I don’t have this chart in my review, I guess because I was 100% Linux. Kind of surprised I didn’t have a little Mac time in there, since I do sometimes use Steam on Mac while traveling. But thinking back, I guess it’s been a while.

Yeah, Matrix is a very, very hard sell. I mean, “normal” people (for lack of a better term) are put off by Mastodon, and Matrix is a hundred times more complicated to join. I’m also not sure what it would look like to use Matrix the way I use Discord. Perhaps there is functionality in Element/Matrix I have never explored since I use it more for messaging and group chat, not for communities with multiple channels like IRC/Discord/Slack.

In any case, Discord is too entrenched to be replaced by something that is merely technically superior, or even more user-friendly. Realistically, you can’t migrate entire communities if they’re bigger than a tight-knit IRL friend group, and even that is hard. That seems to be the only reason X still exists.

Almost, yeah. Certainly the big corps.

This is why I strongly favor services that use end-to-end encryption or do not store history in the first place.

There are not many times when I’ve needed to search back through history on a Discord server, and every time I have I thought to myself “this would be much better on any platform besides Discord”. Discord would, IMHO, be a better product if they did not retain history forever.

Ditto for Slack. Slack has the additional gall to limit access to that data unless you pay for a premium plan, despite the fact that they keep the data forever regardless (as evidenced by their occasional free trials which magically bring all history back, and some search tricks you can use to access old posts regardless).

Both Slack and Discord have lulled their user base into a false sense of privacy. Nothing you post there should be considered private.

It doesn’t really matter if they do or don’t. What matters is that they can change their TOS at any time, they keep an archive of all historical data, and you will have pretty much no recourse no matter what they decide to do with it in the future.

Who knows what will happen to Discord in five or ten years?

They might get bought by a narcissistic billionaire.

They might sell all their data to Google for training AI.

They might go bankrupt and sell off their assets to the highest bidder.

They might have an IPO and begin the usual value extraction at the expense of their users.

I know, I know…crazy ideas, right? When has anything like that ever happened?!