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Discord UI rule
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Counterpoint: My friends don't use them (and won't switch)
Matrix allows bridging chats so you can set up a bot in your / your friends server(s) and it'll forward their messages to Matrix and yours back to Discord. As for DMs you need to set up channels for that afaik (Future me: It seems that some bots support it). The big drawback is that you need to disable Matrix' E2E-Encryption in the rooms you want to bridge your chats to.
Here's a link to the Discord bridge if you are interested. It's not that hard to set up imo.
As for voice chat, you can use Jitsi (works like zoom but without the need of an account) as long as your friends aren't too lazy to open a link in their browser to chat with you.
As for Matrix clients there's Element, FluffyChat, Cinny & others. Element & Cinny are closer to Discord's UI whilst FluffyChat feels more like WhatsApp Web or Telegram Web. Element has cool features like web widgets you can pin to rooms whilst Cinny & FluffyChat are simple (and have MUCH better custom emoji / sticker management)
That's great but this does not account for the dynamics of a Discord server.
Let's say 8 people are hanging out in Discord, playing games or whatever. Should I then message all 8 of them a link to join a separate voice chat? The response would be "no, just join Discord of you want to talk". That also requires me to know who are in the call (therefore already using Discord anyways), since if I just message one or two of them I would be splitting the party, which they won't do.
The whole "hanging out in Discord and whoever wants to join just joins" dynamic is difficult to replace with a zoom-type voice chat that requires you to initiate a call with a link.
I have already tried switching people to signal from Facebook messenger. Didn't work. All it takes is one person to not want to switch and the whole group will end up going back. And that's just a messaging service. Discord is way more complicated to switch from since it is more of an all-in-one thing.
I can attest that when it comes to complete migration, bridging is not a solution or at least not a good one. The only way is full adoption.
In my experience, bridging chats moves only a minute fraction of the userbase in the end. The network pull that a userbase migration would make w/o a bridge is highly reduced w/ a bridge and leads to inconvenience for all.
Considering 95% of communication has been text based in my experience, those who were convinced to move to, say, Matrix, moved to matrix but were still able to talk with users who weren't that convinced to move and stayed on Discord. This formed the middle ground to satisfy both sides but this barely did anything in terms of creating a secure line of communication and virtually stopped the transition and also reversed it because of the few inconveniences caused, primarily the inability to join VC sessions across and making DMs across. And of course as you said, sharing links is too much hassle compared to just a click. (Although this is not the case w/ Matrix as its main clients have in-house VC functionality.)
And yes, I agree that it is certainly difficult to move users as some platforms become too tied up with our lives that if you try to leave any of these sites anyway, you get the risk of isolation. I managed to balance it out to an extent so I have not faced such a situation but I certainly got more time to focus on work and other stuff.
At the end of the day it's still a long road till a more libre internet will be mainstream. At least by making small contributions we can still keep the idea alive.