Not to be confused with the (now extinct) North American Redd Foxx.

My private groups solved this by using Matrix for text chat and Mumble for voice. It has push-to-talk and outstanding sound quality. Hosted Mumble servers are cheap, and self-hosting is pretty easy.

When Element Call (MatrixRTC) eventually leaves beta, we might switch to that, but it’s hard to beat Mumble for audio.

Thank you for bringing perspective, levity, and humility to an otherwise unfortunate thread. You brought a smile to my face.

Haha…

Imagine Commodore 64 users denouncing a useful computing system for calling its own core a kernel instead of a kernal. (Or vice-versa.)

Discord didn’t exist when Matrix was invented, and Teamspeak was never influential enough in the world for its conventions to matter outside of its own user base.

You seem to be overestimating the breadth and importance of your personal experience.

They just had to invent new terminology.

Matrix predates Discord, and room in this context predates both Matrix and Discord by about 20-30 years. They didn’t invent it.

Server as used by Discord has always been a conspicuous misuse of the word. It’s no wonder that Matrix chose not to adopt that nonsense.

Some things to keep in mind if you’re getting started with Matrix after having been on Discord:

End-to-end encryption is available, but you might want to disable it when you create a room. This will help keep things simple for your users as they get familiar with Matrix. Connections between client and server will still be encrypted using HTTPS, which is the same level of encryption that Discord has. (And if it’s a public room, e2ee wouldn’t have any value anyway.) You can always add end-to-end encryption to your rooms later.

A few terms used on Discord are different in the Matrix ecosystem…

If you don’t like the first Matrix client you try, consider trying others. Much like email clients, the features and user interface styles vary. The blog post mentions Cinny and Commet. Element X is probably the simplest mobile client with Matrix’s recent fast-startup feature (though it’s still catching up on other features). More clients are listed here.

Voice and video chat in Matrix are currently available only on some clients, and it’s done by integrating Jitsi. Not ideal, but still useful for at least some use cases. A better system is in development. Here’s a preview of it: https://call.element.io/

Matrix.org is by far the largest public homeserver. It’s convenient in that anyone can get an account without having to run their own homeserver, but it can also suffer slowdowns when an influx of users are arriving all at once, such as right now. You can choose to be patient, or look for a different public homeserver, or pay for a homeserver host, or (if you have the means) self-host.

Matrix.org and some other public homeservers ask for an email address when you sign up, so that they have a way to recover your account if you forget your password. It’s not required by The Matrix protocol, though, and some servers might allow new accounts with no contact info at all. I don’t know which ones; you’ll have to hunt for one (or run your own) if that’s what you want.

The blog post mentions account portability, which is not yet available in Matrix. This means that your user ID (@user:example.com) is currently tied to the homeserver where you create it (example.com). If you decide to switch to an account on another homeserver, you’ll have to get re-invited into any private chats you had joined with the old account. However, the rooms you create on your original homeserver are not tied to that server. So long as at least one room member is on another homeserver, the room will carry on (with its original ID) even if its original homeserver vanishes. This means, for example, that you could create a room on matrix.org today, and migrate its admin duties to an account on your own private homeserver that you set up a year from now. (Or even invite all your members to migrate to your private homeserver.)

Hah… wow. I understand the sentiment, but I think I would have taken it to a local e-waste recycling drop.

I hope the smashing was cathartic.

Out of curiosity, which client and OS sent the messages in question, and which client and OS says it can’t decrypt them?

I’ve seen that behavior in the past, but like I said, it has been more than a few months. It’s possible that at least one end of your conversation is using a client that hasn’t received the recent-ish fixes. It might be helpful if we could identify it.

My TTRPG groups use Matrix for text and Mumble for voice. This arrangement works pretty well.

We don’t use video, so I can’t vouch for that. The Matrix client called Element currently does it using Jitsi, and there’s a new approach in development that will eventually be supported by more Matrix clients: https://call.element.io/

Careful: Discord misuses the word “server” to mean community, so a lot of Discord users here might misunderstand and think you just said the average Joe doesn’t need to set up a community. (Of course, I’m sure you actually mean the average Joe doesn’t need to set up his own homeserver instance, which is true.)

Matrix is buggy and doesn’t scale imo,

I don’t know what problems you found, but the biggest bugs I encountered in past years seem to be fixed now, at least on recent clients. (Element X is recent, and I’ve seen praise for FluffyChat.)

Matrix for text and Mumble for voice works well for me.

For others who are interested:

https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/

Mumble is great. I don’t think there’s anything with better voice quality.

I hope Element Call comes close when it’s out of beta. Using a single app for both text and voice chat would be slightly more convenient than using two.

Most clients are probably waiting until it’s out of beta before they implement it. From what I’ve seen of the design, it does look pretty great. Looking forward to it being fully specced and released.

When was the last time you used it? They’ve been working hard on fixing the encryption bugs, and it shows. I haven’t seen a glitch in… maybe half a year now?

Ah, yes… the old “acting responsibly here won’t completely solve the problem, so we might as well act irresponsibly” argument.

Promised in the same way that the publisher promised the developers a big bonus, only to cheat them out of it later?

This links to an image, not a news article.

For the curious:

Eufy is based in China, has already had at least one scandal for lying about data exfiltration, and (when I investigated last year) could remotely update their products with new behavior at any time. I do not recommend them where privacy is desired.