As someone who runs a Mumble server (and has for over a decade) – it’s really not a replacement for the user experience that is Discord.
People want a unified UI, the ability to create communities with some amount of customization, embedded/live content, plus voice and video so they can chill and play games together. Mumble is just voice, and while it’s a very good implementation of that, it’s not even in the same user space as Discord.
Matrix does have all of that, though? Except for voice.
I use matrix/element for socializing and Mumble for voice chat while gaming.
To respond to each comment:
Element is a unified UI, available on PC/Web/Mobile.
Starting and managing a community involves hitting the + button, creating a community, creating rooms in that community, then setting permissions and ACLs - pretty similar to discord, though with more control as you own the server.
Embedded content is possible through the embed button.
Video and voice work, but aren’t great for gaming (see below).
Element Call (aka the new MatrixRTC spec) is great for video calls, but leaves a lot to be desired for chatting while gaming.
Matrix has moved very very slowly and I’m concerned it’ll have the same fate as XMPP, where it’s a bunch of very complicated standards, with maybe one compliant implementation that nobody wants to work on.
I also don’t think it’s a particularly good protocol design for a Discord replacement, it’s not federated it’s a distributed message protocol, which is an order of magnitude more complicated and intensive than potential alternatives.
That said, many non-perfect things have achieved widespread success, so I’m at least hopeful that Matrix/Element are able to catch on in a wider capacity.
As someone who runs a Mumble server (and has for over a decade) – it’s really not a replacement for the user experience that is Discord.
People want a unified UI, the ability to create communities with some amount of customization, embedded/live content, plus voice and video so they can chill and play games together. Mumble is just voice, and while it’s a very good implementation of that, it’s not even in the same user space as Discord.
Matrix does have all of that, though? Except for voice.
I use matrix/element for socializing and Mumble for voice chat while gaming.
To respond to each comment:
Element Call (aka the new MatrixRTC spec) is great for video calls, but leaves a lot to be desired for chatting while gaming.
Matrix has moved very very slowly and I’m concerned it’ll have the same fate as XMPP, where it’s a bunch of very complicated standards, with maybe one compliant implementation that nobody wants to work on.
I also don’t think it’s a particularly good protocol design for a Discord replacement, it’s not federated it’s a distributed message protocol, which is an order of magnitude more complicated and intensive than potential alternatives.
That said, many non-perfect things have achieved widespread success, so I’m at least hopeful that Matrix/Element are able to catch on in a wider capacity.