• Free Palestine 🇵🇸@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    it must be doing something right in terms of being sustainable

    They’re basically living off of investor money and selling user data. The former is not an indefinite solution though. And Discord Nitro is a fucking joke, the revenue generated from it will never cover the operational costs.

    Matrix is a much better solution, it uses peer-to-peer technology (https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p2p-matrix/) to reduce the burden of operational costs on the team. It’s also federated, just like Lemmy, meaning anyone can host their own Matrix server and communicate with users on other servers. Running Matrix at home or on a VPS is even easier than self-hosting Lemmy. It’s also completely free and open-source and allows everyone to write their own clients. Discord on the other side is a piece of proprietary garbage/spyware and bans everyone who attempts to use a custom client. I will never understand why so many people like Discord.

    • Solivine
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      1 year ago

      Right, but with Matrix it’s a learning curve just to get started. That’s not to mention running a server either, discord makes that whole process much easier and done in a few buttons, and you don’t have to worry about uptime or any of that unlike self hosting, and it’s free. That makes it even harder to get friends onto the platform who don’t care about any of that, despite how good it may be considered to be.

      • Free Palestine 🇵🇸@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        What is known as servers on Discord also exists on Matrix. They are called spaces and you don’t need to self-host a Matrix server to create a space. There’s also no significant learning curve, you just download Element (the most popular Matrix client), create an account and you ready to go. You can join spaces or groups from any Matrix server or message anyone on the network. Chats also make use of end-to-end encryption by default and it can even be activated for groups (wouldn’t make much sense for public groups though).

        • Kayn@dormi.zone
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          1 year ago

          Okay, try to transition an existing community to Matrix and let us know how well it went!

          • avatar@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            I just signed up and tried to figure out how to join any remotely interesting community. There were none.

            There were a bunch of public communities - not many - and I think the most interesting ones in the public room list were either Element Android, Telegram, and Rust. And Rust is one of my most hated games that I wish I’d refunded.

        • avatar@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Why doesn’t Matrix just call “spaces” servers? By calling them spaces, they have created a learning curve for no reason.

          Even just saying you have to download a client called Element to access Matrix is not intuitive. To access Discord, you download a client called Discord.

    • avatar@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      They ban everyone who attempt to use a custom client?

      I’ve been using Betterdiscord for years and have never been banned. Matrix looks good, but I don’t think you’re selling it well by throwing Discord under the bus without some very clear and obvious justification - nobody will be inclined to believe you.