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Android Police: Build your communities elsewhere now that most Reddit third-party clients are dead (www.androidpolice.com)

submitted 1 year ago by TwinTurbo to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I take it you don't remember the old internets chatrooms, that's why Discord is popular. It scratches a very specific itch, Live Chat. Social Media scratches a very similar itch, but with a platform that is forum based, not chat based.

Throw in the old Social Media, like ICQ, MSN Messenger, AOL Messenger, etc. and you begin to see that live chat is absolutely a feature that people want. Sometimes they want a "room" where a bunch of like minded people are, sometimes they want to talk to specific people.

Social Media as a concept has gone through a lot of iterations.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

As much as I'd like to argue otherwise, it's easily one of the most accessible versions of live chat around currently. I'm still on IRC and also on Matrix, but neither is as user-friendly as the centralized single-account, single-app, single-server setup of Discord. That's absolutely not to say that it's the best option, but it's the simplest to explain by far.

My fellow Matrix nerds can tell us all day about how they got their whole family using Matrix and it's great and everybody understood it, but I strongly suspect there's a level of one dedicated user doing things like app and instance selection (or self-hosting) for the entire group, while everyone else is pretty much along for the ride.

Matrix does solve some of the issues of IRC, like using a single account to interact with basically any server, but room discovery is still not great, the mobile apps lag heavily behind desktop, there's persistent basic usability bugs like unread notifications getting permanently stuck, and privacy is an afterthought with most Matrix apps broadcasting your presence to all other users at all times without any option to stop that behavior. Plus, the heavy reliance on bridging with IRC for many communities also kind of loses you the benefit of the single-account approach since you end up having to register an account for your bridge user anyway (and I can hear the eyes glazing over at this point).

Then there's the network effect, of course. Most of the stuff you can reach via Matrix is super nerdy: Linux distros, fediverse support rooms, Wii U homebrew development channels. This part isn't Matrix's "fault" per se, but it's definitely a reason why people would choose to use Discord or maintain a presence in both. At this point, unless there's just nothing that interests you on Discord, switching to Matrix really has to be an ideological choice.