Why do open source projects use discord?

Question

I personally find discord bloated, slow and hard to use. But besides my personal impressions, I am genuinely intrigued by the fact that, having platforms like matrix, which very well aligns with the open source ethos, many people rely upon closed source services like discord to provide support and build communities for their projects. What are the features the it offers?

Owendaniels1 · Accepted Answer

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not_your_vase · Answer

Quick google: Number of discord users: 150M Number of matrix users: 60M Go where you can reach the most people. Not saying I like it. It's just the way it is.

SubGenius · Answer

I'm building a publicly-accessible matrix server [0], primarily so that FOSS communities don't have to move to a closed platform.
It's a negative trend that all the collective knowledge of these communities end up being siloed in platforms that can't be accessed from the open web.
[0] - https://shpong.com/shpong

snehk · Answer

I've wondered about this as well. I can't use Discord. I'm in my mid 30s and I feel like an 85 year old man using that software. It feels absolutely overwhelming and bloated.

mattl · Answer

Discord seems very easy to setup, a lot of people already have an account and the client and the client is somewhat easy to use (notifications are annoying to me) and with a global identity.I wouldn&rsquo;t even know where to setup a new Matrix server, I suspect it&rsquo;ll involve installing server software but is there a larger instance of Matrix people use? (Akin to mastodon.social)