The primary motivation behind Shpong is to have a FOSS alternative to Discord that's indexed by search engines, not closed off behind auth etc. All the channels

The primary motivation behind Shpong is to have a FOSS alternative to Discord that's indexed by search engines, not closed off behind auth etc. All the channels can be toggled between chat and discussion view. Things like encrypted DMs or private rooms are also trivial to build on top of Matrix. I'm just more familiar with the Matrix protocol, having built several projects on it. Activitypub is pretty cool though and I'm working on AP support, so Shpong should be able to interface with Lemmy in the near future!