From a chat standpoint, the two are near identical - yes - but Matrix lacks the “voice/video calls as persistent rooms” feature that Discord has. This was planned a while back, but has recently been pushed on the backburner[1] as they work on Element Call.
Early on Matrix was sort of being built up as an IRC/Discord alternative, but recently they’ve pivoted more towards a WA/Telegram/Slack alternative as most of their financial support comes from European governments and companies looking for strong and secure internal communication solutions they can manage themselves.
So, TL;DR you probably won’t see the exact Discord like features you want land in the spec any time soon as they’re not being funded.
So that means, right now:
- No persistent voice/video rooms (but they are on the roadmap!)
- No push-to-talk or “game friendly” settings like voice auto-detection (also not really on the roadmap)
Having said all that, Matrix is brilliant and I highly encourage people to check it out. I use a Matrix <-> Signal bridge for most of my comms with my friends, and we voice chat on Mumble. Not ideal, but you get to avoid Discord and you get a very similar experience! Bonus points for Mumble as it’s super lightweight.
~[1] It’s not really on the backburner so much as it’s something that will have to be worked on after the new VOIP stack - Element Call - is integrated in the wider Matrix ecosystem. There is an experimental “video rooms” feature, but that really isn’t the same as a native, persistent voice-only room.~
I’m very much with you.
Never understood why Plex, a once open source fork of XBMC, was seen as a positive thing when they switched to the closed source, SaaS model.
I also don’t understand the love for Tailscale when Wireguard exists.
But, anyway, the same people who are reacting shocked to Plex can be shocked when Tailscale does the same.
They’ll probably hop on Discord to vent their frustrations before there, too, they find themselves spurred by a company with no clear plan on monetization finding out that offering hosted services at a yearly loss can only exist for so long.
Open source isn’t just about idealogy, it’s about longevity for software that can’t be clearly monetized - harken back to “amazing” services like Keybase that worked great for a few years until their VCs started asking for return of investment.
Use the shit that was made for you, not to exploit you. And if that shit isn’t up to your standard, learn to contribute, or just enjoy the corporate graveyard in which you choose to live.
(so sorry for the pseudo-unhinged rant, but between the recent Win11, Discord controversies - and now, this - I’m just fed up with all the shocked_pikachu.jpg posts I’m seeing on Lemmy)