Gamers™ are blinded. The general lemmy consensus is that corporations are bad, but somehow steam gets a pass because “games”.

Imagine thinking valve isn’t an absolute monopoly in PC video game industry

All this talk with valve being a “good” monopoly are such horse shit. Valve WILL enshittify, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, buts it’s coming and people are acting like it won’t happen.

Yes.

Why do you think that’s a good suggestion for a newcomer?

Get element desktop or element x, and start by just having an account on matrix.org. If you are reasonably nerdy and have hardware or a VPS, then start a synapse server.

Move to matrix. It’s very stable, maturing up well, and has almost all of the discord features including streaming/video chat.

It is no more clunky than discord was a couple years ago. Setting up a server is very clunky, but the average Joe doesn’t have to do it.

It really is no different than discord. You create an account, download the client, log in and that’s that. You don’t have to self host it or use any instance that isn’t the main instance. Just go to matrix.org and sign up.

In element there’s a button on top of the chat. I press that and it’s calling.

It does it well, it’s just clunky. It works perfectly fine, and I recommend it over discord ang day of the week. Except Tuesdays. Tuesdays I recommend IRC.

Matrix can literally do everything you just mentioned. It’s clunky, but it works.

In their defense, counter strike 1.5 and 1.6 existed. Condition zero as 1.7, source as 1.8, GO as 1.9 and now we are finally at two. 🤷‍♂️