

One of the major draws of discord is the fact that they host the servers for you, for free. Anyone can make an account, click a button, and have a discord server.
Afaik matrix does allow this (haven’t used it personally) but it’s something where I am a bit worried about hosting costs if it reaches a large scale. (Also unsure about how the matrix protocol works precisely, but if defederation is a thing which I feel like it has to be, I can see it leading to huge pains since discords use case is often about being part of a specific communitu, as opposed to twitter or reddit. Being unable to join a groip or see some messsges because of federation issues would be a major headache).
It’s a great tool for the right tasks. What’s annoying is that it’s marketed as being a great tool for tasks it can barely do.
It has really sped up the process of writing things in languages I’m unfamiliar with. All the stupid little mistakes it will find much faster than trying to google them. As long as you’re critical of the answers I also found it pretty good at explaining how to do things. It will often get some details wrong but as long as you have general programming ability and access to documentation you can usually figure those out somewhat easily.