[conor-]

As an early adopter (signed up for the matrix.org riot instance some time in 2016) and someone who has run a homeserver on and off for nearly a decade, my primary issue with Matrix these days is that it still feels like there largely is stagnation in homeserver development because the spec oftentimes seems to follow features from Synapse instead of the other way around.

It seems like a lot of MSCs are implemented as experimental in Synapse while they are under active development, but sometimes it takes months or years for the MSC to be ratified in a way that is stable for other homeserver implementations to pick it up. One example that immediately comes to mind is sliding sync as well as threading and spaces. And in the case of sliding sync, the proxy deployment helped, I think only Synapse is the only server that actually supported (or maybe currently supports?) it and in terms of threads, that was more of a client-side issue of actually parsing and rendering m.thread events.

My feeling on it maybe isn't backed up by reality or the actual data of development but it makes developing on the ecosystem feel difficult.

The other real blocker to being a Discord-killer imo is the permissions model. Having power levels 0-100 is a lot less flexible than the RBAC-style model that Discord uses. Once Spaces were rolled out, a feature that would have been nice is to restrict access to certain spaces or rooms that are children of that space based on a role, which afaik still is not possible to do with the current permissions implementation.