Time is a flat circle. We’re going back to IRC, boys.

It sure would be nice if development communities would stop locking their content behind Discord.

Element is a great client for matrix. It functions similarly to Discord.

I would love to, but finding an alternative might be even harder than finding an alternative to reddit. I am registered to many alternatives, but unless the people I want to talk to such as my friends are there then it serves no purpose for me.

Tbh I don't mind proprietary apps, so long as the user experience is good.

I don't mind the ui nudges to buy nitro - the server costs have to come from somewhere - but if discord starts seriously serving ads, I'm gone.

jokes on you i got overwhelmed by every channel being split into a gajillion chats anyway

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I've been excitedly following the matrix project for years, but I'm in a lot of unique discord servers that would never move short of catastrophe. The network effect is too strong to shake the apathetic. We'll win the long game with matrix, but it might take a while.

Easier said than done when your communities are all on Discord. I would love foss, but I'm not ditching my friends for it

I'd love to leave discord, but I know to many people that use it and will not budge on leaving. I am stuck with it.

So unless discord makes a very serious boneheaded mistake and double down on it like Reddit did... I don't see many people leaving.

Nah. Discord is the most accessible, if we’re talking about blind folks and accessibility. I tried using Element, and yikes!!! No. Cant read a single convo. In Discord, I can go back as far as necessary till I catch up. Tried other apps, too, and they all do the same thing.

Can be hard to migrate to Revolt or Matrix communication apps depend completely on the user. I see it the same as how not so many people migrated to Signal after realizing WhatsApp and Telegram are not really private.

Discord doesn't really block 3rd party apps. Technically, they are against ToS, but unless you're doing something bad, it's seen as okay by the discord staff.

But yes, it's quite the closed ecosystem obviously. There are no 3rd party clients that implement all features, mostly due to the fact that it's all closed source.

Do we also have alternatives to Discord?

While I love the sentiment, I have to say leaving Discord was one of the worst choices I ever made, not because Discord is inherently better, but because of the friends on it. I was in a very different state mentally and left without warning, and I regret it everyday, even though I'm back on Discord and some of my friends were willing to accept me, I still get a very intense feeling that what I did was unforgivable and I shouldn't be given this chance to talk with them again. It feels like leaving someone waiting for a high five and returning it months later when the hype is gone... I'm mostly inactive because I feel so wrong and I really don't deserve friends that are so nice. While I made the choice to leave and I knew the consequences, I don't wish anyone else to make that same mistake, leave with confidence, not with a cloudy mindset, worsening depression, and way less friends.

Discord came around after I had already gone FOSS as much as possible, so I've never actually used it. I host two Matrix (Synapse) servers, one for friends and family and one for work. I don't use it for large public chats, just friends or work, so my largest rooms are 10ish people each. The server side of things has never given me a problem, I easily run it on a 1 vCPU VM with 3 GBs of memory (I'm sure I could give it less if I needed to).

On the client side, Element works well enough, but I do wish it felt a bit further along after all of these years. Calls work reliably if one end is a computer (so computer to computer or computer to phone), but phone to phone calls are a complete roll of the dice if they will work properly. Notifications are a complete mess. I have Element open on my desktop right now with zero notifications, if I turn on my laptop and open Element (same exact account) it will show a handful of rooms with notifications until I go mark those as all read. The worst is when you get a call that isn't actually a call but a stuck notification from somebody that called you days ago.

I mean I do love it, there is no alternative for me. I simply don't even think about Discord or other proprietary apps as even a choice. I hope open source, decentralized software keeps gaining momentum and the rough edges are touched up a bit.

Every community should own their own communication infrastructure, or they don't actually own the community. It can disappear in a second. Matrix, Rocket.Chat, Mattermost, IRC, whatever. An online community relies on the connecting tissue, so if you care about your community you need to own it.

It is so far a slightly different situation. First it gets revenue directly by the users instead of advertisers. This changes everything at a fundamental level.

Second, the type of community is much different. The communities using the full feature set are generally limited in scale one way or another. The issues with Facebook, Twitter and reddit arose also because there is a gigantic userbase which interacts with each other. Toxic policies are more likely to be forcefully accepted due to the massive social inertia.

Type of content hits differently. As a lot of communication is real time, or moment to moment, there is less lost value if things go haywire. Now this absolutely does not apply for servers which directly act as a forum replacement run by the companies themselves. Some use it as a website replacement for some reason which is also a terrible idea.

I think a future migration will be a lot more fluent and less hurtful overall. The moves away from TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Skype were never impactful. With the monetization model I also view it as less probable.

I only ever joined Discord for friends. Leaving would mean losing all friends, not even a select bunch. They're not moving and while some may care that it's upsetting, it's a collective bunch that needs convincing. Friends of friends of friends. People aren't jumping ship for one person to also not have their other friends not jump ship.

Reddit is a community but doesn't have the more casual chat that friends use (well they have it now, but it was never good).

Discord pretty much has to burn bridges like Reddit did before anyone moves.

matrix server is next, anyone whos joining?

There's not really any good alternative for large communities. The amount of tools available on Discord in the form of bots is so useful, any other platform they move to needs to have that as well.