Having tried Rocket, Riot, and Mattermost before, it's of my opinion as well as everyone that I work with that Discord blows them away. It's so much more polished.
Discord is good. But there are a couple of things that prevent my team to use it seriously:
- Message threads
- Ability to share screens when multiple people are in audio conference
- ability to "draw" over the screen while sharing
One thing I wish slack or others had that discord has is ability to select FPS for screen share: when I'm sharing the screen or camera (showing a whiteboard) I usually care more that the image looks with better detail even if it refreshes once every 20 seconds. Almost all screen sharing always introduce compression artifacts.
I think "Go Live" on discord has rolled out to everybody now? Join a voice channel, hit the button (next to Disconnect) and pick an app or screen. Needs Nitro for good quality (otherwise you're stuck at 720p). Latency is better than most other streaming things I've tried.
100% agree on the other two, though. Encouraging people to make channels as needed helps the first, but for ephemeral discussions you wind up deciding between deleting the chat log, or living with a lot of "retired" channels. And being default opt-in for notifications makes Discord _way_ more noisy than Slack could ever be.
Discord is good but it has a bunch of drawbacks. The ones that matter the most to me:
* Can't leave a channel (without custom bot shenanigans, which doesn't scale well to having a lot of channels).
* No control of notification sounds on mobile. All notifications get the same sound and there's no option to deliver quietly.
* No threading.
* Can't collapse embeds.
* No back/forward navigation. The closest it gets is in the quickswitcher it offers the last channel you were in, but that's it.
* Their support is awful. Everything except extremely obvious bugs get the response "please vote it up at feedback.discordapp.com", and even bugs often get that response.
* No "do not disturb" settings. If notifications are on, they're on 24 hours a day.
Speaking as the project lead for Riot, I agree... for now :) The difference (relative to Discord) is that Riot is FOSS and the sky is the limit in terms of how fast it evolves. These days Riot/Web, Riot/iOS and RiotX/Android are both straightforward and fun to hack on - and we do everything we can to encourage and merge good contributions and features from the community. As per the 2020 section at the end of https://matrix.org/blog/2019/12/24/the-2019-matrix-holiday-u..., our top priority for next year is to get the UX of Riot to be as mainstream as possible (ie as good or better than Discord), and we need all the help we can get. The company which funds most of Riot’s development (vector.im) is also hiring currently for UX Designers and developers to work fulltime on this.
TL;DR: If Linux can obsolete Solaris, Riot can obsolete Discord/Slack. Come get involved and help :)
As a very heavy Matrix user, the one thing that's kept me from trying to use it for my local hackerspace is that there's not a simple way to grant access to rooms based on group membership. Within companies/larger private groups, you often (almost always!) want to grant people access to chatrooms conditionally based on membership in the group. There are few options for this right now:
- Have a bot invite everyone in the group to every room and kicks them out if they leave (noisy, not everyone needs to be in every room)
- Have everyone in the group use the same homeserver, make rooms public and non-federated (defeats much of the purpose of Matrix, doesn't let you invite people from outside the org as one-offs)
I think some of the future plans for communities would solve this?
Anyway, Matrix right now is great for both small private chats and FOSS projects; in the former case you can just handle access ad-hoc, and in the latter case the rooms are public anyway. It just seems a bit lacking at the moment for organizations that need private rooms.
You can't reuse matrix IDs (yet), as they are the unique key for your message history - it's like email; if you reuse an email address you'll start getting email intended for the original user.
Meanwhile, if you want echelon as a username, go register a domain name, run a matrix server on it, and you can have @echelon:echelon.xyz or wherever. Try not to get sued by five eyes though ;P
What do you recommend as server software for riot? I had some problems with the various bridges which the default server currently provides. Is the default server also provided with synapse?
Synapse is the best server for now, and works relatively well (resource usage has improved lots over the last year). Bridges plug into the server, and there’s typically at least one good one per protocol: matrix-appservice-irc, matrix-appservice-slack, mautrix-telegram, mautrix-whatsapp etc. We need to improve the UX for provisioning and managing bridges though; atm it’s mix of config files and bot commands.
Thank you for working on Matrix, it has been smooth sailing (after some database cleanup) for me to operate since taking over a homeserver from a frustrated operator nearly half a year ago.
Why would someone other than the server admin host the bot?
It's not ideal, but shipping a mobile and desktop client that are literally incapable of displaying the same channels in the same order is also not ideal.
That's not the same. Unless you're adding one role per channel, and then it's quite unwieldy. For example, we're not going to set up a role and have everyone else self-serve add that for a channel for an outing, a specific feature/bug, etc etc.
How do you get the right subset of employees into a channel in Slack? The same amount of work split the same way can accomplish the same thing in Discord.
Yeah imo, discord is the only conceivable competitor to slack in this space and anyone who thinks Microsoft teams is their competitor just doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
I hard a weird conversation with a group rolling out teams. They had never used instant messenger. They had never used slack. They had never used discord. They had never used irc.
It was very strange because they had no idea what Teams was used for. They shared some literature that says the features are the same, but when asked to do simple tasks like use teams to coordinate the rollout, they didn’t know how to do it.
Kind of weird. My hope is that Microsoft eventually makes it usable since it’s basically free with other purchases. But then, Microsoft killed yammer and Skype.
