About Matrix Matrix is an open protocol for decentralised, secure communications.
Matrix Manifesto We believe:
People should have full control over their own communication. People should not be locked into centralised communication silos, but instead be free to pick who they choose to host their communication without limiting who they can reach. The ability to converse securely and privately is a basic human right. Communication should be available to everyone as a free and open, unencumbered, standard and global network.
I like Matrix but it’s far from Discord right now
That’s a good thing. Discord is chugging its way through the last half of the Web 2.0 service to social media pipeline. It’s a VC-funded multimedia enterprise extended around a novel technology core optimized for its original service offering, real-time voice/text. Nobody is immune to bloat, but because Matrix is a protocol standard, not an app, users have the option of sticking with minimal clients and servers that won’t (necessarily) get destroyed by feature creep.
If you’ve tried Element and thought “ah, slow Discord,” maybe have a scroll through https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/. I don’t want to get off topic but all my favorite software is standard/specification-based.
I loved Discord back in 2015/2016. I hate it now.
Me and my boys have been using discord for years now to chat while we game and maybe stream what we’re doing just to each other.
Discord has added features and shit I suppose but I haven’t changed how I use it at all since I first started.
Part of the reason I hate it now is they refuse to support Linux. In fact their support in general is pretty crappy.
I got Discord installed on Ubuntu just fine, what doesn’t work about it?
On top of what the other guy said, it just doesn’t behave like a Linux app. It doesn’t respect the package manager, if there’s a new version but the package hasn’t been updated yet, the app just refuses to launch. Like the developers literally won’t even let you use the app if it’s not the current version.
It’s also a electron app, so it doesn’t respect the window manager either. It has to have it’s own special window decorations that don’t match, and when I used i3 (tiling window manager) it was very difficult to get it to work normally in my setup like every other app did with no effort.
Finally, it asks for super user access! Why in the name of unholy fuck is a userland app demanding administrative powers on my computer?
Funny you say that, I actually just noticed that today. I tried launching it and it refused to let me use it until I updated. It was super annoying.
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There was a bug with screen sharing sound on Linux (and maybe macOS as well?) for a LONG time, like years, before it was eventually fixed.
Wait, this was fixed? I haven’t been bothering with screen sharing because I thought this was still an issue.
I mean I am not a fan of discord, but it’s just an Electron app, like Spotify, isn’t it? meaning you can just open it in a browser you probably have running anyways
I don’t think Matrix feels slow because the app is slow. In my experience, I have tried 3 homeservers (community.rs, matrix.im, and mozilla.org (hosted by modular), and there was a really really big performance gap. I’m not gonna say which one is which, but sending message on one (the time between you hit send and the circled checkmark appears) usually takes less than 1 seconds, another averages at maybe 1.5 seconds, the other often takes more than 5 seconds. Choosing a performant homeserver could really impact your experience with Matrix, and it’s sad that people can’t really know how performant a server is unless they create an account on it and try it out themselves.
it also depends on the size of rooms your sending messages in
Yeah man so true. Matter of time before somehow we have to but loot crates to earn minutes
The good thing is that Discord is actually kinda bad when compared to Guilded and Slack. It won’t be hard to catch up to Discord, since most of the features they add are fluff and not really needed.
What we need are the more robust features that Guilded has.
Matrix isn’t the alternative for discord. Others have been named.
Matrix is a chat with a high regard for encryption, more an alternative to Whatsapp and signal then discord.
Matrix is considerably more like discord than both Whatsapp or signal.
You can get a WhatsApp/signal experience out of it but overall it is very similar to discord
I don’t see anything mentioned about calls… kind’ve a big part of discord.
Is it supported?
Yes. There is voip. Also video and screen sharing.
Both could work better, but they’re there, if the client you’re using supports them.
Wait since when. I’ve been waiting for VoIP. I am on Cinny tho so that might be why. The changed the way elements works on linux and it’s so cancer to use now
I think cinny is waiting to implement voip when group calls get merged into the spec, currently group calls are done via jitsi
This is also dependent on who is running the server and how it’s set up. If it’s the matrix.org you’re using, I couldn’t tell you. If it’s someone hosting/you’re self-hosting, you need a STUN server for traversing NAT. It’s not part of the default Synapse docker install and I’m not sure about non-docker installs.
Yeah it is more similar to discord. If I were to group chatting apps/services into two groups, I would do this:
- WhatsApp, Signal, Line, Messenger, Telegram, SMS
- Discord, irc, Matrix
I would agree with this. Purpose of the application rather than technical implementation defines its use. Though it can do many things Signal and WA also do
Matrix is the federated alternative to XMPP and IRC first and foremost, imho
Well xmpp is federated, it’s just slightly more centralised then matrix since if a server goes down the room/muc made on that server goes down as well
I too am wondering what makes you say that. What is it missing?
Voice Channels would be a start. Game Streaming is another use-case of Discord my friend group uses which is missing.
Matrix has voice chat and screen sharing. I don’t think it implements audio passthrough like discord but I could be mistaken.
I thought it only had voice chat for calls? Are there voice channels tho?
not yet, they are working on a native group calls stack, so once thats done and stable there will be voice channels in element and other clients
There is a jitsi widget for rooms though, so you can convert any group chat into a drop in/drop out voice room similar to discord’s voice rooms. The biggest struggle I have with it is that it defaults to asking about video every time, and there is no hotkey support. 🤮
my friend has used signal, whatsapp, discord bridges with her conduit server and has had 0 issues
Matris does not use E2E encryption for most channels. Its primary draw is federation, not security or anonymity.
It makes no sense to encrypt public channels.
There’s 0 point to encryption on public rooms
I would say it’s a lot more than discord. Putting it that way doesn’t give it as much credit as it deserves. My favorite out of the laundry list of features and benefits is that you can synchronize your messaging across all platforms into a single interoperable client if your choosing. You can use a better standard while not having to bug others to switch.
I just had to go and look this up to get more details
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/
Looks like you need to be hosting your own server, then you can install plugins for separate services. Very cool…
I’d love to tie together a few different systems I’m using but I worry that the bridges will break every time a platform does an update
Have long have you been using it? How’s your experience been? What bridges are you using?
You don’t have to host your own, just join an instance with bridges. That being said, running your own is easy and nice with docker, including the bridges.
Where would be a good starting point to check out a list of instances with these bridges? And how safe are they?
this is why I never got into matrix. I don’t actually know how lol, the page doesn’t list servers available and i don’t really want to just spin up my own just for myself
Well, due to the nature of the Fediverse, no one can reliably list all the server in existence. They can merely list the most popular ones, much like how you can’t list all the Lemmy instances. A list I used to pick my server is https://joinmatrix.org/servers/ , though you might want to look up the server’s reputation before joining. Please do check it out! I believe that someone on Lemmy has a much higher probability of liking Matrix.
I apperently had tried element out using a matrix.org account at some because when I went on the client I was already logged in, I vaugly remember it but it didn’t really give a great first impression.
anyway, I decided to look around it again to give it another shot, I really don’t think it’s a good idea to relate it to Discord, the documentation itself says it’s more similar to IRC than Discord. It lacks fairly basic features that you would expect to see in a current day chat service, for permissions example: they do have basic permissions and they’ve stated that more coming but there’s no way to fine tune them for example if you want to give the ability to delete message you need to give the ability for every permission under the below the redact message permission (which is hard set at perm level 50 if I remember right). This in my opinion is actually worse than IRC in that matter, as with IRC I could fine tune someone to have Channel topic editing permissions and the ability to hide that they are there but I didn’t necessarily need to give them disconnect or Banning permissions at the same time and visa versa.
I’m sure it’s perfect for some pieple but, I’ll stick with modern day implementations till they give a bit more control, but I’m pretty certain with the current spec it’s not possible at this time
Sign up for beeper and all the hosting is done for you
sadly they’re on restricted signup
If you want to use a paid service from the developers, there’s Element One: https://element.io/element-one
hmm, I wonder if there’s a way for me to host my own matrix server and do the bridging myself, like a docker container or something.
There’s an Ansible playbook that allows you to install everything easily, but I don’t know how difficult the maintenance is. It’s definitely possible to self-host Matrix with bridges.
They actually link to a guide right on their website: https://github.com/beeper/self-host
The beeper client only works with the official beeper services, but you can use other apps like Element and FluffyChat with your own server.
Beeper is a paid Matrix server that neatly integrates with many other chat services using a custom GUI specifically designed for integration with third party apps.
There’s a free tier but there will be a paid tier eventually
By the way, if you join an instance without these bridges, you could always search for bridges on other servers
Just sign up for beeper they host all major bridges including imessage and then if you need additional bridges you can self host them
Very interesting
People say this but there are a few features, particularly robust voice chat, that it could use before any kind of mass adoption will happen.
It integrates with jitsi, which is a fairly good tried and proven solution. Meanwhile, The matrix developers are working on their own implementation of voice and video that plays a bit nicer with their room permission system. For one to one conversations, there is a turn-based solution for voice and video.
own implementation of voice and video
This is what I’m referring to and am looking forward to trying it out once it’s ready.
But does it have activity detection and screen sharing?
If you delve the bridges available, some support activity, some do not
Element does have screen sharing.
Try Mirotalk when you need simple screen sharing. It uses browser based tech so no server/app/plugin required. https://p2p.mirotalk.com/
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matrix isn’t a fediverse thing, it’s its own thing. it does happen to be decentralized, like the fediverse.
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matrix isn’t an alternative to discord. it’s an alternative to whatsapp/signal/telegram/etc.
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matrix is nice (I use it with my friend group), but it’s not perfect. we’re looking for something better.
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if you’re looking for a decentralized, self-hosted, open-source, secure alternative for discord, my friends and I use Mumble. It works great for VoIP (and its noise cancellation software actually seems to work noticeably better than Discord’s), but it doesn’t really have the advanced text chat features that Discord does. We make do with Matrix.
matrix isn’t an alternative to discord. it’s an alternative to whatsapp/signal/telegram/etc
Yes and no.
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Matrix is a communication standard. More like SMTP, RSS or XMPP than those things. I don’t know why Matrix specifically has this problem because you’ll never see anyone say “I’ve joined ActivityPub”.
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Element is by far and away the most popular Matrix client (similar to how Mastodon is the most popular ActivityPub software) and it has “Spaces”, which functions similar to Discord “servers” (not actually servers). Better in some ways but mostly worse. Namely in terms of stability and the function of “spaces” specifically.
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The True selfhosted open source alternative to Discord are Mattermost and RocketChat. My friends and I use both
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There is certainly some overlap in what Discord and Matrix can do, and personally I like Matrix about a thousand times better, but it’s not really a direct replacement. That’s not a criticism. I don’t really even want Matrix to be more like Discord. I just think presenting Matrix as a Discord replacement kinda sells it short and is likely to leave people looking for an alternative to Discord disappointed.
What are the differences between Matrix and Discord?
First, it’s federated, meaning that different instances of discord can talk to each other, much like Lemmy.
Second, it allows for encryption. Matrix uses the same double ratchet algorithm present in signal.
Third, joining groups is optional. This is perhaps the biggest user interface difference between discord and matrix. Each conversation exists in a independent channel, or room as they are called. Rooms can be grouped together the way you would see in discord, but they usually exist independently of the groupings. Incidentally, matrix groups are called spaces. There are edge cases where rooms are not independent from spaces, but by and large it is not something most users will have to worry about.
But you interact with other people pretty much the same way? Text/voice/video chat?
Yes. Matrix uses an integrated jitsi widget for voice and video. It is unfortunately not quite as polished as discord for voice and video, but it does work.
Element Call is in beta and works quite well. Jitsi was only used for group calls and Element Call is slowly replacing it.
Last time I tried, 3 years ago, jitsi was very much not ready. There were memory leaks, no sleep mode (one processor was fully used 100% of the time) and the video performances were bad (impossible to do a video conference with more than 3 people). How did it improved since then?
On Discord, you cannot host your own server, and you cannot use any third party clients (without the threat of being banned).
You can host your own Matrix server, either on physical hardware, or a generic virtual machine you can rent from any number of ISPs. There are over a dozen compatible third-party clients (though many lack full feature coverage).
In summary, Discord is strictly a service. Matrix is a tool you can apply however you see fit.
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i wish people would stop thinking these words mean something that everyone knows
Anyone can host a server that’ll talk to the others seamlessly (like Lemmy), but it doesn’t talk to Lemmy
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To explain more specifically. Matrix is federated, so you can talk to other matrix servers like Lemmy instances can. However, matrix not part of the Fediverse, which is built on activity pub, which lets Lemmy, Masotodon, Pixfed and others all talk to each other.
Lemmy and Mastodon technically communicate on the same protocol, but they don’t currently communicate with each other in any meaningful way. Possibly in the future, but probably not imo.
I think you can comment on lemmy posts from a mastodon instance
Support for groups (i.e. communities on Lemmy) is coming to Mastodon sometime soon.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/federated
Fediverse isn’t a real word though
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And, I guess, in general I am increasingly worried about people with bad opsec. A lot of the “fediverse” discussions are reminding me of the crypto crowd thinking it provides a high degree of security and anonymity because a corporation is not involved. And they really don’t realize just how much power and access instance owners/admins have.
people should always think that everything they post on the internet can be searchable and viewable by anyone, it is public information
Exactly. Drives me a little crazy seeing all these posts and comments about how the Fediverse has poor privacy. It’s a public forum people, you should be considering everything you say here to be freely accessible information. At no point did anyone promise that your posts and comments would not be available to someone outside the service.
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Never say anything over chat/IM that a company knowing would hurt
I used to work at Discord and I can tell you that this is, painfully, not the norm.
the orgs that prioritized it were shady as hell
You literally have no idea who’s behind Discord.
And I still wish there were an “open protocol” so that I could use the steam overlay to chat with a buddy playing elden ring on her xbox while I play trepang2 on my PC.
I’m 99.99% sure that discord released an xbox app so you can chat on discord cross platform now. Haven’t used an xbox in ages though.
That’s why i wpuld name my matrix instance not the fbi. It helps keepa the weirdos out
And I still wish there were an “open protocol” so that I could use the steam overlay to chat with a buddy playing elden ring on her xbox while I play trepang2 on my PC.
There are open chat protocols, like XMPP. The issue is corporations either don’t use them, or use them to enshittificate (that’s what happened to XMPP, even. As for open GUI protocols, which is needed for the second part of your message, same issue: there’s open protocols and open toolkits all over the place, but the corps that produce consoles and games won’t use them (or, when they do, they’ll still lock them behind an “ecosystem”).
tl;dr: choose better (more open) games, and you can have p much all the chat you want.
what do you mean with “all of the orgs that prioritized it were shady as hell”?
It is unfortunately such a PITA to self host. Spent hours a few weeks ago trying to set it up and failed.
Same experience. I wanted initially to make our own server for our company. So we could chat and communicate. Make public channels for support, etc. It’s such a nightmare to host and after days of trying I gave up. They also had bunch of problems when I tried using it. I even forced all of my developers to use it for work. Messages would get delayed, even lost. Signal is what we currently use for chat and it just works.
You could always use Yunohost - it makes things much easier.
Never heard of it. I’ll give it a look. Thanks.
Yeah! In my experience, when two accounts on averagely-performant servers send each other a message, there is often a 10 second delay.
I’ve never had anything like that in the past few years of using matrix
Mind you at the time I tried to use it, it was super early. Issues might be fixed by now. Or might not.
They definitely have been fixed
Its requirements are insane… My little minipc which easily hosts my lemmy (multiple channels) and mastodon server (follow about 100 people plus retoots) without breaking a sweat couldn’t manage it. Installed matrix and subscribed to one channel and it simply buried the machine… I had trouble getting control back to shut it down.
sheeet… just switched it back on for a test… 2 minutes in and the load average is >60 & it’s already consumed 14 gigabytes. Idle.
I don’t think that’s normal. I run Synapse and Postgres, and they only take about 200mb of ram together. Load is less than 2% on a 2-core vm.
give conduit a try its a homeserver implementation written in rust and is alot more lightweight then synapse which is the first HS implementation for matrix
I spent so much damn time banging my head against the wall with it too. I could host an email server easier and get DKIM and all the various dns configs up and runnjng easier.
Uh? You need a DB server/service, and it’s basically a python script that runs in a venv, which can be easily setup on anything vaguely linux related. If you don’t want to bother with the command to setup a venv, there’s also a docker image I believe. We set that up in an emergency when covid restrictions showed up and so far the worst issue we have is sometime the client takes a few minutes to refresh after long breaks.
I tried to run it with the docker image. Still a PITA. I’m not a noob when it comes to self hosting services.
Same. We had three developers try to make it work for a local makerspace and we failed. The default instructions are too complex ATM. I want to make it work sometime but that experience makes me want to wait. I only have so many weekends.
IRC is still a thing.
Ain’t that the truth, IRC was arguably the easiest service for me to set up, it had all the defaults basically set I think I only have the change one or two settijgs and open the ports, anything else was optional and it came with all the bells and whistles (of what you can get out of IRC… lol)
Yep super easy. And if you had a third party client it’s even easier for others.
Uh?
Because everything you said is common knowledge to the average person.
Bro you’ve just got to disentangle the gigabytes on the flux stack mainframe bro, it’s easy bro
That made me lol
The average person does not self-host services yet. And if that comes to be, then yes, it will be common knowledge at that point. There’s also a fairly comprehensive documentation to get anyone with basic knowledge started.
Right. I think we need something simpler.
I’d be happy with something like irc, but with e2e, history and the ability to receive messages when offline.
Don’t need stickers, voice chat, video chat etc.
The only real Discord alternative is https://revolt.chat
It’s not e2ee but it is FOSS and you can self host. Also, unlike Discord they actually have discriminators
It doesn’t federate though. So if you stand your own “discord” server up, you can’t message anyone and have to ask people to join it. Matrix allows you to not just set up your own server but also interact with everyone else’s servers so you’re not isolated. Revolt is nice, but you’re, like discord, limiting yourself to a single instance who has access to everyone’s data.
yeah thats the main reason I’ve not given it a try myself, I dont want to have to make an account for every server if lots of projects decide to host it them selves
Last time I checked it, it was said to be very buggy. How is it doing now?
I have not had any bugs in all the times I’ve used it
Someone needs to hook revolt up to a matrix homeserver. I’m kinda surprised there still isn’t like a discord UI clone matrix client along the lines of how elk.zone is a twitter UI inspired frontend for mastodon. Having not used discord much I’m not sure what’s really missing, maybe it’s just the stricter adherence to spaces on the left bar and the lack of non-current-space-related channels listed above the current space’s channel list.
Tbh I kinda hate how discord works (and how impossible it feels managing being in 30-40 servers and figuring out which server that doot-doot sound came from when at least 10-15 at a minimum have unread badges even 30 seconds after I mark everything everywhere as read), but I do love the look and feel.
I’m kinda surprised there still isn’t like a discord UI clone matrix client
Check out cinny.in. I use this on my desktop browser and it looks similar to the Discord UI.
I’d use cinny for sure if they supported calls and video like element
I think the plan is to start work on that once element call which is native group calls gets merged into the spec
Thanks for mentioning this, looks perfect
Matrix is a great beginning… But it is still FAR from Discord right now.
Matrix is almost there but the last bit might make chat impossible to be federated. And i say this as a matrix user and a server maintainer.
“Instant messaging” is a service with high demand. When all servers are in one location or have high bandwidth pipes between them its not much of an issue. But once you have a group chat with people on instances all over the place, some running on Raspberry Pis…you might as well be running an email mailing list.
How did irc resolve this issue?
I
could very well beam wrong here,but I believe that IRC doesn’t have to solve this problem. IRC functions on a server/client model so someone sets up an IRC server and people connect to it and chat with one another. Every user is just connecting to a single server, rather than having users talking with one another who are not using the same provider. So long as you have a good connection with an IRC server, you will send and receive messages quickly and do not have to worry about messages hopping from one server to another over connections of unknown quality in order to reach their destination.You are wrong, IRC specification says servers connect to each other to form IRC network, and a channel can be a distributed channel, which is known to all servers on the IRC network
See https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1459#section-1.3
There are a few major differences for IRC.
First there isn’t any sort of message history or sequencing beyond what is implemented on a server. For IM if your phone is off and you turn it back on all the messages you miss are sent to you. This requires each message to be stored in a database or semi long term storage, keeping track of if everyone in the group had confirmed receiving it. IRC doesn’t track any of that, if you’re not connected you miss out which makes IRC have a lot less overhead.
The other difference is that server to server was a concept for building a network of location based servers for a single network. Its not federation, but handling user overhead. You don’t have random individuals running their own servers on subpar hardware causing undue stress on the network. You dont have thousands of instances with huge degrees of latency difference to deal with. Server to server was made so you could connect to
east.myirc.coandwest.myirc.co.Damn, knew I should have taken the 10 seconds this would have required to google. Thanks for the info!
Personally I don’t think it’s quite there yet. Element is probably the best Matrix app but not quite at parity for ease of use to a regular user and the general design and feel of discord is better… For now
I believe it will get there though. We’ve seen the enshittification cycle happen so many times to chat apps historically it’s basically the most inevitable that discord will collapse eventually. Is anyone still using AIM? MSN? Case in point.
I remember how quickly furriea moved from groupme to telegram. Anyone remember skype or oovoo?
Honestly doscord not being shit already is impressive
i’d give it one or two years before discord undergoes some serious enshittification, with the way most other social media websites have gone down, presumably due to them not being really profitable anymore, im sure discord will start pushing people into nitro more and more as time goes on, i mean as most other platforms discord is already taking advantage of our data, but so did twitter and look where twitter is going now lol
Mostly true although I’d caution on the use of “profit” here. Profit isn’t the problem that causes this. Growth is. Almost all of these companies grow using investor money operating at a loss, radically cut costs then sell, netting their investors a packet.
It’s when the growth slows that the enshittification occurs (via radically cutting costs).
The only “profit” that matters is at the point of sale for the various company owners that invested.
yea i agree, growth would be a better word to use here
I definitely don’t think element is the best but yes it’s not there yet. Honestly the performance has gotten a lot better but I’m still waiting for VoIP.
https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-element-call/
I think those were merged quite a while ago, right?
If not element what do you prefer?
Cinny or fluffychat
Interesting. Last I tried Cinny it was behind Element. I’ll give it a look again. Haven’t tried Fluffy. Linux and mobile only?
ye basically, you can use flufflychat in the web browser as well
I would say it’s more a Slack alternative, Discord does one click screen sharing, streaming, voice rooms, has a soundboard, and other stuff that’s fantastic for friend groups.
Plain Matrix rooms are a bit too foreign to Discord users i’d say.
There’s another alternative being built which resembles Discord a lot more, is federated and as i understand is built around Matrix communities: https://github.com/commune-os/commune-server
Here’s a demo instance: https://shpong.com/
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Worth noting that persistence set certain expectations now that Matrix does not live up to currently.
Looking into Matrix…(again apparently because I had an account already logged in on element) I hate to say it but, I can’t forsee myself ever using that. It’s waaay too complicated while simplistic at the same time. There is a permission system but, this is more similar to IRC then discord. Graphics wise it’s super basic and easy to use, but I can forsee that being way too much of a pain to moderate or administrate on.
I actually find it nice compared to discord. It’s simple. If you need more complex moderation in matrix, there are bots you can use
I expect there probally is, I only briefly looked at the integration system and the bridge system nothing really caught my eye but it would make sense that since they’re looking for more IRC feel that most of your basic moderation perms would be through a bot of some sort kinda like how chanserv was
