Basically just what the title sais
Element/Matrix. element.io
Element does not provide what Discord provides and should not be advertized as a direct replacement until the community feature gets some serious work done to it.
Like what? Rooms that we can call “servers” which are then subdivided into pointless little topic rooms?
I wish it was that simple. I wouldn’t mind switching to Element and working around the differences, but I would find it difficult to get anyone else to move off Discord and stick with Element for more than a few minutes if I could get them to sign up in the first place.
Discord “servers” allow you to easily invite people to the community and create rooms for various topics as they come up while still keeping the group together.
With Element if I join a room / community (for example for a software application) I’m quickly overloaded with thousands of messages, all covering a range of topics. You may get a string of messages - some may be people asking for basic support, others may be complex coding topics which are over my head, others may be about design, translation, or just people chatting - all in the same stream. It’s all over the place and difficult to follow. I can’t just jump into the specific topics that I’m interested in.
We can create different rooms and leave it up to individuals to make sure they join all the available rooms and just hope the community stays together and they post to the correct room. But then we have the issue of also seeing the notifications for who has joined and left each room in the every room. It’s overwhelming. At least on Discord these notifications can be secluded to an admin channel and not interrupt the flow of conversation.
On Discord you can join a server, and be sure that even if you step away for a while you’ll have access to any new channels that are created. You can view the channels that are relevant to you, and you’re not bombarded with notifications or forced to read through irrelevant information.
I think @Ninmi@lemmy.ml is speaking about audio/video channels.
https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/7487 Here’s an issue that tracks the missing features.
However, the biggest difference is simply the fact that Discord and Element work fundamentally very differently. Element is (still) centered around making single rooms where people can choose to join. Discord on the other hand operates from a “”““server””“”" perspective where everyone joins every room by default unless access is restricted. It’s the complete opposite.
It’s like people really haven’t tried Discord, Element or neither and try to make you push a cube object through a circular hole claiming, “yes it fits just do it”. As it stands, Element is not the answer to Discord specifically and claiming otherwise is only gonna end up with disappointed new users.
Thank you for sharing. It is nice to see you here too. :3
Element/Matrix supports audio and video chat though.
Yes, individually, but you remember Mumble? with the audio channels inside every server? That is what they want.
I think they see it easier than mounting a room and making a conference.
Yeah, it’s a bit frustrating and when using Matrix you have to just accept that it is not suited for certain uses of Discord, particularly the ones that encourage tightly-knit communities with consistent and seamless moderation + common settings across them.
I manage a “server” that simply would not function without Discord’s systems for channels and moderation / organization. Believe me, I’ve tried to move it to Matrix, IRC, and other places but I’ve never found something which doesn’t require massive sacrifices to what the community is about and how it works. Especially given that these are a bunch of non-techies who for the most part do not care at all about free software and privacy, nothing gets anywhere near a practical replacement.
What’s really ironic is that Discord’s model is such a perfect fit for a decentralized system.
But there isn’t even another centralized proprietary silo alternative. That’s how bad the situation is.
Thx!
XMPP has my vote, although element is probably closer to discord.
Xmpp + mumble is what I use personally.
Ahttps://app.element.io
Ir seems to me that Mumble is what you are looking for.
ty sir! Faster reply than I thought. I’m a bit new to Lemmy to. Coming over from Reddit
Actually, IRC. It has all the communities and so on, and with a webclient like The Lounge, it comes pretty close in terms of UI. Of course no voice chat, but you can use Mumble for that. I wish someone would make a nice integrated client with both.
Hey folks, I’m new to the platform, this is my first response to my first post so I hope I’m not making too many faux pas here. We were chatting about federated/federatable post-based solutions on our Element server and a comrade suggested lemmy.ml so of course I had to come check it out. Wouldn’t you know it, this was the first post on the landing feed that caught my eye.
So yeah, we’ve been running an independent Element server at chat.nopasaran.gq for a few months and love it. I’m an old IRC nerd and I’ve been doing a lot of organizing around opsec/commsec with comrades for the last couple years. We were using Signal to coordinate local and regional teams but managed to bail out before the glaring commsec holes bit us in the asses.
I know the apps are clunky, the interface needs some work, and communities is just straight up broken, but it’s so far an excellent chat server solution, especially from a commsec perspective. Oh, and when you create a channel, if you don’t switch that default nonfederated (hidden) option, you done screwed up. Otherwise I love it.
Pleroma has one-to-one chats with groups in the works
element
I don’t think it exists yet.
It could be element / matrix. But at the moment that only gives you the option to make rooms / channels. You can’t make the Discord equivalent of a server with its own rooms / channels.
You can. It is called Communities. It is groupings of rooms.
xe8 is correct. Communities in Element are only glorified collections of rooms without any of the features that Discord provide.
In fact, there’s an issue on the Element github repo called “Discordification of Riot/Matrix” and it’s a long, long list of missing features. Element is not a proper alternative to Discord.
I must be stupid because I’ve tried for 15 minutes to create / join a community with no luck. I’m on the iOS app.
The community tab is blank with no instructions or way to interact with it.
I’ve tried searching for existing communities. Nothing appears when trying to search. I’ve tried joining multiple rooms about the same topic and then grouping them together as a community somehow, but nothing seems to work.
I also tried on fluffychat. That has an option to join a “group”. But it seems what fluffychat calls a group is actually just a room.
I saw people recommending Element/Matrix. I don’t like it actually, because it’s a too centralized platform. Otherwise there’s IRC and Mumble that could be alternatives.
Also, Element/Matrix is resource consuming unfortunately, I prefer using lighter things. My laptop doesn’t even support Element client.
The reason why I think Element/Matrix is centralized is because of the resource-heavy Matrix server which limits the number of servers (same issue with emails), also most communities are on matrix.org, so it becomes more and more dependent on one server to work. There is a difference between “decentralized on paper” and “decentralized in reality”.
(btw, why am I being down voted so much xD ?)
How is Matrix centralised? It’s federated, just like email. If anything, mumble and IRC are more centralised.
Like 75% percent of the network runs on the official matrix.org servers and small scale selfhosting is not all that feasible, given how resource hungry Synapse is (although that is getting slowly better).
With that argument you should not like Lemmy. Way more than 75% of the network is from Lemmy.ca . It takes time for things to decentralise as long as the ability is there.
Matrix isn’t a super young project like Lemmy though, and Lemmy has the explicit goal to be lightweight to self-host. Oh and Lemmy doesn’t have a (basically) centralized identity server like Matrix.
That’s not a technical but a social issue though. Matrix doesn’t have dozens but hundreds of installations. I guess your 75% are exaggerated.
I know that, but I never seen any instance of Matrix that’s not matrix.org. Also email is becoming more and more centralized because almost everybody uses Gmail or something else from GAFAM. I mean, on paper it’s decentralized, but the fact everybody uses Matrix make it more and more dependent on one server.
The centralization of IRC doesn’t matter though, the fact there is no chat history makes it irrelevant to be centralized or not, if Freenode dies, something else can replace it without any problem.
Also a tiny note again about emails, due to the difficulty to setup an email server yourself (that doesn’t end up in the spams of everybody), I don’t really think emails are so decentralized in practice.
TL;DR, there is a difference between the things on paper and the things in reality.
I know that, but I never seen any instance of Matrix that’s not matrix.org. Also email is becoming more and more centralized because almost everybody uses Gmail or something else from GAFAM.
I like to quote myself on this one.
That’s not a technical but a social issue though.
There is a part of technical stuff though. If you have a very resource consuming technology, it’s obvious that less people are going to install it, which is the case of Matrix.
Also, “social issues” can be managed, for instance, the main Framasoft closed the registrations of the main Mastodon instance because they thought the network was becoming too centralized on their instance.
If you have a very resource consuming technology, it’s obvious that less people are going to install it, which is the case of Matrix.
Nobody in the real world cares about resources. I do, but that’s not the reason for people not adopting Matrix. It’s rather silly reasons like “it doesn’t have sticker packs!” or “I don’t understand where I need to create an account and why”.
I mean, people with low-end servers aren’t going to install a matrix server. So it’s limiting the decentralization of Matrix.
You don’t need to install a matrix server to use it.
