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Discord’s secret weapon against open source competitors (it’s PluralKit) (medium.com)

submitted 8 months ago by Grail@aussie.zone to c/foss@beehaw.org

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Why are FOSS platforms like Matrix having such a hard time getting users to migrate from Discord? Because of PluralKit.

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[–] InfiniWheel@lemmy.one 75 points 8 months ago (2 children)

This seems like a rather really hyeprspecific use case than "the reason platforms like Matrix don't get as much traction as Discord".

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 40 points 8 months ago

Preach

(a) network effects (b) inertia (c) Matrix is still kind of a pain in the ass

Are all easily more capable to explain it (d) all the users are otherkin

[–] Grail@aussie.zone 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Plurality is a lot more common than most people think. The existence of pluralkit exposed a LOT of people to the idea of plurality and got them realising they were already plural. Myself included.

It's kind of like how a lot of lesbians didn't understand their own identities until they heard Katy Perry sing "I kissed a girl".

Furthermore, imagine you're on a server with 500 active members, and there are 5 systems who use pluralkit. That server has probably had the "why are you a bot" "I'm using pluralkit" conversation dozens of times. All 500 people know how important pluralkit is. On Discord, there are dozens of allies for every one system.

[–] InfiniWheel@lemmy.one 52 points 8 months ago

It mostly seems like your personal experiences and server choices might be giving you the wrong idea. It might be the reason your communities don't make the switch, but the wider userbase doesn't really know about any this at all.

If it was as prevalent and the big reason, plurality would be more common in general servers or those dedicated to some other topic. It's my, and probably a sizeable portion of people's, first time hearing about PluralKit. Even knowing about plurality and systems prior to this. I'm in a bunch of servers with indescribable amounts of people and this really hasn't come up at all.

If you were to ask a random discord user/mod/server owner why they don't switch to Matrix, they most likely won't answer "It doesn't have PluralKit and I/my friends use it", but "What's Matrix?/What's PluralKit?/How so you use it?/Discord's fine/But why?/IDC"

Like, all power to you, this shows an important missing feature for your community in Matrix, but I don't think this is it.