Discord is a for-profit unencrypted proprietary centralised walled garden. It’s forbidden to connect unofficial clients to their server, and there’s nothing sto

Discord is a for-profit unencrypted proprietary centralised walled garden. It’s forbidden to connect unofficial clients to their server, and there’s nothing stopping them from monetising your data/metadata in future. Matrix is a non-profit open source project that defines a decentralised communication protocol that forms an open global end-to-end encrypted communication network. Anyone can run a server to participate, and anyone can use whatever client they like. You could see Matrix as descended from IRC, and Discord from AOL chatrooms. The only advantage to Discord is that historically it has slicker UX than flagship Matrix clients like Element, more users, better room management, and exposes voice/video chat as dedicated chatrooms. Matrix is steadily catching up however.