Recently I accidentally made a Fediverse post which went viral:

stop using discord for your open source communities

That post is short, punchy, opinionated, and prescriptive, which I suspect is the cause for its virality.

Unfortunately, like many micro-blog posts, it lacks nuance, which many replies highlighted. I made the post to vent my frustration at needing to join a Discord server to interact with a community, so it is far from a measured critique of the subject.

This blog post is an attempt to address those nuances in greater detail. This is not an exhaustive analysis, and I’ve resolved to not let “perfect” be the enemy of “done”.

  • The pros and cons he listed for Matrix are exactly the same as XMPP, though he didn’t know it. It has stable gateways to SMS, voice PBX, Matrix and other services.

    I was hoping to see some more details on why Matrix might be better, rather than merely different/“new&shiny”.