Posted my thoughts on Matrix over on Bluesky in a thread:

bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/
bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/

TL;DR no, it's not going to replace Discord. Matrix is too full of jank due to early poor design decisions to be widely usable by non-technical people.

The Fediverse and Bluesky are different takes on federated Twitter with different pros/cons, and federated Twitter is a much harder problem (because it's "global"), but Matrix is basically just all cons. It's a failed experiment, and you can simply do much better starting over rather than trying to fix it. Just because it's relatively widely used in FOSS spaces doesn't mean it's the way to go. Sunk cost fallacy etc.

@linaHoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!! a lot of that seems to be focused on E2EE. but also, even ignoring E2EE, matrix is still a jank mess, honestly

I'm in a matrix community that isn't primarily about a tech project, and there has been a lot of jank. room splits (and handling those), clients needing a clear cache and initial sync, inadequate moderation tooling only made reactively against (the very bad media) spam (this impacted the whole of matrix, not just this specific community), the community's synapse homeserver falling over for the weirdest issues (I count 2 only somewhat recently), room upgrades being still a pretty meh experience, the whole thing of room v12 too (how much of matrix rooms have even upgraded to that?), and probably even more I did not remember to include here. oh, and I'm not even an admin or anything too, just been a participant who's been there for some time.

I've also ran into E2EE issues too. unable to decrypt, etc., with the worst one being sending an unencrypted message in an encrypted room, because my client for some reason got really confused about the state of room encryption (it's also a thing that's manually doable, and can also done the other way)

I also personally have 6 clients installed on my phone, and 2 per computer. just because not all clients implement wanted functionality. I could probably reduce the clients count to 3 for my phone at best while still keeping roughly all the feature sets I use.

probably a lot of this jank is how matrix kinda just does not have much communities that isn't about a tech project (not related to general tech oriented communities). the matrix.org room directory is by my rough estimation 99.9% tech projects. (compare that to stoat where I was able to instantly find a general stuff community in the discover section, and multiple of them, and many of them.)

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