After trying Matrix as a Discord replacement with a couple of different clients it was pretty terrible. My Discord usage is fairly simple but I run a community for non-technical people. Matrix UX was pretty shit between confusing clients and just the overall clumsiness. I would have loved to introduce a whole community to it but instead I went back to Discord instead.
I run a server for a non-tech community with roughly 300 members ranging in age from 20 to 65. Some of them are extremely non-technical, to the point that they say “hey Siri turn on flashlight” instead of finding the button on their phone. Every single one was able to figure out Discord in a matter of minutes and use it daily with zero complaints. I would say that’s a customer success story right there.
> Every single one was able to figure out Discord in a matter of minutes and use it daily with zero complaints.
My parents and their friends couldn't figure out Discord after 2 weeks of honestly trying to use it. Biggest sources of confusion seemed to be DMs vs servers, username vs username+number vs nickname, and the sheer amount of stuff onscreen. They reverted to iMessage.
The main server I'm on is for after hours gaming with coworkers at a company I contract with. I can certainly find my way to a room and chat. But I can't use my actual name, though requested to do so, because it's too common (names don't have to be unique in discord, for some reason there can only be so many of each. Silly limitation.). And I'm not categorized in the same way as my coworkers in the user list. And then some rooms seem to be for text and others for watching one person broadcast video. The experience is just kind of all around disjointed feeling. Perhaps curation and community style has a lot to do with that though.