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Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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I run a Matrix family instance. My elderly parents use it as their main way of communicating with us.
Sure, I set up their accounts - but all that difficult to use UX seems to have passed them by completely since they're very happy with it.
Setup is the hardest part. Syncing multiple devices and device migration are also hard. I'll bet you're going to act as tech support every time they get a new phone. That's fine for your family, but it's hardly going to scale.
The performance issues show up when dealing with large groups syncing between instances. You might just not be using it that way, but that's what needs to work seamlessly for a viable substitute for Discord.
How large is large? A few hundreds? Not seeing any performance issues.
If we're talking about Matrix as a Discord alternative, then that would mean thousands of channels, each with hundreds or thousands of users, many with constant activity.
I'm not sure if anybody actually uses Matrix at the scale of the average Discord user. Sliding sync is supposed to help, but I don't think the Matrix architecture can realistically scale that high.
You might have a very different definition of "average Discord user" than the average Discord user.
Or perhaps you do not understand how Discord is commonly used.
People join dozens of servers. Maybe one for every game they play, every TV show they watch, every podcast they listen to. Everything has a Discord.
Even small Discord servers have many channels. Bigger ones will have dozens or hundreds of channels.
Some servers have millions of users. Most of the servers I'm in have thousands.
Many channels are default for all users in the server.
Not sure what the mathematical average is, but this is certainly common at least, and any alternative that can't handle this is no alternative at all.