I would prefer to use matrix 100x over discord, but all my friends use discord soooo

As much as I’d like to agree, comparing matrix and discord is not a direct comparison. They serve different purposes in my opinion. Matrix also lacks features people use discord for.

I want to like Matrix. I really do. You have no idea how bad I want to leave Discord’s locked-down, upsell-laden, profit-driven proprietary garbage in my past and only connect via relay when I connect at all. I set up my own home server, talked a few friends into it, familiarized myself with every client for it I could find on F-Droid…

but Matrix is just so bad. E2EE is cool but it means that chat logs don’t sync unless devices are manually paired and even then sometimes randomly fail because the client sending the E2EE key is buggy, Element is the only mobile client I’ve found that supports voice calls at all and the situation on desktop is not much better, there’s no way to define stickers or custom emoji… I’m willing to do a lot of legwork to work around a platform’s shortcomings, especially a platform that’s FOSS, but good grief. Admittedly most of that is the fault of the clients, but if the matrix protocol is so complicated that no third party app can get even half of it down and doesn’t have features that apps like Signal and Telegram beat it to by half a decade, it’s a really, really tough sell.