If you're paying for discord nitro, consider paying for a **hosted/managed** matrix server instead
6 months ago by onlinepersona to c/pcgaming
To make it clear to those who are misunderstanding: that's a list of companies that host matrix for you. They do it at a good price.
If you and your friends chip, it'll be a few bucks a pop per month to have your own private server with voice chat rooms and video chat rooms.
It's all opensource and contributes to the ecosystem. Best of all, no age verification because the data is yours.
This isn't that, though.
OP's link is to a list of companies you can pay to host a matrix instance for you, so you don't have to deal with any of the hosting yourself.
But I agree most people would be sufficiently served by an account on a public instance.
Yeay its maybe not that bad. Sorry I think I might be chasing the argument. I'm an old bastard who still has friends on IRC from 35 years ago and they STILL argue IRC serves the role of Twitter, discord, etc. I share their passion but more often than not I feel like they turn away allies.
I'm also still in some IRC channels from way back, and I can't deny I hate what discord did to the IRC community. ("Look how they massacred my boy...")
Of course, Discord pulled it off for a good reason - the experience was seamless, featureful, rich, and modern - none of which IRC can claim. And it's only cantankerous sticks in the mud such as I who care about ideological concerns like interoperability and open standards.
And another thing that Discord did is to absolutely explode the channel count. In the IRC days, a particular community or friend group would make do with one single channel. But that group moves to Discord, and suddenly creates a general channel, announcements channel, music channel, games channel, cooking channel - all for one single friend group, and multiply that by the number of groups you are in - because the Discord model permitted it and made it frictionless.
And I think that's why for some people who use Discord at the moment, it wouldn't be enough to simply have a channel on a public Matrix instance. People are used to having a whole 'server' to themselves (of course discord 'servers' aren't servers, but let's set that aside) and so they'd need at least a 'space' in Matrix, being the more reasonably named analogue.
This is also why bluesky picked up over all the other twitter alternatives. The average user doesn't want to learn all this shit, they just want to use something that works (which in that situation is unfortunate, because Mastodon is right there and works perfectly fine out of the box with their default public instance, but it is what it is I guess).
Realistically I don't see Matrix picking up as a widespread discord clone. Just the entire idea of Matrix being a protocol and having different clients to choose from is enough to turn a lot of folks away from it. Meanwhile, Stoat is practically building a 1:1 discord clone, and is much easier for the average user to understand.
But instead it offers people to learn hosting and sysadmin stuff.
It does not. The post says paying for a hosted matrix server. That means you pay for somebody to host it. There's nothing more to it.
The full discord nitro plan costs 10$/month. That can get you a server for your friends and you can communicate with other servers. If everybody chips in, it's the cost of discord nitro minimum if you're 5 friends.
I think they're complaining you don't list where to host it/managed hosting.
I'm aware, just guessing.
People pay for Discord Nitro?
I pay for Discord Nitro because it's where the vast majority of the people I have real interactions with online are and I like being able to send my own emojis outside of my own server. I also like having better audio and video quality for my server's voice chat. Dumb, maybe, but it's literally less than a club cover fee per month.
Vencord.
wait for the free trial, sign up with it using like a gift card that has a few cents on it or an empty paypal account. trial lasts like 2 weeks but you'll get more than a month as they email you daily "we can't charge your account, you'll lose nitro in 3 weeks"
Repeat this every time they offer you a trial, which they will, without verifying that you've already had a free trial. I've had Nitro for months doing this and have never paid them a dime.
But why?
Haha, hey at least you recognize it for what it is. Can't knock you for that. Eff it, enjoy your animated avatar. Don't let anyone take that away from you.
From everything I've seen matrix is not comparable to Discord, but instead like a slightly amped Signal. What am I missing?
Actually I did just ask the same thing, and the TL;DR is that most clients do handle it as signal with group chat folders. Cinny does look like Discord, but currently lacks voice calling. It's currently web only with PWA support for mobile, though.
Okay, then if it really is not discord, or to be specific, not self-hosted discord (because I don't care about the upfront cost of self-hosting), then I'm gonna start ignoring these matrix posts because they seem to be trying to convince people who want - someone in your link used burgers as a metaphor - A burger to instead get a hot dog.
I don't want a hot dog.
Yeah, they all really do feel like "Oh you want to stop playing World of Warcraft, but still want an online game to play? Try Second Life!" and I think that's partly because there isn't an app out there that feels like Discord besides Discord. Cinny (Matrix), IRC, and Stoat come close, but none support voice calls at this point, at least that I can find. Matrix itself supports calling (though I think that's still experimental), but Cinny doesn't. If it ever ends up supporting voice calls, that will likely end up being the Discord alternative In wouldn't feel bad recommending.
Until then, though, we don't really have a true Discord alternative. Just various chat apps that don't quite hit the mark.
Stoat literally supports voice calls and Matrix has supported 1 on 1 voice calls for a long time and now they are testing group voice chats
I'm sorry but it will be difficult to deliver something that fits all the checkboxes Discord filled without a lot of money behind it.
Following the food analogy, you don't want a burger, you want a whole buffet with all the foods discord delivered.
But it is. I made the move with some friends. We created a space with some rooms for games and calls and some for memes and general shit.
Everything that discord does as well. If you don't care about the themes and personalisation of your space it is great and free.. And open source... And offers encrypted spaces
It's mostly rust but there's typescript, js and go too.
Donate, buy merch, become a member, etc...
It also isn't going to come by just abandoning a platform and no longer interacting with the communities on it. Torpedoing my ability to communicate with my friends doesn't make them all change platforms.
Or pay nothing and host it on your own.
Fuck it. I'm making the CPU cores and harvesting the silicon myself. Hand crafted indie servers and infrastructure from scratch.
You really should. I made the switch six months ago and my skin has never been more vibrant!
As you can read in the other responses that misunderstood the post, some people do not want to self-host and want something hosted. That's the beauty of opensource though: whatever suits you.
YES there's a client that adds support for GIFs and custom emojis https://commet.chat/
Any providers that have hosted Matrix servers?
That's the link of the post 🤔 It seems like you're not the only one mistunderstanding that. Why is that?
Oh I see it now. It looks really close to like an ad that my brain immediately filtered it out, sorry about missing that.
No problem. I wasn't sure how to frame it. It just bothers me that people are willing to pay for closed source stuff, but as soon as it comes to opensource it must be free and have all the features, otherwise they won't use it.
I've been trying out different alternatives with my friends. Screenshare and audio sharing capabilities across Linux, Windows and Mac is the one feature that Discord does right that no one else seems to. I really like Element (and by extension Matrix), but they really like to stick their head in the sand when it comes to important feature requests. The lack of screenshare with audio is a big thing that helps bring about the unfortunate choice to stick with Discord.
I know it's a tricky thing to get right, and I have love for the work that open source does; I don't have quite the level of skill yet to make/contribute an implementation myself. But it's strange it's been this long and nobody seems to have gotten this feature working, despite a big want for it.
EDIT: After taking a look at the issues on the element repos, it seems like this is getting worked on! https://github.com/... https://github.com/...
But it’s strange it’s been this long and nobody seems to have gotten this feature working, despite a big want for it.
It's not strange at all that the feature hasn't been implemented. Not enough people donate, so there isn't enough funding to implement features. Most people wait around until something is there or pay for closed source stuff. Funding is the major issue. If there were funds, people could spend time to implement such complicated features. Discord had millions in seed funding and has thousands of developer hours sunk into the platform. The developers of element have to juggle element and their jobs.
That is exactly why I'm saying: if you have the money to pay for discord nitro, throw some money Matrix's way. It'll benefit us all instead of some money-hungry enshittifiers.
I dunno, I recently read it's not that simple and feasible.
I read somewhere that you're wrong.
I think I read what I just wrote back to myself.
You're free to explain why, other than being a contrarian. I read this here, and the linked article too. Make of it what you want.
Paying for managed matrix is not that simple? Why not?
No, I meant using it.
Did you try for yourself?
Never had the need, since I don't play much online. I used ICQ, IRC a little years ago, but never went far.
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Rules:
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- No Spam or Porn.
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- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
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This kind of lack of perspective is why open services always struggle. It seems like it's the only tool the advocates of it use since they fall into the "I have a hammer to everything that isn't a nail doesn't matter" trap.
This post could have been a list of free instances to join. But instead it offers people to learn hosting and sysadmin stuff.
I'm sure there will be a bunch of replies trying to teach me how easy it is... But I am a sysadmin. I'm not your audience, and some people don't see a difference.
People who use corporate platforms do it because it's easy. Joining matrix instances is pretty easy. Presenting Matrix like people need to host servers to use it is detrimental.
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