Bridges appear as “bots” in your Matrix contact list. Contacts from other services appear as “$name ($service)” and work as you would expect of a chat.
You should know that Bridging breaks end-to-end encryption as the Bridge has the decryption key and Bridges work by “impersonating” you on the other chat service. Don’t use a Bridge you don’t trust. Beeper is a paid/commercial hosted Matrix service with pre-configured bridges for you, including iMessage (which Apple makes painfully difficult to bridge because Apple).
I need
I basically quit discord when notifications completely broke after the mandatory name change. Nothing I do has any effect. It’ll simply never beep again.
I managed to get most of my co-mods to Matrix. We set up a bot to notify us what’s up. All was good for a while.
Then the bot broke and is moving to Discord, and now my Matrix clients are giving me problems with notifications too.
Modern computing definitely hates me.
I like Matrix but it’s far from Discord right now
That’s a good thing. Discord is chugging its way through the last half of the Web 2.0 service to social media pipeline. It’s a VC-funded multimedia enterprise extended around a novel technology core optimized for its original service offering, real-time voice/text. Nobody is immune to bloat, but because Matrix is a protocol standard, not an app, users have the option of sticking with minimal clients and servers that won’t (necessarily) get destroyed by feature creep.
If you’ve tried Element and thought “ah, slow Discord,” maybe have a scroll through https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/. I don’t want to get off topic but all my favorite software is standard/specification-based.
I don’t think Matrix feels slow because the app is slow. In my experience, I have tried 3 homeservers (community.rs, matrix.im, and mozilla.org (hosted by modular), and there was a really really big performance gap. I’m not gonna say which one is which, but sending message on one (the time between you hit send and the circled checkmark appears) usually takes less than 1 seconds, another averages at maybe 1.5 seconds, the other often takes more than 5 seconds. Choosing a performant homeserver could really impact your experience with Matrix, and it’s sad that people can’t really know how performant a server is unless they create an account on it and try it out themselves.
I loved Discord back in 2015/2016. I hate it now.
Me and my boys have been using discord for years now to chat while we game and maybe stream what we’re doing just to each other.
Discord has added features and shit I suppose but I haven’t changed how I use it at all since I first started.
Part of the reason I hate it now is they refuse to support Linux. In fact their support in general is pretty crappy.
I mean I am not a fan of discord, but it’s just an Electron app, like Spotify, isn’t it? meaning you can just open it in a browser you probably have running anyways
I got Discord installed on Ubuntu just fine, what doesn’t work about it?
On top of what the other guy said, it just doesn’t behave like a Linux app. It doesn’t respect the package manager, if there’s a new version but the package hasn’t been updated yet, the app just refuses to launch. Like the developers literally won’t even let you use the app if it’s not the current version.
It’s also a electron app, so it doesn’t respect the window manager either. It has to have it’s own special window decorations that don’t match, and when I used i3 (tiling window manager) it was very difficult to get it to work normally in my setup like every other app did with no effort.
Finally, it asks for super user access! Why in the name of unholy fuck is a userland app demanding administrative powers on my computer?
Funny you say that, I actually just noticed that today. I tried launching it and it refused to let me use it until I updated. It was super annoying.
It works but they won’t provide support if it breaks. There was a bug with screen sharing sound on Linux (and maybe macOS as well?) for a LONG time, like years, before it was eventually fixed.
On macOS they also took their sweet ass time with the Apple Silicon version, when the regular version was broken as hell on the shiny new M1 Macs.
They only really care about « gAmERs » which to then means Windows.
There was a bug with screen sharing sound on Linux (and maybe macOS as well?) for a LONG time, like years, before it was eventually fixed.
Wait, this was fixed? I haven’t been bothering with screen sharing because I thought this was still an issue.
I wanted to like matrix. I really did.
But it never really works properly for me. And when it does, it’s slow.
And the e2e implementation is a nightmare for multiple devices. They tried to make it easier, but it never quite worked for me.
Did you stay on the matrix.org HS by any chance?
Yeah. That explains slow, does it?
yeah, thats homeserver is very slow since its the one most people use if they just install the element apps and dont know that matrix/element is a federated platform so its very overloaded
Spacebar.chat is very cool, but progress is slow…
What is it missing? At least it has good UI xd
Everything. Im pretty sure it’s not installable yet.
Never used it but I though Matrix was more an alternative to Messaging apps (like Telegram, Signal, …) than Discord. Am I wrong ?
I wish Matrix/Element focused a bit more on their experimental P2P version, released as experimental in 2020 and then left it in the drawer :/
https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p2p-matrix/
https://github.com/vector-im/element-android-p2p (… and just why the zuck are they hosting builds on a gdrive instead on the github proper ???)Yeah it’s going slow but it’s not something that can be quickly done and it’ll require some big changes in the core protocol to really work well with p2p
If you are looking for P2P structure, WireMin is the right place for you I think. http://wiremin.org/
WireMin stands firm on a P2P decentralized network structure to resolve these digital issues: epitomizing data privacy, freedom of speech, and censorship resistance.
…and not open source… thank you, but no thank you!
Also from their FAQs:
Who’s behind WireMin?
The WireMin team consists of a group of experienced technical experts and Web 3.0 advocates all over the world.
Web3 = crypto
Not a single personal name on their website.
Marked the domain as crypto-scam in uBlock and good riddance. Unironically thank you!
I know non-open source is very likely to be a scam, but I was using it for a month, all the features seams very decentralised. It did not ask for my personal information when registering an account, so seems safe to me, man. Just an advice…
Plus, Web3 does not means crypto only, it means Decentralised, DAO, Smart contract, Data privacy, Anti-censorship, etc.
all the features seams very decentralised
registering an account
Uhmmm
Are you aware that some of those terms are crypto too?
I still don’t see why we can’t just use IRC anymore. The protocol itself is old but reliable, and just needs a good client or two to help people compare it to Discord a bit more favourably. Though I suppose the need for a BNC to fully match it is probably a bit much of an ask for most.
IRC not allowing users to receive messages while offline, not having multiple synced clients, not natively supporting media, not supporting voice or video calls makes it a complete non-starter.
And there is XMPP
Trued xmpp, but all the good features are extensions and not all client support them.
Psi+ supports almost everything, but there is no good mobile client
Right. Its about finding clients with a feature intersection that supports everything.
I dont have time…
Hey you discovered why it never took off in the first place once Google and co got their mitts into it.
It takes a lot of work to support encryption and it’s definitely not end to end
It’s not really federated, you make a new account for each server I think.
needs rich messaging support. At very least markdown. Matrix supports images.
Element is an amazing platform! It’s not perfect, but given what it implements it’s doing a helluva good job!
it’s federated, but it’s not a part of the Fediverse.
i wish people would stop thinking these words mean something that everyone knows
Anyone can host a server that’ll talk to the others seamlessly (like Lemmy), but it doesn’t talk to Lemmy
There is an upcoming foss client called spacebar / fosscord
Last commit to repo more than one month ago
Yeah, not happening
Matrix isn’t the alternative for discord. Others have been named.
Matrix is a chat with a high regard for encryption, more an alternative to Whatsapp and signal then discord.
Matrix is considerably more like discord than both Whatsapp or signal.
You can get a WhatsApp/signal experience out of it but overall it is very similar to discord
Yeah it is more similar to discord. If I were to group chatting apps/services into two groups, I would do this:
- WhatsApp, Signal, Line, Messenger, Telegram, SMS
- Discord, irc, Matrix
I too am wondering what makes you say that. What is it missing?
Voice Channels would be a start. Game Streaming is another use-case of Discord my friend group uses which is missing.
Matrix has voice chat and screen sharing. I don’t think it implements audio passthrough like discord but I could be mistaken.
I thought it only had voice chat for calls? Are there voice channels tho?
not yet, they are working on a native group calls stack, so once thats done and stable there will be voice channels in element and other clients
There is a jitsi widget for rooms though, so you can convert any group chat into a drop in/drop out voice room similar to discord’s voice rooms. The biggest struggle I have with it is that it defaults to asking about video every time, and there is no hotkey support. 🤮
my friend has used signal, whatsapp, discord bridges with her conduit server and has had 0 issues
Matris does not use E2E encryption for most channels. Its primary draw is federation, not security or anonymity.
There’s 0 point to encryption on public rooms
It makes no sense to encrypt public channels.
but its not activitypub, but its still a good alternative
Is Activitypub designed for encrypted messages? Edit: My impression is that it isn’t
Nah, its more like fediverse
Thanks for the reply :P I do have an idea of what Activity Pub attempts to do, and I would’ve been very surprised if it turned out that it’s well-suited for an end-to-end encrypted chat protocol
If you are looking for e2ee chat service, try out WireMin, Signal, Session
Thanks for the recommendations. Unfortunately, Signal is centralized and WireMin is closed source. Session
does look interesting!Edit: Session actually has some security and ethical problems… Matrix may not have the equivalent to onion routing, but so far it seems like the best optionto run a session node you need to buy a certain amount of their shitcoin and it has no perfect forward security so its alot less secure
There is certainly some overlap in what Discord and Matrix can do, and personally I like Matrix about a thousand times better, but it’s not really a direct replacement. That’s not a criticism. I don’t really even want Matrix to be more like Discord. I just think presenting Matrix as a Discord replacement kinda sells it short and is likely to leave people looking for an alternative to Discord disappointed.
