this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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First I’m hearing about it
Yeah seems really weird that a service with 2/3rds or more of the users than Discord is completely unknown to me or any of my fellas on the group discord when I asked them.
Can't tell if I am falling out of touch, the service is aimed at a completely different demographic than me, or these numbers are bullshit.
A lot of IRC communities migrated, and it's pretty much the go to option now if you want live communications for your project or org, but don't want something proprietary. It's a pretty good replacement for Teams or Slack.
Many communities went back to IRC, though, because Matrix still is a hot mess, and the most visible ones which didn't (Mozilla, KDE, ...) are not hosting their own Matrix instance but letting New Vector do that for them, which makes in practice a disproportionate amount of users and accounts be managed by a single organization. I do think it's better than discord, but barely so.
I'm going to assume the bridged users count as well, but a lot of it is going to be private organizations.
Ah that explains it, ty.
It's used by a lot by organisations who want an alternative to Slack/Teams. Have a look at the client list for Element, arguably the biggest Matrix client/platform - https://element.io/
And as someone else mentioned there's also a huge influx of IRC folks especially in the last year.
I think they're aimed at very different demographics. In my experience, Discord is full of people who call themselves server admins when they moderate a group while Matrix-admins is actually self-hosting their own servers.
I have been running my own server for a few years now. I would describe it more as an alternative for What's App or Signal than an alternative to discord. I think it's more used in a professional/and or government setting for organisations who need to run their own services.
Also, Matrix is just the protocol behind it and there are quite a few different clients for it, the most popular one is element. Lemmy.world also has a link to their Matrix instance.