Matrix is an alternative to Discord, so you should join if you want to use the service. It's not mandatory or necessary at all.
It would be like linking to your Mastodon account, a Twitter alternative, in your profile.
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
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Matrix is an alternative to Discord, so you should join if you want to use the service. It's not mandatory or necessary at all.
It would be like linking to your Mastodon account, a Twitter alternative, in your profile.
Honestly, I think having an option for Mastodon links in profiles would be cool - for those that want to use it, of course. I can see people wanting a separation between Lemmy and their Mastodon if they use it more personally than the more anonymous nature of a Lemmy account.
I wouldn't say discord, it's use is more similar to instant messaging like what's app. And it's not really an app or a service, but more like a protocol. There are already multiple clients and servers with which you can use Matrix.
It's also federated like lemmy.
It's considerably more like discord than Whatsapp. Whatsapp is just group chats and 1:1 chats, while discord has groups of groups called guilds.
Matrix is our self-hosted equivalent of a 'federated' WhatApps like platform. You could use it but it's not required ;-)
More on https://matrix.org/
**Element is just a 'front end' for Matrix ;-) Like an app for the web, mobile and desktop that connect with a Matrix server!
I think that a link to https://matrix.org/ would be a lot more appropriate in the settings than the link to element.io. I see no way for me to just "join" on element.io, but at least matrix.org explains what it is.
That's very true indeed!