> you can even change which app you want it to be.
From a limited set of options.
My friends are the mass market. You and I are savvy, tech folks and we know what Matrix is. I've got friends who work as car mechanics, secretaries, teachers, etc. They're not dumb, they can spend the time to figure out which app will work best for them on their computers and phones, but they don't particularly want to spend their time fiddling with software on their computer. I love them, and they love me, but do they love me enough to go through this rigamarole just to share Star Trek memes and talk about our days?
For all its faults, Discord is easy, and it's good. They've put in a lot of polish, and it just works, and it's well supported. Convincing them to move away means that at best, I'm taking on the role of tech support for... potentially dozens of people? Except it won't be that many, because I doubt that many of them will move.
Discord will have to get catastrophically bad before they strongly consider moving off of it, and I would bet you twenty US dollary-doos that the first place we'll move to will be Slack.
Sure, but they wouldn't have been the market for XMPP's cross-compatibility before, either. You would have been, and you can have that now - your friends don't have to move to Matrix for you to get one chat app to rule them all. They can stay on Discord, and it doesn't stop you from having inter-op text chat
I agree that it would take something catastrophic for people to move off of the service they currently use. I disagree however on the premise that the move will be from one proprietary service to another. Us tech savvy people can and should self-host the things we believe can be valuable - now or down the line.
I'm not on mastodon but I've perused some threads and if it brings value to people great - the fact that it was there when twitter imploded means some portion of the population actually moved to it and now uses it. It provided some real value to people.
From a limited set of options.
My friends are the mass market. You and I are savvy, tech folks and we know what Matrix is. I've got friends who work as car mechanics, secretaries, teachers, etc. They're not dumb, they can spend the time to figure out which app will work best for them on their computers and phones, but they don't particularly want to spend their time fiddling with software on their computer. I love them, and they love me, but do they love me enough to go through this rigamarole just to share Star Trek memes and talk about our days?
For all its faults, Discord is easy, and it's good. They've put in a lot of polish, and it just works, and it's well supported. Convincing them to move away means that at best, I'm taking on the role of tech support for... potentially dozens of people? Except it won't be that many, because I doubt that many of them will move.
Discord will have to get catastrophically bad before they strongly consider moving off of it, and I would bet you twenty US dollary-doos that the first place we'll move to will be Slack.
Network effects, man.