[theshrike79]

For me, despite its flaws in E2E, Telegram is the sweet spot for small to medium sized groups.

Easy to install, works on every platform I need it, super-simple bot support and the UX is very nice. You even have tools to make write-only groups (microblogs of sorts) and actual moderation tools for larger groups.

For a "community", I'd pick Discord though.

Matrix as a technology is a good competitor, but the UI/UX for every client I've tried rangers from "death by a thousand cuts" to atrocious.

Case in point: I got a notification about a message on a channel on my phone from my Element client. I open it and what do I see? Not the message. A "Syncing" -message that lasts longer than I can stand to wait. My phone actually falls back to sleep and turns off the screen while I'm waiting for it to sync. And after it has synced, does clicking the notification take me to the channel? Of course not and now I've already forgotten where the notification was from.

[pkulak]

Sounds like you were running with an account on the default matrix.org server? It's gotten faster, but there were a bunch of months when it was dog slow. The point is kinda to run your own server.

[theshrike79]

I don't have the time to run my own infrastructure. That's why I pay someone else to host my mail, compute and everything else.

[pkulak]

You can pay someone to host a Matrix server too.