I haven’t really used any kind of messenger service since probably MSN Messenger and IRC back in the day so I’m a bit behind on a lot of the basics. Part of what’s quite different now than the experience then is what modern messenger protocols seem to be used for, as in they have public channels dedicated to topics that function like communities, whereas I only really had experience using them for talking to people I personally knew IRL and manually adding some kind of username to establish talking.
I just got a matrix client and joined a community on a specific interest because I had a question I wanted to ask. I did something similar about a year ago on Discord. This worked… sorta but the problem I had doing this on Discord is kind of what I think I’m going to run in to on Matrix. If the community is open to the public, there’s going to be a lot of people some of whom will log on at different times. If I post a message asking a question hoping someone will have an answer for me, I feel like it’s going to be hard to see anybody replying to me specifically because presumably there’s going to be lots of people talking to each other on various topics including those with their own questions. The messages just come in a stream, much like you’d expect of something designed around chat but like, if I get up to make coffee and miss someone’s reply to me, how would I ever find it. Or conversely if my question is not immediately answered but someone joins the room later that could have answered it, how would they see it?
If I make a post here on Lemmy, it’s open and around for anyone to answer it for some time. Theoretically it’s around forever but in reality it’s more like however long it shows up on people’s feeds but either way it’ll be longer than a few minutes or seconds.
Matrix supports threads (assuming your client implemented them) which work well for Q&A style rooms, but it doesn’t have a full forum interface like Discord does. In Element, these threads are listed if you click the threads button in the top right, and you can browse them as a list.
However, using threads is entirely optional. In my experience, some people will use replies instead (of the “right click and hit reply” kind, not just a message below yours). That generally triggers a notification in most Matrix clients.
Most Matrix clients are built around chatting, either Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/iMessage style with chat rooms, or Slack/Teams style with a collection of rooms per community.
Someone could use the Matrix protocol to build a forum (I’ve thought about doing that before), but it’s not the default. Lemmy makes a bit more sense for support forums and such.
I’m using Element. Good to know about the threads thing. They didn’t work how I expected they would, I thought I’d be able to essentially do something similar to forum where I come up with a topic of discussion, name it and have a means of identifying all discussion within this topic as part of the thread, the way it works is kind of like that, but it’s more that something has to have first been said, and then you can reply to it in a thread thus essentially making it a thread. I kind of get it, it’s a bit like how emails work i that regard.
It looks like it would be hard to entice people to reply to things I ask in a thread since they have to think to click reply in thread and which message uttered as part of a topic should be considered the start of a thread is random and up to the reply-er so someone might pick something said much later in the conversation, and click ‘reply in thread’ to that thus splintering everything. Good to know there’s something at least. I kind of thought it might use something more akin to #hashtags so I could make my first statement intended to be part of a thread thus starting a thread and then anyone joining it later could easily slot in to the timeline of discussion by just using the hashtag. I see there’s a list of threads so hopefully people would use that, but it seems like a lot of hoping everyone employs best practice for the feature to really be useful.
Yeah, Matrix isn’t meant as a forum replacement, not with the standard clients at least. It’s a chat client, and concepts like threads are modeled after the way other chat clients model them.
I prefer Matrix communities over Discord servers, but both are mediocre forum replacements. I wish forums would return, but the heydays of PHPBB seem long gone.
In theory someone could write a Matrix forum solution, though; all you’d need is to create rooms for threads, a bot to create them (with perhaps an integration to make creating threads user friendly), and ACLs to stop people from talking in the general channels. You could even throw a web UI in front of that and make it searchable on Google like a standard forum.
For me the ideal replacement would be to have a client supporting both lemmy and matrix. The UI would likely be an abomination tho.
Also prefer forums for most stuff, in group chats the relevant info gets lost easily, it’s harder to moderate, and impossible to continue a topic in medium-big communities. I think most people like discord over post because they don’t like the “create topic each time you wanna talk” dynamic, but then everyone started using thread channels the moment discord added them. It could be more reasonable to have one “general” chat then the rest be posts (kinda like amino i guess?), rather that implementing a whole forum inside an instant messaging app.