I was sold on Matrix as a viable alternative to Discord but recently read this article which made it look not so good.
That article is mostly FUD, but there are very good reasons to be sceptical of Matrix, as it is mostly driven by a VC funded for-profit company.
If you are looking for a truly community driven and owned alternative, check out XMPP: https://joinjabber.org
XMPP has issues such as rooms are not properly decentralised, not all clients support proper replys and you cant edit messages older then 1 message
the servers are much lighter then matrix servers, conduit is quite light and fast compared to synapse but not as light as XMPP servers
The message editing thing is just a client setting and having a single source of truth for a room is a huge advantage of XMPP that Matrix is now reinventing as they realized their hyped decentralized rooms are just a gimmick feature that causes more problem than it solves.
Linearized matrix wont be replacing the current way rooms work, especially with how they want to make the clients p2p eventually, its just for the DMA and convincing them to go with matrix
Yes the article is FUD and sloppy. This is what Matthew Hodgson (Arathorn) had to say about it:
Talking of sloppiness, that hackea.org article is a huge steaming pile of FUD about Matrix.
For what it’s worth, the team who came up with Matrix was originally based in two separate startups: one in the UK doing VoIP, one in France doing mobile dev. Both got acquired by Amdocs in 2010, but we ended up forming an independent “incubated startup” first to build telco apps, and then we came up with the idea of Matrix in ~2013. We then built out Matrix until 2017 when Amdocs killed our funding, having run out of patience for what amounted to generous FOSS philanthropy.
We then set up New Vector (now Element) as an entirely independent UK/FR startup, and have received zero funding from Amdocs since. To be crystal clear: Amdocs has zero privileged influence or control over Matrix (or Element, for that matter), and has zero access to the Matrix servers we operate as Element. And besides - the whole point of Matrix is that you can and should run your own servers so you can pick who to trust, even if you don’t trust the project itself.