At the start of the pandemic Discord had the killer feature unmatched: active voice room discovery. You could see where people where, and how many were talking at a glance before you joined a room.

That's the single most useful feature of discord, but recently element integrated jitsi rooms and showed active participants. I think matrix is now good enough "enough" to replace discord.

I find a lot of admins forget or neglect bridges which can be frustrating

You cannot setup servers on Discord.

https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord

Yeah I feel the same way. I just can't get any matrix client to give me the same experience I get with discord. I know they're two different programs, and that if I started with matrix, discord would be weird, but still. It's annoying