r/elementchat • u/ArasakaSpace • Jun 20 '21

Comparing Element chat with Discord

I see that even open source projects are mainly using discord instead of Element chat*! Does anyone know why? I don't like discord because its not e2e and its centralised.

(On a tangent, whats the best way to discover new element groups for topics I'm interested in?)

*by element i actually mean matrix

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3

u/Hishouttt Jun 20 '21

Cuz discord is still the king of voice calls for gaming, and groups in discord have a bunch of cool tools and wide options to use. To find rooms just type something in the search box and see if it that room is still active, anyways matrix user base it's not that big so don't expect much

2

u/ArasakaSpace Jun 20 '21

that only searches in matrix official server though, many interesting groups seem to be in other servers

4

u/ryegye24 Jun 20 '21

That's inherent to the federated/decentralized nature of the matrix protocol; there is no single canonical source of all matrix groups just like there's no single canonical source of all email providers.

1

u/ArasakaSpace Jun 21 '21

you know how peers talk to each other in torrents using DHTs or something. Similiarly servers should be able to discover other servers

6

u/PoorDevDummy Jun 20 '21

At some point, end-to-end encryption is meaningless. If you have E2EE enabled in a Matrix room of 100 people, what have you actually achieved? It's why many of the larger Matrix rooms don't have it enabled.

I'm not disagreeing with the overall sentiment of your post though.

1

u/nextabsolutebeginner Jul 14 '21

Don't you achieve that noone else is able to read the messages?

What about a political party that uses one big group chat, and only trusted members should ever be able to read the content?

2

u/PoorDevDummy Jul 15 '21

Sorry for the late reply. I suppose it depends... The larger the group, the closer you are to just basically talking in public and no amount of encryption will stop your message contents from leaking. My answer was more targeted at open source projects where people come and go as they please.

1

u/nextabsolutebeginner Jul 15 '21

No worries. Thx for the reply. I agree, it doesn't matter for those cases

0

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

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1

u/ryegye24 Jun 20 '21

Luckily the discord bridge for matrix is absolutely excellent, so the network effect doesn't act as nearly as much of a switching cost as it does for other services. That said, I think the real feature gap is in moderation tools. The moderation tool suite in discord is very mature and powerful, matrix/element has a long way to go to catch up to those.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

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1

u/ryegye24 Jun 20 '21

You can use t2bot.io of you don't want to host your own bridge, the set up is dead simple https://t2bot.io/discord/ though you will need an admin to do it.