If you are someone who love using discord, well then this is for you. You might love discord, but there are many things wrong with it. Specially if you care about your privacy and stuff. It’s not a secret that discord keeps a lot of user information and even tracks user actively, yes just like google. What is more hilarious is if you use a VPN of course to stay anonymous, discord will be a bitch and ask for your phone number! Isn’t it hilarious? I mean you want to stay anonymous but then discord wants you to give them your phone number, it’s not nice at all. Asking for phone numbers is generally bad and not safe. Because there’s no way they can guarantee that your information is safe with them. Data breaches are a very possibility. Discord go further by even locking accounts that doesn’t have associated phone numbers. So yeah now let’s talk about the better alternative!
It’s called matrix. It’s an open standard for decentralized and realtime communication over IP. Just like the fediverse this network is also decentralized and lacks a central body, and works somewhat similar to the fediverse too. Each user will connect to a single server, and they will be able to participate in any room that may be created on any server. So just like in fediverse, it doesn’t matter if what server you are in, you can be in touch with anyone in different servers. You can use direct messages to people too, but here just like in discord what is more common is to communicate in so called rooms (kind of like whatsapp groups.) Oh and almost forgot, well this is one of the main points too. It’s end to end encrypted so you don’t have to worry much about security, because it’s damn secure.
Even if you have never used discord before don’t mind. Feel free to try matrix it’s just will be a nice experience. So if you want to try it you will have to create an account on any server you like. This is a list of such servers. Now you will need a client to use matrix (like using whatsapp app to use whatsapp), the one I recommend is Element, you can get it on android, windows, Linux or mac. Or if you don’t want to download you can use it on your browser too! Click here to see it. And if you want you can create a matrix account on element too!
That’s all for now, if you want to host your own server (for advanced users) you can read this documentation.