Discord came around after I had already gone FOSS as much as possible, so I’ve never actually used it. I host two Matrix (Synapse) servers, one for friends and family and one for work. I don’t use it for large public chats, just friends or work, so my largest rooms are 10ish people each. The server side of things has never given me a problem, I easily run it on a 1 vCPU VM with 3 GBs of memory (I’m sure I could give it less if I needed to).
On the client side, Element works well enough, but I do wish it felt a bit further along after all of these years. Calls work reliably if one end is a computer (so computer to computer or computer to phone), but phone to phone calls are a complete roll of the dice if they will work properly. Notifications are a complete mess. I have Element open on my desktop right now with zero notifications, if I turn on my laptop and open Element (same exact account) it will show a handful of rooms with notifications until I go mark those as all read. The worst is when you get a call that isn’t actually a call but a stuck notification from somebody that called you days ago.
I mean I do love it, there is no alternative for me. I simply don’t even think about Discord or other proprietary apps as even a choice. I hope open source, decentralized software keeps gaining momentum and the rough edges are touched up a bit.
Work was easy enough - this is our messaging platform, use it, haha. For family and friends I would just take their phone and set everything up for them, join the rooms, set their avatar, everything. Minimize the work they need to do. It helps that none of my friends use Discord, maybe they do for games or something but they don’t use it socially to communicate with friends. So even though Element has its fair share of bugs, it is still much better than MMS between iphone and android users, so my friends and family do see the advantage there.
Discord came around after I had already gone FOSS as much as possible, so I’ve never actually used it. I host two Matrix (Synapse) servers, one for friends and family and one for work. I don’t use it for large public chats, just friends or work, so my largest rooms are 10ish people each. The server side of things has never given me a problem, I easily run it on a 1 vCPU VM with 3 GBs of memory (I’m sure I could give it less if I needed to).
On the client side, Element works well enough, but I do wish it felt a bit further along after all of these years. Calls work reliably if one end is a computer (so computer to computer or computer to phone), but phone to phone calls are a complete roll of the dice if they will work properly. Notifications are a complete mess. I have Element open on my desktop right now with zero notifications, if I turn on my laptop and open Element (same exact account) it will show a handful of rooms with notifications until I go mark those as all read. The worst is when you get a call that isn’t actually a call but a stuck notification from somebody that called you days ago.
I mean I do love it, there is no alternative for me. I simply don’t even think about Discord or other proprietary apps as even a choice. I hope open source, decentralized software keeps gaining momentum and the rough edges are touched up a bit.
How the hell did you get people to show up? My fiends took forever to be convinced over to discord.
Work was easy enough - this is our messaging platform, use it, haha. For family and friends I would just take their phone and set everything up for them, join the rooms, set their avatar, everything. Minimize the work they need to do. It helps that none of my friends use Discord, maybe they do for games or something but they don’t use it socially to communicate with friends. So even though Element has its fair share of bugs, it is still much better than MMS between iphone and android users, so my friends and family do see the advantage there.
I’ve heard we need to check out revolt but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
I’ll have to check that out