Asking because I value opinions here.
Personally I don’t think anyone can influence what the general audience of chat users ultimately coalesces around. That’s going to happen, and it’s going to be out of anyone’s control as people discuss and compare and decide which they prefer of the dozens of alternatives appearing.
This however looks interesting to me. I know it’s not Matrix and thus not secure like everyone here wants. But it is fully open source and it is AGPLv3.
It feels like it’s getting some traction and interest. If it has problems that anyone here can spot (besides the full encryption which isn’t something the rest of the discord users looking to leave are going to demand), I am interested in hearing them.
I think the XMPP-based attempts at replacing Discord are the best bet. Movim is working on Spaces (the XMPP extension for being Slack/Discord) and making good progress.
I used XMPP a bit with some peeps here and it was fun for a short bit but its even worse than matrix honestly cos its so niche and client support is so thin.
Which XMPP things did you use?
Conversations, monal, gajim. All have their own quirks or missing different parts of the spec but the absolutely worst part of xmpp is waiting ages for it to sync on another device if you hadn’t used it in a while or lose your entire conversation history instead.
The worst part was sometimes certain people couldn’t download the omemo key for whatever reason or they just wouldn’t receive half of my messages and found it was because their instance just rejected stuff at random but the client didnt tell you that it was only because we were hosting a server we could see comms werent working. Oh and randomly at one point images stopped working for several days. We used it for quite a long time after moving off matrix for similar reasons and it just got untenable after a while. I still prefer it over matrix but it lacks a lot of polish even after all this time.