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.
TL;DR: If Linux can obsolete Solaris, Riot can obsolete Discord/Slack. Come get involved and help :)