I see a lot of people saying online that “forums are dying off because of discord and reddit”
yet other people reply: “Well, I’m still using my forum/IRC.”
So I have to ask, what forums that are decently big still exist? Only one I can think of is Nomutantsallowed for fallout related content.
There are some good Matrix community, on matrix.org as well as individually run homeservers (federated).
matrix isn’t a forum. it’s a chat.
Incorrect. Technically Matrix is a protocol, and a forum client can be made. You already have some PoC social media ones. It just so happens that most well known clients at this time and for instant messaging. But it can be much more.
that’s interesting… I guess a forum and a chat have a lot of similar attributes. The difference is in the presentation with forum being more static appearing. What would be the reason to deploy Matrix like that instead of using a purpose-build forum software? The most obvious would be not requiring a second account.
What’s PoC?
is there a matrix client for Android? last I checked there was like, one, and it wasn’t very good. whereas there’s like 14 different Lemmy apps, many of which are fabulous.
I am not a big fan pf matrix but I think SchlidiChat was the one I used most successfully on android.
From what I have seen a main issue with Matrix is that the protocol can be implemented in bits and pieces. Which is perfectly fair but it leads to an inconsistent user experience. The default web clients you first use to try it out will be using strong encryption settings by default but then a lot of the mobile or native desktop clients don’t support encryption. So it’s difficult to get going finding cross platform apps that have all the desired functionality consistently between them.
In terms of the apps, I don’t think comparing matrix to lemmy is exactly fair for this reason.
Element X is quite good now (note the X, not the classic ‘Element’). Fluffychat’s good too but missing some features.
FluffyChat is pretty good these days https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/