I haven’t really used any kind of messenger service since probably MSN Messenger and IRC back in the day so I’m a bit behind on a lot of the basics. Part of what’s quite different now than the experience then is what modern messenger protocols seem to be used for, as in they have public channels dedicated to topics that function like communities, whereas I only really had experience using them for talking to people I personally knew IRL and manually adding some kind of username to establish talking.
I just got a matrix client and joined a community on a specific interest because I had a question I wanted to ask. I did something similar about a year ago on Discord. This worked… sorta but the problem I had doing this on Discord is kind of what I think I’m going to run in to on Matrix. If the community is open to the public, there’s going to be a lot of people some of whom will log on at different times. If I post a message asking a question hoping someone will have an answer for me, I feel like it’s going to be hard to see anybody replying to me specifically because presumably there’s going to be lots of people talking to each other on various topics including those with their own questions. The messages just come in a stream, much like you’d expect of something designed around chat but like, if I get up to make coffee and miss someone’s reply to me, how would I ever find it. Or conversely if my question is not immediately answered but someone joins the room later that could have answered it, how would they see it?
If I make a post here on Lemmy, it’s open and around for anyone to answer it for some time. Theoretically it’s around forever but in reality it’s more like however long it shows up on people’s feeds but either way it’ll be longer than a few minutes or seconds.
Yeah, Matrix isn’t meant as a forum replacement, not with the standard clients at least. It’s a chat client, and concepts like threads are modeled after the way other chat clients model them.
I prefer Matrix communities over Discord servers, but both are mediocre forum replacements. I wish forums would return, but the heydays of PHPBB seem long gone.
In theory someone could write a Matrix forum solution, though; all you’d need is to create rooms for threads, a bot to create them (with perhaps an integration to make creating threads user friendly), and ACLs to stop people from talking in the general channels. You could even throw a web UI in front of that and make it searchable on Google like a standard forum.