To make it clear to those who are misunderstanding: that’s a list of companies that host matrix for you. They do it at a good price.
If you and your friends chip, it’ll be a few bucks a pop per month to have your own private server with voice chat rooms and video chat rooms.
It’s all opensource and contributes to the ecosystem. Best of all, no age verification because the data is yours.
I’ve been trying out different alternatives with my friends. Screenshare and audio sharing capabilities across Linux, Windows and Mac is the one feature that Discord does right that no one else seems to. I really like Element (and by extension Matrix), but they really like to stick their head in the sand when it comes to important feature requests. The lack of screenshare with audio is a big thing that helps bring about the unfortunate choice to stick with Discord.
I know it’s a tricky thing to get right, and I have love for the work that open source does; I don’t have quite the level of skill yet to make/contribute an implementation myself. But it’s strange it’s been this long and nobody seems to have gotten this feature working, despite a big want for it.
EDIT: After taking a look at the issues on the element repos, it seems like this is getting worked on! https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/issues/29891 https://github.com/element-hq/element-desktop/pull/2850