Okay, given that Discord is planning on doing an IPO (and I’m expecting even more enshittification as a result), I feel like it’s time for us to reflect on the choice of Discourse chat now that we’ve used it for a few months.
I have to say that I’m a little disappointed with it:
- The experience is not nearly as nice as other modern chat applications like Discord or Matrix.
- It doesn’t matter for me personally, but a few people I’ve talked to have expressed to me that they simply would never use chat here because there’s no dedicated app for it. It seems that people like the context switch of not being in a web browser for this.
- Notifications never seem to work consistently. I’ve tried looking into it and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
- I originally had the hope that Discourse chat could eventually be bridged to other chat protocols. This was an unfounded hope as there are no IRC, XMPP, or Matrix bridges for Discourse to my knowledge.
The only benefit of Discourse chat appears to be the fact that chat is literally built-into the page of the website. The livestream plugin utilized the chat connection the best, but it’s clear to me that the livestream plugin is a little half-baked, especially after Discourse moved to the new Horizons theme, despite it being an official plugin. Admittedly, the bug I reported was resolved quickly, but overall I think Discourse chat’s lack of features and interoperability is not worth the downsides imo.
Matrix supposedly supports video calls (or at least, their Matrix client Element does), supports federation, and continues to grow with plenty of interop support like bridges to other protocols compared to other options. It does have horrible UX, but out of the options we can self-host, I think I now like it the most.
The other option I suggested, Revolt, has since rebranded to Stoat. However, they still have no plans to implement Federation and the ecosystem is a lot smaller with less choices and pretty much no interoperability – not even with other Revolt instances, as far as I can tell.
So, I think I’m resolved to move us to Matrix chat, but this will require me to take quite a few lengthy steps like moving to a cheaper host and improving authentication across our services by looking into SSO like Authentik.
What do you all think? Do you like Discourse chat? Are you excited about a move to Matrix?