Derin

From a chat standpoint, the two are near identical - yes - but Matrix lacks the “voice/video calls as persistent rooms” feature that Discord has. This was planned a while back, but has recently been pushed on the backburner^[1] as they work on Element Call.

Early on Matrix was sort of being built up as an IRC/Discord alternative, but recently they’ve pivoted more towards a WA/Telegram/Slack alternative as most of their financial support comes from European governments and companies looking for strong and secure internal communication solutions they can manage themselves.

So, TL;DR you probably won’t see the exact Discord like features you want land in the spec any time soon as they’re not being funded.

So that means, right now:

• No persistent voice/video rooms (but they are on the roadmap!)
• No push-to-talk or “game friendly” settings like voice auto-detection (also not really on the roadmap)

Having said all that, Matrix is brilliant and I highly encourage people to check it out. I use a Matrix <-> Signal bridge for most of my comms with my friends, and we voice chat on Mumble. Not ideal, but you get to avoid Discord and you get a very similar experience! Bonus points for Mumble as it’s super lightweight.

~[1] It’s not really on the backburner so much as it’s something that will have to be worked on after the new VOIP stack - Element Call - is integrated in the wider Matrix ecosystem. There is an experimental “video rooms” feature, but that really isn’t the same as a native, persistent voice-only room.~

It’s the issues with XMPP’s spec: you don’t just use XMPP, you use XMPP + your favorite optional spec implementations.

If your friends aren’t on the same server/client combo then you won’t be able to communicate with them (effectively).

I loved XMPP, still do, but haven’t used it in years. If it were to get a single, matrix-style “spec release” (think an aggregation of existing features into one collection) that contains/requires a bunch of modern chat features I’ve come to expect from programs, then I could see it potentially having a resurgence.

I’m very excited for this! Granted, I do wish they’d stop “announcing” Matrix 2.0, but I think the release of SSS alone is reason enough for celebration.

I have sync issues with even Slack or WhatsApp when I use an old device that hasn’t updated in a while - Matrix’s new sync scheme is genuinely fantastic and fixes all the issues my aging synapse server was having (4+ year server means those initial syncs on log-in could tak upwards of 10 minutes).

Now I just want Element Call to work with my pre-existing accounts and then I’ll be ready for the next Matrix 2.0 announcement 😂

Might need to find more active communities?

The spam thing is annoying, but is a result of anyone being able to join a room and just upload images.

Really wish the large rooms would just disable image uploads, or use a bot to police new users a bit.

This is a pretty interesting idea! And I do agree that the feature to aggregate comments from multiple posts would be useful.

Mine is in 6 days, oh boy.

But what happens if you don’t use an IDE? That was the original point. Even if it isn’t statically typed, a python IDE can also do its best to guess the type of an object.

The point is to have code that’s legible without dependence on large, third party tools.

True true!

Yep, I was specifically talking about C#'s implementation.

I worked with some large C# code bases, and you could always see the point in time in which an individual developer would finally get comfortable with var - it’s when the code would start getting unreadable. 🤣

Nope, was added to dot Net after the fact. Normally you declare each type by hand, e.g.

ArrayList<int> myCoolList = new ArrayList<int>();

vs

var myCoolList = new ArrayList<int>();

The second example is why the keyword was added, but now imagine you have a function call returning an unknown type, and then things will start to get super funky.

E.g.

var myCoolBook = BuildBookData(input);

…one step forward and then the same step back 😂 (disclaimer: I do actually like C#, though)

Just you wait until your developers learn about the var keyword - it’s going to be Python 2.7 PTSD incidents all over again 😂

Larger, modern python projects always use type hints, for this specific reason.

In the past you had PyDoc, which also scratched that itch.

Barring that, contributing to a python project is very difficult without an IDE that performs type checks for you (which is unreliable).

What’s annoying about it? Deploying a war to tomcat is one of the easiest things one can do.