Discord's ongoing enshittification may create a market opportunity for alternatives in the near future. I'd like to think that Matrix could be a beneficiary of that, but the common-case UX needs to be polished damn well when the time comes if they want to capitalize.

MAS and Next Gen Auth open up the way to things like QR-login (complete with syncing all E2EE state and verification!) which should help enormously with common-case UX.

See https://youtu.be/ZiRYdqkzjDU?t=966 for a demo of it from The Matrix Conference in Sept, or https://youtu.be/lkCKhP1jxdk?t=1832 showing it working in on a fresh instance of element-docker-demo at FOSDEM 2025.

Eh... Discord's enshittified client is still a hundred times more usable than Element — for all its faults, at least Discord is able to deliver and display messages reliably ("unable to decrypt message", anyone?). And for the more technologically oriented, client mods do a lot to improve the Discord UX.

Element X is supposed to improve things, but it's stuck on Android and iOS for the foreseeable future.