I recently was setting up Synapse on my NAS, and installed Element, which had a login I’d previously used on the main Matrix server. I stared at my nearly-empty window looking for anything that might guide me to get some information, find some channels… SOMETHING.

On Discord, once I’m on a server, I immediately have channels. And there’s a list of servers along the left side that I’ve joined.

AFAICT, you have to search for chat rooms yourself (or have links from elsewhere, I imagine?).

And while that’s not hard, it’s very much indirect and inconvenient.

If I convince someone to join me over on a Matrix chat server and they make an account and then all they see is an empty chat with a “Look for rooms” button, that’s a lot of work to get started.

Also, I don’t see any way to have specific communities to join which come with a set of rooms already, which is one of the biggest benefits IMO of Discord – the sense of a “community” of discussions.

And it may be that these things do all exist already; but the fact that I don’t just see them and can use them out the gate without research… that’s a major hurdle to ask people to overcome for most users.