this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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Alternative to discord: your best bet will be to find a matrix server at https://servers.joinmatrix.org. Element is the most mature client for all platforms.
For Facebook, any of the ActivityPub alternatives like Mastodon, Pleroma, GoToSocial... Too many choices for clients and instances, but if you are looking for a professional provider and care more about a "generic" instance that is well-maintained (or want to run your own), you can try communick. Disclosure, it's my own project and I've been running it for some years now.
I’m a fairly technical guy, but I genuinely cannot figure out why I’d want to use Matrix at this point.
My understanding, which may be wrong, is that it can communicate on its own encrypted standard, and that there are bridges that allow it to communicate with other services like Signal and WhatsApp. You have to register for a home server, which essentially means trusting the individual(s) running that home server not to abuse that privilege, especially considering that not all features are supported by the bridges to other protocols at this point (including end-to-end encryption in some cases), so they may have access to your unencrypted content. Not only that, but your data is then replicated on other servers where the other participants in your conversations are registered, which means you essentially need to trust all those other admins as well.
Then there are the clients, which (at least on iOS) seem to be few and far between. The (seemingly) most popular, Element, appears to collect a crap-ton of personal information - including user content!
I was a big fan of Trillian back in the day, which sought to unify AIM/MSN/ICQ/etc. into one place; am I correct in thinking Matrix seeks to do something similar today?
Given the seemingly large amount of trust you need to put in potentially numerous individuals and organizations, is the convenience of a unifying protocol that may or may not bring your various chat and calling services under one roof with varying levels of compatibility and security (not to mention the apps, some of which appear to collect everything under the sun about you) worth it?
Trillian was just a UI that put all your contacts in the same window. You couldn't talk across protocols, or merge the same user contact across multiple protocols.
Think of Matrix as a unified protocol from which AIM, MSN, ICQ would have all been based. And so if someone is on AIM but you registered on MSN, you can still talk. And at the fundamental level, it looks like IRC. It is the opportunity to re-baseline everything on a standard that is open and supports end to end encryption.
So while bridges would be needed today, the idea is that some time in the future these services would re-baseline on the Matrix protocol, or be displaced for whatever market reason by a startup that chose to baseline on Matrix.
Ok, seems I was on the right track. Thanks for clarifying!