Notices by NEETzsche (neetzsche@iddqd.social), page 41

I can think of a number of ways Discord’s UI/UX is superior and it’s not just “flashies!!!11”

The fact that it’s normal for you to need to spend more than 10s joining a channel that’s on another homeserver? Massive issue. The fact that it’s normal to have issues where you can’t exchange DMs because the keys won’t exchange? Massive issue.

Really, either of those on their own are dealbreakers. But let’s consider some other things Discord has that Matrix does not:

• Guilds are not individual channels, but groups of them
• Voice chat actually works
• Categories, roles, permissions for those roles
• Custom emojis and reacts
• Invite links that actually work

These are all significant and they’re not just “more flashies!!11” Being dismissive of this stuff is basically just a coping mechanism.

Matrix isn’t as bad as it was but the flagship client – Element – really is clunky, even now. And it’s routine for Matrix to lag out if you try to join a channel that’s on another homeserver. It’s not like Discord where you click one button and you’re in within a couple seconds.

Well if we take a “let the market decide” analysis of how much of a dealbreaker it is we find that basically nobody outside of tech spergs and paranoid political dissidents use XMPP. You can attribute some of this to the network effect for sure, but commercial services like Discord, Snapchat, and Telegram don’t janny enough normal people to merit actually using any of this stuff.

I get the theory behind extensibility and XEPs but in practice it’s a pain in the ass. And that absolutely is a dealbreaker to anybody who intends to correspond with someone who doesn’t have a computer science background.

I mean, if XMPP had something to offer other than being FOSS, I’d probably use it. Right now I use Matrix as a hub but the clients are all garbahj

At least you acknowledge that the UX for FOSS chat services is garbage. But even the protocols themselves are pretty trash. XMPP in particular considering how much “modding” you have to do just to get it to run in a way that is worth a shit, but Matrix’s protocol has its own issues, like for example storing its events in a DAG.

All👏FOSS👏chat👏services👏are👏garbage.