Zagorath

They added that recently (element-call audio only i mean) its the phone icon at the top

I don’t see that. Video, Threads, Room Info, People is all I have at the top of my rooms.

Like the other replies you’ve gotten, I never really liked “server”. It implies something very different from what it is.

Rooms is pretty obvious and straightforward, I think. And to be honest I rather like Spaces too. It’s a lot less immediately clear, but there’s something ineffable about it that just feels right to me. I’m just glad to see the old Communities feature (which was their now-deprecated first attempt at a Discord-like functionality) is hard to even find out about now. When I first joined I was confused about the difference between Communities and Spaces and had to search to figure out which to use, but when checking now to remember what the old one was called, I found it hard to even find the name of it.

I would have said Matrix is a kind of hybrid. Obviously Matrix has 1 on 1 chats and individual IRC-like rooms, which are not at all like Discord.

But the addition of Spaces is very much positioning itself as an open Discord alternative.

I’ve seen QR-based login before as an option. (Heck, I was an early adopter of SQRL…or tried to be. Sadly that protocol never went anywhere.) But it’s not typically mandatory, and I don’t think most casual users (the kinds of people who just reuse the same password everywhere rather than using a password manager) aren’t likely to be especially comfortable with it.

Oh, it does? I’ve always logged in with username and password.

Discord has E2EE?

I and my group are all just on matrix.org. We didn’t want the risk of dealing with potentially less reliable servers or federation.

We also use Element desktop and Element X for Android. I think I read that the old Element might have supported audio calls? But these days, it’s video only, with the very weird UX of having two different options for video calls (one being, as you say, Jitsi). I assume there’s a historical reason for that, but it doesn’t make much sense as a design today, to me.

Having Discord-style audio rooms built around the idea that people are not broadcasting all the time (as opposed to the more chat-like design of today) would be one of the most impactful comparatively low effort (considering they already have video calls working) things they could do, IMO.

Your 142.x.x.x will be your public IP address. All devices on your network share that public IP. They all have a unique private IP address too, accessible only on your network. It probably starts with 192.168.x.x, but it could be 10.x.x.x or even less likely 172.16–31.x.x.

If you want to operate a web server that users can go to by typing https://youdomain.com/, you’ll need to forward from ports 80 and 443 through to the internal IP address of your server, using the “port forwarding” settings on your router. What port on the internal IP you route to depends on how your server is configured. But a basic default configuration is fairly likely to be 80 and 443, too.

Since you have a reverse proxy, all traffic from your router should go to that. Then you use that to send the appropriate traffic to the appropriate server based on whatever rules you want to apply. (e.g. siteone.mydomain.com goes to server 1, sitetwo.mydomain.com goes to server 2, or mydomain.com/siteone goes to server 1, etc.).

It’s definitely nowhere near as polished as Discord, but it does a good enough job for my small gaming group to have moved over.

The equivalent of a Discord server is a Space, which is made up of Rooms (channels). Unfortunately Rooms are displayed in order of recent activity; admins can’t define a set order to group things by function.

The two weirdest things: there are no audio calls, you have to do a video call and turn off the webcam. And the process of logging in on your phone requires scanning a QR code from your desktop (a technically-minded person will understand this is necessary for E2EE, but to an average user it’s just strange).