this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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for me the most critical ones are replacements for discord and microsoft teams. for discord the critical piece is the login - people don't want to make accounts on each server, so until we have proper federation with a good user experience people won't actually move off it.
for teams i'm sure theres projects in development, i just don't know them or their status - all i know is that i want a project to combine several specialized FOSS services (jitsi is great, and there's lots of other collaboration tools for email/calendar/chat) into one nice unified frontend that is actually reasonably easy to self-host and maintain.
Have you tried element?
The problem with Element as it compares to discord in my experience of showing it to discord-heavy users is that it does not contain the feature set that they are seeking.
Discords roles and permissions abilities, multiple channel types, streaming capabilities, public bots that are easily joinable, profile customization features, moderation capabilities, and more have no real equivalent in Matrix/element. Hence, when I have shown it to discord users before, they have 0 interest in using it because for them it is like reverting to an IRC.
This is part of what suggesting alternatives to Discord is hard. People tend to view it as one thing, often chat or voice/video, instead of a holistic solution that is all of those things and more along with making most tasks super easy to do for people.
Element's still Electron-based for the desktop app, given Electron is Chromium and Google has the final say over Chromium, that doesn't make it trustworthy at least in my opinion and I'm sure others' opinions too.
I run it in Firefox, though
Was about to point you to MatterMost but saw it's not open source, doh! Anyone know if it was and switched? Or was it always closed source?
Edit: Turns out it was and still is open source, I just apparently suck at researching.
Mattermost does have an Github Repository with a choice of three licenses: MIT (if using versions compiled by them), AGPLv3 (if compiled by you) or an Enterprise license. I would count that as open source.
Oh awesome! I saw their website just describes them as "source accessible" and that github didn't detect a license type and (wrongly) took that to mean it was an "open core but not really open source" product.
@houseofleft https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/blob/master/LICENSE.txt
I've shit on matrix a lot but this is something it does well.