The crowd that is blocked by sanctions, values privacy/freedom, has certain accessibility needs third-party clients could provide, or doesn’t have powerful enough hardware or a big/fast enough internet plan likely hasn’t been able to participate even if they wanted to. It’s a bad choice, and we see users get banned for weird, non-project-related reasons & they lose access to the community due to the whims of the Discord corporation.
My point is that the vast majority of users want Discord now, and second is Slack. I wish there were good enough Matrix clients and features that users demanded Matrix, but they don't.
Eh, I mean it’s better than Discord & Slack, yes. The Matrix model of mirror the entire history of all user conversations, including attachments, make it costly to host the storage side. This in turn makes self-hosting not appeal which has lead to de facto centralization around Matrix.org. I would like to see a greater uptake in XMPP MUCs as it’s way lighter to self-host …or IRCv3 which is lightweight but has some modern comforts. Chat needs to be treated an non-permanent where Slack & Discord have made folks over-reliant on it & now we can no longer do a simple web search.
Without in any way suggesting this is a solution rather than a work around, the last time I needed Discord for something I used bitlbee to present it as an ircd and it worked out nicely.
That workaround is obviously not ideal & still requires an account (& possibly a phone number too). And your private message will still be logged. And using the service also still causes a big issue for search as you can’t find solutions using an engine like you could with a forum.
If there are the resources a community would self-host a decentralized, federated server where users are in control of their account/data along with the community in control of moderation, bans, CoC, ToS… & then bridge to other services from that base if they are seen as useful. If a community has less resources certain servers use less resources—especially if the server isn’t supposed to hold the entire history (which these chat rooms shouldn’t be seen as a place for permanent decision making anyhow).
