Yes, Matrix Federation with your own homeserver and its bridge feature (I haven't used that yet) makes it top notch for private, sovereign, "almost" anonymous communication. 

Yeah I'm definitely interested in civ kit but refuse to use (and not allowed to join) discord.

Either that or set up a matrix bridge into discord. 

TonyGiorgio

My thoughts: would you like to use your own Matrix server for collaboration and not Discord as Discord is centralized?