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Comment by slimsag | Hacker News Reader

I recently did a little survey of the top 2,000,000+ GitHub repositories and found (corrected) 28k listed a Discord, 4.3k a Slack, and 1.4k a Matrix chat room[0] This is one of the reasons I chose Matrix for a new game engine project I'm working on.

Highly encourage anyone who has not used Matrix/Element since they added Spaces[1] to give it a shot, it is not perfect but it's the closest FOSS messaging system to reproducing the Discord experience (which I truly love, a good UX is so absolutely critical)

[0] https://twitter.com/slimsag/status/1474453626328207362?s=20

[1] https://element.io/blog/spaces-blast-out-of-beta/

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Note that there's an error in the assumptions behind the discord regex, discord invites do not necessarily have "invite" in the url, and may use the domain discord.gg instead. For instance the yarn repo[0] uses the url "https://discord.gg/yarnpkg" which was missed by your search. Another worthwhile mention is the Svelte repo[1], which uses discord, but instead of linking directly to their discord invite, links to "https://svelte.dev/chat" which then redirects to their discord invite.

Looking for the "discord.gg/invitecode" pattern[2] gives 27k results, safe to say discord is severely under-represented in your statistic.

[0] https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn

[1] https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte

[2] https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+https://disc...

Bah! Can't believe I fumbled that, thanks. Looks like the most accurate count, if you include both, is then:

* 28k for Discord[0]

* 1.4k for Matrix[1]

[0] https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+%28https://d...

[1] https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+https://matr...

Another interesting number: 4.3k for Slack (`https://join.slack.com`)

Spaces is the most important thing I miss in Slack. The use of different accounts for different communities is understandable in the business point of view, but is very unacceptable for people just curious about multiple open-source projects. They are also adding conversation threading [1], which I think is one of the most notorious features of Slack.

The thing I like about Matrix is they are basically implementing every feature in the other platforms, so it's just a matter of time before we get a decent UI that can compete with the existing platforms

[1] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/3440

This is my point as well. I can see the Slack model of basically completely independent workspaces works well for something that I am doing full-time but for open source work it is just too much effort to follow. Discord is better but I still find that switching between different servers is a lot of clicking and for non-focused servers you only see server-level read/unread.

I really like the Matrix (and WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Telegram...) model where every chat is just a different room that I can have in one recency list. Spaces of top of "just rooms" does a nice job to help discovery and filtering.

At least for how I work Matrix "Spaces" is actually the best UX for my personal life as opposed to "Servers" or "Workspaces". Element could definitely improve on other fronts but the way it "merges" my different communities on the client is excellent.

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