We try to, but when you’re living paycheck to paycheck, trying to find solutions to the moving target that is your wife’s fibromyalgia, have a growing, energetic baby boy, sometimes you can’t afford paying twice as much or more for the product that isn’t sold on amazon, assuming such an alternative exists.

Unfortunately, lots of people can’t afford to shop with a conscience

Living without amazon prime is easy; living without amazon at all is more challenging with various manufacturers using amazon as their only storefront

Element is okay, but I really wish Matrix had better clients on iOS. If Cinny put out an iOS app or got the web app working better on mobile, I’d be way more willing to start using Matrix more.

I have just started using it, but I’m planing to migrate my small Discord group over to Revolt.

If you go to their website revolt.chat it’ll offer a download for desktop or a link to the web app, but they’re basically the same. They’re working on an updated client called Frontend which you can get a beta of from GitHub.

I’m on an iPhone and I used the save to Home Screen function in Safari while in the web app to get an icon for it, and I think it works pretty well! It can even do push notifications, but some weird artifacts of using the web app on mobile mean you’ll only get notifications from mentions in a server or a direct message (or group message).

I’ve got a Matrix server up and running and have tried a couple of different clients, but at the end of the day the Matrix UX isn’t really an alternative to Discord, rather an alternative to Facebook Messenger/WhatsApp or other group message platforms.

The main thing I would point to is that Matrix itself only does text; the Element client uses Jitsi to add in audio/video calls and screensharing, but at least right now, it’s the only Matrix client to integrate voice, video, or screenshare.

My other gripes are just with the user interface, but if you open any of the Matrix mobile apps and compare it to Facebook Messenger and to the Discord mobile app, and you’ll see it really doesn’t look like Discord. I wish I could quantify it better, but Matrix just doesn’t feel like Discord whereas Revolt does.

If anyone is looking for an alternative to discord, please check out revolt.chat The interface and user experience is the closest I’ve seen to discord (miles better than any Matrix client), has functioning voice chat (being rebuilt for more stability) custom server roles, and a functioning youtube music bot called Remix. They’re doing awesome work over there!

Edit: Forgot to mention that it’s also open-source and self-hostable (although not federated)