What is it?

We're moving our primary communications over to a Matrix-based chat application. The shift won't be instant, but it's coming soon.

Why are we moving?

Discord has recently announced their intention to perform ID verification across the board, not just in areas which have legal requirements for doing so. Additionally, they're partnering with Persona and constructing profiles on users using AI. As this is a cybersecurity-focused group, it doesn't sit right with leadership that we stay on this platform with that much surveillance going on, and the poll we posted seem to indicate a majority of our active members agree.

End Goal

A full lift-and-shift of our community over to our self-hosted Matrix (Synapse) server installation.

External resources being used as of date of posting:

Element Synapse, currently the major server implementation of the Matrix protocol: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse
The Matrix protocol: https://matrix.org/docs/chat_basics/matrix-for-im/
The Matrix ecosystem: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/
The Element WebUI: https://github.com/element-hq/element-web

We'll be ensuring this happens as smoothly as possible from start to finish. However, if you want to help, you're more than welcome to.
Right now I'm evaluating clients to see which bears the most similarity to Discord, to keep things as painless as possible during the switch (the coolest one obviously being ement.el, the Emacs extension, but not everyone wants to learn emacs keybindings).

If you'd like to help

You can start by evaluating clients yourself. Let us know what you like, what you don't like, what looks cool, what looks like the concentrated essence of cringe, what claims it'll run on Linux but freaks out on CachyOS because it's stuck in the late 2010's (looking at you Cinny). If you want to test, I can give you a token to register on my server. If you just find a cool one but aren't comfortable installing it, shoot me a message and I'll take a look at it.
Right now the biggest thing I've noticed we use, but isn't supported by the clients and/or Synapse server implementation I've tried, is specifically Youtube embeds. The other criteria I've looked for is simply to keep things as close to Discord as possible.

If you really want to get into the weeds, you can test out some of the alternative server implementations. If you find one that's stable has more features than Synapse, and is stable, we may shift over to it.
If you really really want to get as deep into the muck as possible, we can look into coding our own stuff. I'm willing to help coordinate that if enough people are interested, but we're not going to delay the move for the sake of a custom implementation.

-# Statement on AI usage for this project:
-# You're welcome to use AI responsibly. That means ensuring that there are no API keys, mysterious endpoints, or unverified code being presented as verified, involved,