Matrix Shit

It all started after the news of Skype's untimely demise came up.  At one point that service was a contender.  Everyone used it.  It was a rather neat chat program.  Friends would all have their group chats everyone would be in and sometimes voice would happen.  All seemed well.

Then Microsoft got ahold of it.  More and more changes were made in the name of profit.  And eventually everyone decide to just head off to Discord.  I can't even fully remember the chatter or the exact events that lead me there but ere long everyone was on discord.  The group chats were there.  The cycle had begun anew.

I always wondered if Discord would stay cool.  Eventually they'd have to extract their value from it.  I paid for the nitro because I wanted to keep it afloat without the enshittification and boost the servers I liked.  As did many people.  Discord ecosystem grew.

Thing about it though, and the thing that strikes me about stuff in this day and age is how we all got our eggs in one basket.  It probably outs my age when I speak of odler things, but originally every community, every game had their chat rooms and their forum.  Chatrooms were often done via IRC, which was and is a collection of different servers and no central authority.  Forums on web pages handled all the more persistent data.  It was kludgy at times, but worked and it wasn't beholden to some large company.

But everyone is on a discord now.  Forums are rare and you're better off browsing reddit often.  And discord has been great in the past.  But I always wonder if discord ever closed, if discord ever made awful decisions nobody could suffer, here we'd be, all our eggs in one basket and its now rotten.

I mentioned this to a developer of a third party Second Life client I know.  They mentioned they are already enacting plans to jump ship from discord.  I asked them what they are using.  They said matrix likely, but they were still researching.  That lead me to look into it.

Matrix has been about for nigh on 10 years.  It does a lot of what discord does but different.  It's decentralized and federated.  Strange words to the uninitiated, but all it means is it can't really be fully killed ever in a meaningful way.  Though instead of a single centralized service handling it, there's many provider machines giving people on ramps.  Though people can talk to people even if their servers aren't shared.

They avoid the confusion of setting up a mastodon and getting stuck in decision paralysis land as you browse through a myriad of servers.  If you go to their website they will suggest you download element and they'll funnel you to make an account on matrix.org's provider.  Skips over the browsing through servers.  Though some people may feel it defeats the purpsoe of decentralized.  I'd have to agree on a level, but at the same time, sometimes it's easier to just keep it simple for new people coming in.  The site does mention other servers or just rolling your own, in case you want a vanity domain.  Though for those who want to browse alternative servers I'd suggest gawking at the join matrix website, which is in no way affiliated with matrix.org but I found way more informative, complete with comparison of matrix against other chat protocols.

Yeah.  I was a dork and I set up a matrix account.  I went full dork and set up a vanity on-ramp using the random-rabbit domain.  Got no use for it at the moment though.  Maidenless as it were.  No contacts no chats to sit in.  But I got it warmed up at least for when that contact moves their chat rooms to a new service I'll be ready to roll.