[rebeccaskinner]

I really want to like Matrix, and just last weekend I re-downloaded a matrix client and tried to give it another shot. Maybe I'm holding it wrong, but from what I can tell it's suffering from the same problem that all of the fediverse services seem to suffer from: The only thing to talk about is the fediverse itself.

Back in the heyday of IRC I spent a lot of time in technical channels on networks that were mostly technically focused, but I started using IRC in the first place because of the social channels where you could join games, talk about music, or find people with other shared interests.

Then there was a moment in time where community slack groups popped up, and again I mostly joined tech focused slack groups, but it still felt social and there were channels to talk about movies or games in addition to talk about careers or particular programming languages. Slack killed those kind of communities but they moved to discord. I left discord when they introduced ads.

Open up a Matrix client and look at the public rooms on any large server and you'll find places to talk about... the matrix protocol. and matrix servers. and matrix clients. If it's a really popular server you might also be able to talk about mastadon clients and servers too.

Even as someone who is enthusiastic about the idea of federation who might actually be interested in talking about the Matrix protocol or implementing particular servers, I still want to also talk about math or programming languages or movies. Without anything like that Matrix as a whole just gives off this general vibe of being kind of unwelcoming and not _fun_.

[Arathorn]

This is probably because we literally just deleted everything but Matrix-related rooms on the matrix.org room directory to deal with abuse: https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/curated-room-directories/

[rebeccaskinner]

Reading the article was helpful to understand the other side of it. I definitely understand how it's a hard problem to solve on the part of the server owners.

I noticed in the linked post that there's not a clear way forward in the short term for people to submit their own room directories. Do you think there are other ways someone might be able to help with the need for discoverable fun community spaces on Matrix? I suppose running a server is one option, but it's both difficult to bootstrap a userbase and I suspect that anyone running a server that's open for public signups risks running into exactly the same problem.

[amatecha]

There are giant, active channels for specific topics. I've been in the OpenBSD channel(s) for years and there is always relevant deep discussion there. Same for other technical topics like that.