Honestly, I’ve been trying to find a good alternative to Discord for a while. Matrix is promising. But I tried self hosting it a few times and there were too many technical gotchas specifically in my environment (combination of Cloudflare tunnel and Traefik).

I haven’t checked on the progress of Matrix 2.0 in a while but once that is stable I’ll give it another shot. The eternal problem after that is convincing a critical mass of friends to join you. Most of my friends have decent moral compasses and they still don’t understand why I have not touched Reddit since July.