Omid's Blog

Sun Feb 15 21:24:15 2026

There seems to be a giant misconception about Matrix. The protocol, and its clients. Due to the news emerging on Discord and its future, it seems as if many people are looking for a new ’home’. Stoat, Rocket.chat, mattermost and what not are always recommended; however I have the feeling that every time Matrix is recommended that it’s immediately shot down from someone saying ’it doesn’t work’, or ’its not like discord’. As if rocket.chat is anything like Discord. The arguments usually seem to be that the channels are not working properly, there are permission issues, or that there’s no screen sharing/video calling.

All of these are not true. There is great video calling using Matrix’s new implementation of MatrixRTC using Element. The permission system whilst not as robust as that of Discord, is still great.

Some people also say that Synapse has issues, or federating your own instance is hard. Yes, if you are the kind of person like me who runs his own instance then you will come into these hardships, but talking to Discord refugees on the niceties of continuwuity and its Rust codebase as opposed to the Python codebase on Synapse is like telling a person who wants to switch from Windows to Linux as a casual user that they should really install Linux from Scratch.

To keep things short, Matrix is great. It’s not flawless, it’s not as polished as Discord. However, it is very usable and just fine for 99% of things the average user wants to do. Just join matrix.org, download Element and get online and enjoy a federated future.

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Edit on Wed Feb 25 17:46:33 2026: I still see misinformation about Matrix. Including one thread today where a vibecoded E2E chat program was being hailed as the replacement for Discord. Matrix is here. Instead of wasting time and trying to create other standards, push your code to Matrix and make it a great standard.

I had some fun setting up MatrixRTC this week. I used this guide, and it works well so far!