It’s hard to leave when a huge chunk of your interpersonal connections are tangled in its web. It’s the same reason Facebook and Twitter still exist.
That’s part of the reason why these platforms have such high valuations per capita, opposed to non- or less-social apps. There’s a lot of momentum.
I host a Matrix server myself and even I still use Discord more because that’s where people are. Matrix has its own issues and, frankly, it’s a shitshow; discord offers a lot of features with better UX and it has a lot of people.
The only reason Skype and team speak died* was because Discord provided a better value. Now it has the momentum, and the only way it will die is if something else offers even more value. Enshitification helps shift, but the momentum fights against it; momentum is like a small multiplier on top of its feature value.
Even if the app enshitifies, even if their base value drops; the product is still larger because of the userbase. So it becomes a chicken and egg problem. Until an inflection point is hit, their sheer mass buys them room to enshittify.
People who can walk away early are the exception, not the rule. It’s why people still use Reddit more than Lemmy. I may get some hate for this, but I don’t think the people on Lemmy are inherently “better.” There are selection biases, and I’m sure that holds true by some metrics, but not in totality.
“If everyone accelerated at the same time, there wouldn’t be a traffic jam” is true, but that’s not how the world or its people work; you just need to come to terms with that before you can do anything about it.
My complaints are mostly about UX and privacy. If all you need is simple messaging, it works fine if not just a little clunky. I hate signal as far as I’m concerned it’s basically a sigint op; but I’d usually recommend it if the simple messaging case is all you care about.
For matrix, the client landscape is a clusterfuck and feature adoption is lousy at best. How those features are communicated to a user is plainly bad, or lacking even in the best cases.
Use element and try to make a voice call with your friends: Is it encrypted? How do you know? Is it only the one-on-one call or is the Jitsi group encrypted too? Just TLS or e2e and when can your homeserver or other federated servers see? What about video streams? message reactions? Are media attachments? On disk? Has there been any work at all towards obfuscating or otherwise protecting metadata? What relays are being used and for what features? On and on and on.
All of these questions have answers. The problem is that they are communicated very differently and the answers vary per feature, per client, per room.
I vaguely remember, when I was testing clients, a one-to-one call had encryption drop silently because the other client didn’t support it, and there was no visual signal of that fact in the app at all. Frankly, it’s just disturbing.
And that’s just the technical things that I care about, that I don’t want to dig into the source code or pull out wireshark for. Normies care less, but will get tripped up by the recovery key and verification systems before even having to worry about that. Not to mention that the key hygiene of most people is absolutely terrible. Even some of my very technical sysadmin friends wind up with a bunch of unused device identities in their chains; some clients don’t even show them at all.
/matrix rant
But yeah it’s a fine substitute for discord if you’re willing to give up some features. With a good home server, it can be pretty painless day-to-day.
You shouldn’t get hate for it. Most people aren’t that deep into the weeds of their given apps to worry about this stuff, and honestly, that’s probably healthy 😅
It’s hard to leave when a huge chunk of your interpersonal connections are tangled in its web. It’s the same reason Facebook and Twitter still exist.
That’s part of the reason why these platforms have such high valuations per capita, opposed to non- or less-social apps. There’s a lot of momentum.
I host a Matrix server myself and even I still use Discord more because that’s where people are. Matrix has its own issues and, frankly, it’s a shitshow; discord offers a lot of features with better UX and it has a lot of people.
The only reason Skype and team speak died* was because Discord provided a better value. Now it has the momentum, and the only way it will die is if something else offers even more value. Enshitification helps shift, but the momentum fights against it; momentum is like a small multiplier on top of its feature value.
Even if the app enshitifies, even if their base value drops; the product is still larger because of the userbase. So it becomes a chicken and egg problem. Until an inflection point is hit, their sheer mass buys them room to enshittify.
People who can walk away early are the exception, not the rule. It’s why people still use Reddit more than Lemmy. I may get some hate for this, but I don’t think the people on Lemmy are inherently “better.” There are selection biases, and I’m sure that holds true by some metrics, but not in totality.
“If everyone accelerated at the same time, there wouldn’t be a traffic jam” is true, but that’s not how the world or its people work; you just need to come to terms with that before you can do anything about it.
Edit: speech to text typos. Probably missed some.
For what it’s worth, I use it daily with no significant trouble.
I guess it depends on your usage patterns.
My complaints are mostly about UX and privacy. If all you need is simple messaging, it works fine if not just a little clunky. I hate signal as far as I’m concerned it’s basically a sigint op; but I’d usually recommend it if the simple messaging case is all you care about.
For matrix, the client landscape is a clusterfuck and feature adoption is lousy at best. How those features are communicated to a user is plainly bad, or lacking even in the best cases.
Use element and try to make a voice call with your friends: Is it encrypted? How do you know? Is it only the one-on-one call or is the Jitsi group encrypted too? Just TLS or e2e and when can your homeserver or other federated servers see? What about video streams? message reactions? Are media attachments? On disk? Has there been any work at all towards obfuscating or otherwise protecting metadata? What relays are being used and for what features? On and on and on.
All of these questions have answers. The problem is that they are communicated very differently and the answers vary per feature, per client, per room.
I vaguely remember, when I was testing clients, a one-to-one call had encryption drop silently because the other client didn’t support it, and there was no visual signal of that fact in the app at all. Frankly, it’s just disturbing.
And that’s just the technical things that I care about, that I don’t want to dig into the source code or pull out wireshark for. Normies care less, but will get tripped up by the recovery key and verification systems before even having to worry about that. Not to mention that the key hygiene of most people is absolutely terrible. Even some of my very technical sysadmin friends wind up with a bunch of unused device identities in their chains; some clients don’t even show them at all.
/matrix rant
But yeah it’s a fine substitute for discord if you’re willing to give up some features. With a good home server, it can be pretty painless day-to-day.
You shouldn’t get hate for it. Most people aren’t that deep into the weeds of their given apps to worry about this stuff, and honestly, that’s probably healthy 😅
Except when it involves the livelihood of other people.