If you're paying for discord nitro, consider paying for a **hosted/managed** matrix server instead
If you're paying for discord nitro, consider paying for a **hosted/managed** matrix server instead
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.
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.
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…” etc)
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 - all for one single friend group - because the Discord model permitted it and made it easy.
And I think that’s why for a lot of people who use Discord at the moment, it absolutely 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.