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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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Why use this over Matrix?
The user experience for matrix is absolutely dog shit. Anyone who says otherwise is huffing copium.
I have been setting up matrix servers and testing every desktop and mobile client. I cannot present this to my discord group as an alternative.
As much as I want to love matrix, it is a huuuuge pain to set up & maintain.
With voice/video or just text?
Drop-in voice channels are a requirement for a discord alternative, Matrix does not have them. AFAIK you still need to call an entire channel to start a voice chat.
Im surprised as how many people discount this feature. Sometimes I sit in voice chat in my small Discord server alone for hours because nobody would show up if nobody was around.
We're all adults with jobs and responsibilities and shit, we don't want to have to dial people in to shoot the shit late at night. That would feel like a chore.
An alternative with no drop in voice chat is a non starter for my group.
I think it comes from the fact that a lot of communities and projects use Discord basically like they would with IRC, with voice chats often not even existing in some servers. I have to assume the people who recommend Matrix are only ever in that kind of server.
I'm in 2 or 3 servers with different friend groups and of course each one is full of friends of friends of friends. Even the smallest is over 30 people, but I only regularly join VC with 3-4. If I had to call all of them to be in a voice call I would literally never do it.
Same goes for chats, in Matrix the closest things to channels and servers is rooms and spaces. The difference is that you don't join a space, you just view rooms in the space and join them. Most of my servers have a ton of different channels for different things, I want to be able to see what happens in all of them without having to join each one, announcing to them that I've joined.
I like Matrix for FOSS project discussions, but I don't think it'll ever be the right pick for just hanging out with friends.