A couple weeks ago Discord announced their plans to go down the IPO route. This means that there is now a ticking clock until the platform goes full-on enshittified like so many others before them.

Last time i checked last year there weren’t many options to migrate to, mostly Matrix communities (which are not quite the same thing) and Revolt Chat (which is a non-federated but FOSS and self-hostable drop-in replacement for Discord). Revolt sounds like the logical route as it’s clearly designed for just this exact role, but it seems it’s still early in development and not yet ready for the average Discord user (looks like the voice functions in particular are still in development)

Has this changed or improved since then? I feel like the use case of “IRC servers, but modern!” should have been solved years ago but feels like it hasn’t, i have lots of non-technical people who heavily use Discord who I’d love to rescue from it before it starts actively burning, a replacement that isn’t complicated and has all it’s features would be welcome.

  • snownyte@kbin.social
    1·
    4 months ago

    Color me surprised.

    I loathe that platforms treat themselves this way. We see this happen over and over again when a newcomer comes into the field to shake things up. They become, eventually, the best alternative. They eventually become the only thing.

    And all that they turn out to be, are just portfolio fluffing projects to be made into an IPO. Then the enshittification and oh, there is next to no where to go.

    What a world…

  • verysoft@kbin.social
    0·
    4 months ago

    I was wondering what happened to the Discord IPO. Discord already went to shit, I don’t know what else an IPO could do to it? More restrictions?

    • Sabata11792@kbin.social
      1·
      4 months ago

      500 character limit unless your paying for nitro? It’s so scummy that I expect royalties when they steal my idea.

  • ADHDefy@kbin.social
    0·
    4 months ago

    I love the Element client for Matrix. I use it with my friends and I have joined a lot of communities on there. It’s Discord-like, but I personally find it much easier to navigate than Discord. It’s free, open source, decentralized, you can self-host if that’s your jam, it’s got some solid security and usability features, call quality is great, and I’ve found it to be very stable and reliable. I’m a little biased because I personally don’t like Discord, I find the UI clunky and unpleasant to use, but I love using Element. If you love Discord, you will find Element familiar, but you may or may not appreciate the differences.

      • ADHDefy@kbin.social
        1·
        4 months ago

        You can just search terms right within Element to find public “rooms” (like a Discord Server). There’s rooms for all kinds of things. There are private rooms, too, but someone in the room would have to send you a link to it.

  • Nia [She/Her]@beehaw.org
    0·
    4 months ago

    The most popular ones I know are Revolt and Matrix as you mentioned, but Fosscord also still exists under the new name SpacebarChat (had to change name for legal stuff). It’s still very alpha but good to keep an eye on. It plans to be Discord compatible so bots, plugins, and clients made for Discord will also work on it when it’s ready to be used.

    Offtopic (some FOSS ways to reduce enshitification on Discord for now if you can’t migrate yet):

    spoiler

    In the meantime, to reduce enshittification you can use Vencord which is a FOSS modded client for Discord. Technically breaks their TOS but I’ve never heard of any bans from it except if people do dumb stuff like try to log chats or spam with it, but be aware that it’s possible. Also Vesktop is made by the same people and still FOSS, but it’s a wrapper around the web version as a standalone app instead of the regular app, it runs a bit faster and doesn’t need reinstall on Discord updates, but has less features.

    • BolexForSoup@kbin.social
      1·
      4 months ago

      I have joined revolt servers purely based on size just to see if anything was happening, and every single one of them was basically dead, especially anything with a focus. At most I will see one or two people talking. Makes it very hard to hang around on a daily basis.

      Are there any servers you know that have decent activity?