A bigger problem than a technical alternative is convincing all of your friends to switch.

There are multiple other programs that fill a similar niche, but I don't know I'll be able to get everyone I know to change over.

I definitely will discontinue using Discord if they deploy this surveillance state bullshit, but a little bit sad over the number of gaming buddies I'll lose contact with in the process.

I think it looks promising, but it's still very early days. Hopefully they can gain more traction.

It will take a while for a full on replacement to be viable. People need move to this kind of stuff with friends and small groups for now. As time goes on, the infrastructure and community momentum will build out and make moving feasible for larger groups, though. That's to say, if you've got a massive Discord server with 10 thousand people, 100 different channels, and complex bots, you can't simply knee jerk move it overnight without destroying the community. Number one, the community has to want to move. A switch of that nature starts with people using other options alongside Discord. When there's enough people using something else, there needs to be a good plan laid out for how to build out the new server and make the switch seamless for the users.

Waiting for a C&D from Discord. I'm avoiding on that premise alone.

This is just not true at all, only recently have alternatives started to spring up that even get close to the number of features and level of polish that discord has (note, discord still has plenty of issues, I'm not saying its perfect)

ts6 has poor Linux support currently.

Hopefully it's improved soon.

This is bullshit. I'm sorry. I've tried signing up on like three servers with Element Classic and Element X and all of them fail. Maybe I've just gotten incredibly unlucky with the instances I've picked, but it's been a much tougher time than joining Lemmy was.

I have an old matrix.org account I can use, but it's asking me to get something from a currently logged in session, which I don't have any. I saved all the files and phrases it asked me to when I joined originally, but it isn't enough. There's a possibility I missed one, but the fact that I do have a file and phrase saved in my password manager is evidence I was saving what it asked me to.

If worst comes to worst I can just use matrix.org, but I know that Matrix's "federated but de facto centralized" problem is much worse than Lemmy's (lemmy.world is big but not a majority, but I think a majority of people use matrix.org) and I'm trying to help fix that.

It's just frustrating. I want Matrix to be the Discord replacement but it's a pain in the ass currently. And Discord is so many things to do many people. It's voice for some, streaming for some, and for a lot it's the fact that it's DMs, rooms, servers, voice, and streaming all in one and with a very large user base. Matrix, to my knowledge, is only rooms, servers (or more properly spaces in Matrix, since they have real servers), and DMs. Back when I used it more frequently it wasn't super active. Especially for really niche activities. And don't even get me started on the state of NSFW matrix, I went down that rabbit hole and one of the top results was MAP stuff (pedophiles). There's also just a huge amount of furry stuff, which isn't inherently a problem, but when it seems like there's dozens of NSFW furry rooms and a top result on search is talking about which servers and rooms are sympathetic to pedophiles and the folks most likely to be leaving Discord are the ones who were doing NSFW things because that's what's actually age restricted I can't really evangelize Matrix as a good replacement.

This sort of turned into more of a rant than I intended. It's just frustrating.

(Edit: Also, to be clear, I'm not saying it's Matrix's fault pedophile apologists use it or that it's a top result, I'm just expressing frustration with the situation.)