Slack/Zoom/Teams/Whatever Google is running now is mostly dictated by what the company uses for their email.
Pretty much no-one uses any of those for personal stuff, Slack does have some open-source project stuff in there.
FB Messenger seems to be highly siloed, I never use it and I know only one person who uses it as their main communication platform.
Whatsapp has reached critical mass in many countries outside of the US. People use it because everyone uses it - not because it's especially good in any way.
Signal, Matrix etc are for idealists, who have a future vision of what the platform will develop into in mind.
My personal favourite is Telegram. It has a good mix of bots, API, native clients and channel management tools.
I don't actually use it yet myself, but my hope is that Matrix will eventually be the end of having to care about which app someone else uses. That an incumbent or two will switch, and no new app would gain significant market share with a non-Matrix silo.
I may just be dreaming though. Perhaps better bridges are the best we can realistically hope for.
Matrix-the-technology is a really good idea, no complaints there.
But Matrix the ecosystem is a mess. Everything is almost there, but not quite. Pretty much anything you want to do is just a little bit too difficult compared to the amount of work you're willing to put in to adopt a new messaging system.
The worst part is, that it's been in this state for a few years now. It's not that much easier to run your own server, clients are just a bit too clunky, bridges are flaky and hard to use.
I have almost no hope for matrix at least in the short term given that I recently tried joining Mozilla’s server and ended giving up and creating a new account with Mozilla login.
I assume you're not American. Here everyone uses SMS by default. Failing that, everyone uses FB Messenger. Discord is used for gaming. That's about all the breadth you'll get outside of work. I guess I know three people who use Hangouts sometimes. Marco Polo and Snapchat are moderately popular things, though a bit different. Still, I have never met a single person who has used Whatsapp, Signal, Matrix, or Telegram. I doubt more than a handful have ever heard of any of them.
No one will win. That's not how this works. Things will continue to be an ongoing example of XKCD-927 until the world as a whole cares enough to fix things.
The train wreck that is instant messaging makes me realize how incredibly lucky we are to have email.
Snikket[1] is an attempt at creating (maybe better "curating", as we're not starting from scratch) a suite of well-integrated user-friendly XMPP software (a server, and a single app for each platform).
The server is available as a Docker image, though we're still working on things like a web admin. Android app is available, the iOS app is due to enter beta in a month or two.
This is a personal thing for me. This year I migrated my family to XMPP from WhatsApp (at least for communicating with each other), and I want others to be able to do the same. Trying to make it a sustainable project (it's 100% open-source).
The advantage of XMPP is that you don't have to use the official site/app. It's not surprising that Facebook and Google removed support when they both rely on ads on their sites to fund their businesses.
Email or the phone networks aren't global monopolies, are they? They even got text messages working globally—no idea about MMS though.
So maybe there's a way to make a globally non-island IM that works in the Internet as well; or maybe with islands that can work with each other if that's how it must be. Sadly I doubt this will not happen without regulation; it worked for the telephone network, though email happened without.
The problem with Discord is that every single thing has their own server with 42 highly nuanced channels, intricate permissions and multiple utility bots.
Then you have like 15 active users, all typing on #general
Multiply this by 20 or so communities and it's an UX clusterfuck of epic proportions.
At the other end of the spectrum, I manage a 20-user private channel in which users coordinate to play together and chat about games in a single channel, voice chat in about 2-3 channels and the quality of life is various degrees of magnitude better than the old skype/teamspeak days.
When you look at what it was supposed to compete with (good old mumble and teamspeak). The UX and UI make a lot of sense. You where supposed to have a lot of channel since you where usually creating one per game / per team. I remember having channel lol-1, lol-2, cs-1, cs-2, etc, so that multiple team could play the same game at the same time without speaking over each other. Then you had a main channel where you where hanging out when not playing anything.
But discord became so popular, it stopped being used just has a "game voip" service and has a general messaging service. A lot of streamer/youtuber use discord to host their community. I even know some company who switched to it when the pandemic started. And the fact and the matter is that discord was never designed for this.
Totally Agree. We have quite a few smaller professional communities switching to our airsend (https://www.airsend.io/) exactly for the same reason. What we hear often from these users is that managing discord (tool) takes more time than the actual communication. It is ideal for large communities but if you want something simple discord is not the way to go.
That's exactly why I prefer Telegram to Discord in most cases. Everything just feels so cluttered. Yeah, it's nice to have the multiple channels in one server (though forums would be nicer, as then things would be easily searchable in the future for everyone and not behind Discord's wall, where who knows what could happen), but Telegram is just so much sleeker in my opinion, and that's why I use it as my primary chat app (and keep trying to get more of my friends and family on it)
More broadly, what does the landscape look like in 5 years? 10 years?
I'm also skeptical that chat is worth as much as I'd once thought. If it's not paired with an enterprise solution (Slack, Teams, Hangouts/Allo/Meet/Whatever), it has to make money on ads or premium features (emotes, stickers, "server boosts").
Google and Facebook are about to get reamed by the DOJ for anti-competitive practices, and I'll wager that privacy is one of the talking points. If you can't use chat to enhance your advertising moat, what then? Sticker sales can't amount to that much, and ads without purchase intent or social graph knowledge are pretty low value.
And without ads deeply ingrained (or highly addictive paid features like Discord has), does it matter?
With the recent scrutiny of the DOJ, I wonder if Google and Facebook's business models are really all that sustainable or desirable.
Discord seems to have the healthiest setup here.