this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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I get your point. But unfortunately the sad truth is, even IF we can convince techie nerds to switch, do you really believe we could convince the vast majority of the ignorant public? The answer is no. And even as a techie who works with computers on a daily basis, I have my reservations about Matrix. It is a slow, buggy, hot mess for the most part, and it's even more inconvenient when it comes to voice/video chat.
What I'm learning from this is that there is NO FEASIBLE alternative to Discord, let alone one the general public would be willing to switch to. I've now got the task of converting my friends to Signal as a temporary half-measure before we have a reliable alternative, but things aren't looking good.
I agree that matrix is a slow and buggy hot mess, but its issues mainly lie with scaling. As long as your instance is small it works well enough. Imo this is architectural and will never be fixed with synapse.
As for no alternatives for discord. I think the problem is that people have come to expect a certain level of QoS with hosted services that are expensive to maintain for hobbyists (cdn, load balancing, nat traversal, ddos protection, etc). I think this is fundamental to how we're abusing IP when it's way past its prime and on life support using middle boxes. If we want to reclaim this space, the best way forward would be something like NDN, but the transition would be astronomical that nobody wants to do it.