Usability is good in my opinion. They’ve spent a lot of time on the UI over the past couple years. The mobile Element X apps are excellent now IMO.
But the two things that prevent matrix/Element from being a good discord replacement are:
No Mumble-like voice chat. They have Zoom-like conference calling now, but no voice channels.
Search is either non-existent (mobile clients) or is awful. It’s somehow worse than Discord’s search! I know it’s because the search needs to work on-device because of E2EE, but unfortunately it’s still a minus point vs Discord.
Usability is good in my opinion. They’ve spent a lot of time on the UI over the past couple years. The mobile Element X apps are excellent now IMO. But the two things that prevent matrix/Element from being a good discord replacement are: