Selfhosted

Yes, which is good, but the lack of federation is a deal-breaker. It means that you either:

1. Use their servers - This requires entrusting them with your communities, just like Discord.
2. Host your own private instance - You can control it, but the lack of federation means it'll be isolated from communicating with other communities. This makes it really difficult to convince people to use your self-hosted servers.

Until Revolt adds a way for different instances to federate, Matrix is really the only other option.

That doesn't really change that it's one company hosting it. Unless you're willing to make 10 different accounts because your super-FOSS friends aren't willing to join each others instances?

: ( i was too dumb to follow the playbook correctly

i wanna have a matrix sever!

but I'll use snikket for now until i skill up

those are called spaces there. but there's no flexible roles system. also no hop-on voice channels yet, but that's a client feature so maybe that's a bit different

I think P2P is still the way to go. Sure it's not perfect, but it's simpler and by it's very nature doesn't require the infrastructure we know will be a problem.

Plus, don't forget screen sharing in discord isn't very good as is (720p30) if you're not a paid user.

They're out there. The Venn diagram of people still choosing IRC (as opposed to being forced to use it b/c that's where the community is) is probably just a circle.

I was a big XMPP user back in the day, but because of the lack of multi-device message syncing and the really shoddy state of encryption, I wandered away. Plus, using XML for the protocol really geeked me out. XML is a document format, and per the spec, to be well-formed it needs to have an open and matching close tag. Jabber hacked around this by making a sort of infinite document - you get the open tag, but never the close tag - and it just felt really icky.

I understand a lot of these things have since been addressed. I don't know if XMPP still uses that bastardized version of quasi-XML without a close tag. But other things have come along that I like more. About 6 months ago I started running a client on my desktop again, but like you, nobody I knew was still using it, and nobody new was advertising it as their connection info, so... yeah. After a few months, I stopped running the client.

It’s so much easier to set up and install than Matrix.

Unbelievably so. Mumble is... basically one setup command. Don't even need a domain. And it needs absolutely no resources, can run on a Pi Zero.
Setting up my own Matrix server was honestly one of the most difficult things I've ever attempted in decades of non-professionally using computers and I'm still not sure I'd be able to properly take care of the installation if it breaks. Sooo many moving parts. All the federation-oriented projects that rely on adoption rates reaaaaally desperately need setup wizards before any other additional feature.

There is text chat but it’s not persistent, or very customizable.

Don't forget free servers.
On TS3 it was to either know a friend that rented/hosted it, rent/host it yourself or use a public server.

@Nikelui is 100% right: a chat room may be private, but it's not secure. Even in an encrypted room, every additional person you add reduces your security. I'm sure there's some paper out there that studies this, and that the graph of # of members vs security is an inverse power ratio.

If it's a public chat, there is no security.

However, with Matrix, if you run your own server and restrict access to your friends, at least you can be fairly certain your chat room isn't being used to train an LLM, or to harvest information about you for advertising.

There is a difference between willing information that you put out there and data gathering that goes on without your consent.

Location data is something I don’t want anyone collecting without my consent.

Why does Element need to know where I’m located? Why is that being gathered with my identifiers?