I personally don’t have the technical knowledge, time, or energy to take on something like this — but I was curious:
Since Matrix, XMPP, etc. already support most (if not all) of the features that Discord offers — text, voice, video, threads, bots, roles, federation, etc. — would it theoretically be possible to just replicate Discord’s UI and UX and build it on top of the Matrix or XMPP protocol instead of starting from scratch?
I mean, sure, there’d be some challenges with existing third-party clients, like
Matrix:
Element X,
Nheko,
Cinny,
FluffyChat,
XMPP:
Aparté
AstraChat XMPP Client
aTalk
Beagle IM
Bruno
Chat-O-Matic
Chatty
Conversations
Cheogram Android
but if developers and users agreed to focus on a stack — say, Matrix, XMPP, or both — couldn’t there a “Discord-like” ecosystem of compatible apps and communities?
Basically: could an open-source “Discord alternative” be built using Matrix or XMPP as the backend rather than trying to reinvent the wheel?
What are the technical or social barriers to doing that?
The problem with replacing Discord isn’t the tech or features. Discord doesn’t do anything special that hasn’t existed in other software for 15-20 years.
The key difficulty is overcoming the network effect. All the big streamers use Discord, which means their millions of viewers are going to use Discord also, which means that most of their friends will too, and thus, you have a default app that almost everybody uses.
It took a massive amount of effort for me to just get three of my friends to sign up with Matrix and join a group server for gaming, and two of them stopped using it after just a month or two. I only have a single friend who is still using it, and they only use it when the two of us are gaming.