City of Neoxian chat has returned to Discord
Dear Hive,
I have caved into peer pressure and returned my city chat to Discord from Matrix chat. The city was originally born in Discord and was there for quite a while, but then I moved it to Matrix for about 1 year and 10 months, but today have decided to move it back.
Why did you move from Discord to Matrix
I don't want to go over that again, I talked about it in this post, so read that.
@neoxian/city-of-neoxian-migrating-away-from-discord
Ok so why are you moving back to Discord?
The straw that broke the camel's back was that I feel it is hurting my Splinterlands Guild. A lot of Splinterlands players don't care about some weird chat and don't want to use it, so making them use it is probably discouraging them. Everyone in Splinterlands uses Discord so it seems like I need to as well.
But it's not just that. Discord does have many amazing feature and bots that make it easier to use, can save me time with various tasks. Matrix chat (with Element client) just doesn't have that level of features.
Things I missed from Discord
- Pinned messages
- The mee6 bot
- The giveaway bot
- Other bots, music bot
- Being able to quickly and easily check if people are chatting, their last messages
- Roles! A rich and featureful role system
You get the idea, just tons of stuff.
Matrix wasn't that bad, but it did have problems.
To be fair, Matrix chat is a decent chat, we were able to use it for almost two years, still had lots of fun in the city. It was mostly ok, but there were problems. Often times people would get "encrypted" and can't read each other's chat. This happened pretty often. Or just general network problems "My Network!" Also, the lack of features above.
You have to pick your battles
I really hate doing this, moving back to Discord. I'm giving up and giving in on my values. I value Open Source, and decentralized software. Discord is closed source and centralized and run by a single company. Discord is basically the Microsoft of online chatting, but it's just so good and well written. Nothing open source comes even close. Honestly, it might be five years or more before something open source can challenge it.
This is a battle I'll fight some other time, in the future, when there is something better available, or when Discord overplays it's hand and starts banning and spying on everyone and generally showing their true colors, or if I get kicked off, for whatever reason (because I'm an evil rich whale or some bullshit, or flagged by some Karen.)
So I'm moving the city back, sigh
I guess it's not all bad. Going back to Discord will breathe new life into the city. Already a bunch of older people have returned, people who haven't chatted in ages and didn't like Matrix.
The Discord Link
https://discord.gg/Rdhc6vdd (good for 7 days)
(image generated using Midjourney AI, used with permission for commercial purposes)
