The former lead dev (who is still part of the team) seems to think many people are out to get him for no good reason. He has claimed repeatedly that Calyx devs have sent harassers to target him for years (from spamming gore or nazi content in the matrix channels, to swatting him and almost getting him killed by the police) and that they constantly speak ill of him, but has never actually shown any proof. Instead, he sources his own past claims about how he has shown proof, in a sort of endless loop.

Also, youtuber Techlore made a 5 second joke about GOS’s extreme approach to security in his mostly positive review of it, which the lead Dev took as a personal attack. After which he started attributing harassment to him too. He made a later video talking about it, and Louis Rossman commented on it expressing concern. After which, the lead Dev accused him to being complicit in the harassment.

Eventually he stepped down as project manager, citing how the harassment and bullying he constantly got was too much. But to my knowledge no one has actually seen it ever.

It’ll probably be open for anyone to use. They’ll just be pissy about it.

It mostly seems like your personal experiences and server choices might be giving you the wrong idea. It might be the reason your communities don’t make the switch, but the wider userbase doesn’t really know about any this at all.

If it was as prevalent and the big reason, plurality would be more common in general servers or those dedicated to some other topic. It’s my, and probably a sizeable portion of people’s, first time hearing about PluralKit. Even knowing about plurality and systems prior to this. I’m in a bunch of servers with indescribable amounts of people and this really hasn’t come up at all.

If you were to ask a random discord user/mod/server owner why they don’t switch to Matrix, they most likely won’t answer “It doesn’t have PluralKit and I/my friends use it”, but “What’s Matrix?/What’s PluralKit?/How so you use it?/Discord’s fine/But why?/IDC”

Like, all power to you, this shows an important missing feature for your community in Matrix, but I don’t think this is it.

This seems like a rather really hyeprspecific use case than “the reason platforms like Matrix don’t get as much traction as Discord”.

The official instantce, meet.jit.si, now requires an account to be made through Google, Facebook or Apple (for the host). Community hosted instances still allow anonymous meetings but may not have all the features in the main instance (since some require hosting other services, like etherpad and excalidraw)