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Discord’s secret weapon against open source competitors (it’s PluralKit) (medium.com)

submitted 8 months ago by Grail@aussie.zone to c/foss@beehaw.org

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Why are FOSS platforms like Matrix having such a hard time getting users to migrate from Discord? Because of PluralKit.

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[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 4 points 8 months ago

I don't know shit about plural systems and have no idea about PluralKit but I can already forsee two issues that regular user accounts would have:

There may be systems who switch operators frequently; having to switch between multiple accounts could be a major hurdle for fluent conversation
Some systems may have too many operators to reasonably manage accounts for

As far as I understand it, PluralKit is more of a hack for acting as multiple pseudo-accounts with the convenience of a single (platform-) account. Given that Matrix, Element and the like are FOSS, it ought to be possible to build such a convenient single-"user" multi-account mechanisms into the clients or even protocol themselves rather than relying on hacky 3rd party add-ons.
Especially given that the user base of Matrix is far more likely to come into contact with plural systems than the general population is. (In the communities I frequent, I know of at least one and would not be surprised if there were quite a few more.)