So seriously, what’s going to replace Discord? Everyone wants to leave, but to where?

And no, Matrix is not and will never be a viable alternative

Matrix is not

With LiveKit for calls / screen share, it is for my group. Though I’m not saying it doesn’t have issues.

will never be

Community-developed homeservers like continuwuity have gotten a lot of new support on the last few weeks. Clients like cinny are getting pretty close to a replacement ux wise (if you look at PR2599 on Cinny’s GitHub, they are working on and will soon merge support for LiveKit in a way that is very close to voice channels).

I also generally think that the only way to replace Discord as an ecosystem where you talk to many people from different communities is a federated protocol, not a bunch of new silos, one for each community.

I have no first person experience but I’ve read Matrix’ lack of “Discord-like server” grouping is terrible for moderation where you have to manually set permissions for each “room”. If that’s actually true it’s literally impossible for it to become proper discord alternative.

I’ve moved to Matrix from Discord for two small friend groups (<6 people each). Matrix is a fine replacement for the small friend Discord. But it has awhile to go before it can replace 1000+ people servers