Telegram isn't great for having an overarching place for everyone to join with siloed discussions for sub-categories of discussion. The point isn't "we need IM communication", it's "we need IM communication in a logical structure that matches the way we want to communicate".
Slack costs a lot of money if you want searchable history.
Matrix (https://matrix.org/) is pretty bad when you get to using it. It works, but the QOL isn't up to Discord's level.
Discord is just as easy to replace as any other chat platform if they decide to sell out or destroy their product.
> Telegram isn't great for having an overarching place for everyone to join with siloed discussions for sub-categories of discussion.
Just want to point out that they fixed this, it's possible to create Topics once the channel's community reaches 200 users.
Though this probably isn't what most users want for a support channel. Having one place to go is simpler then a community with a dozen company meme channels that you have no interest in seeing.
> Matrix (https://matrix.org/) is pretty bad when you get to using it. It works, but the QOL isn't up to Discord's level.
It goes to hell if you make the mistake of enabling E2EE for channels since the key exchange bogs it down and only a few clients support encrypted message search. Otherwise, yeah the Element clients have pretty bad UX especially when comparing to Telegram. Some other clients like Nheko improve on it but don't cover the full set of features, so while I'm a user of Matrix I find it hard to continue to recommend Matrix over chat ecosystems with better usability.
Zulip is the best for this IMO. You can even export conversations so they are indexable and viewable without login.
But Discord has the advantage that people already have an account and all the so called servers are within the same GUI. (This convenience also makes it a walled garden)
Gitter seems to have moved to being a Matrix instance (or maybe it always has? it didn't look like Matrix when I used it circa 2016), but matrix feels half-baked and is just a bunch of hacks put together. For example
- Can't "mark all as read" on a space. probably because rooms within a space are only tangentially related,
- No custom emojis or sticker packs (their proposal for this is to create rooms to house custom emojis/sticker packs[0])
Ah, the joys of open source: where "nobody has implemented 'mark all as read' on a space yet" is extrapolated to "half-baked and just a bunch of hacks".
Custom emojis & sticker packs exist as per MSC1951 (thanks for linking it), and implemented in various clients. The fact the data is stored in a room shouldn't exactly be a surprise, given 'rooms' (i.e. persistent decentralised pubsub topics) are the main primitive for storing data in Matrix, much as everything is a file in unix.
(Somewhat) confusing UI, delayed key exchange ("the sender hasn't sent the key to this device so the message can't be displayed yet" or something similar) and just in general a much less polished experience.
Slack costs a lot of money if you want searchable history.
Matrix (https://matrix.org/) is pretty bad when you get to using it. It works, but the QOL isn't up to Discord's level.
Discord is just as easy to replace as any other chat platform if they decide to sell out or destroy their product.