this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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I admittedly haven't looked very hard for an alternative. But I fully expect to be forced to move elsewhere in the next year or two due to their increasingly belligerent chasing of profits.
Same. I just hope my friend group and by some extension the gaming community chooses something that won't fall into the same pitfal of closed source for profit organizations.
I hope the transition is towards matrix, or something like it.
Hopefully, I would love a discord alternative that does the same thing but is open sourced similar to the fediverse.
What exists that cannot be sold to a high enough bidder? Even Lemmy isn't magically immune. If the admins of .world got handed checks for a couple million dollars in exchange for the rights to operate the servers, what would discourage them from cashing out?
The internet is fundamentally a privatized system that exists to generate profit for investors. There is no true public domain. Its all just turf up for sale, some of which hasn't gone to a notable bidder yet. If you do manage to improve a patch of digital real estate to the point where someone will pay you enormous sums to divest, you'd be a fool not to take the money.
Nothing, but it would be far less disastrous than say some billionaire buying the town square of the internet.
Because it's federated, everyone can just leave. There is nothing stopping people from ditching .world and moving on.
Because of the networking effect, people don't leave. People have stubbornly clung to Twitter and Facebook and YouTube in the face of enshittification.
This notion that everyone's just going to pick up and leave Lemmy hasn't even worked on Reddit, the OG thing everyone was supposed to pick up and leave after it went to shit.
Federation is strong specifically because of how it gets around the networking effect. You don't need a .world account to see content from it. That doesn't apply for Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube without shenanigans.
You don't need to leave lemmy. It takes 10 minutes to set up a new account somewhere else, with zero downsides.
Federation doesn't get around the networking effect. It inhibits the network's growth by allowing the community to fracture along instances, depending on the whims of the admins. But when one community outstrips the rest, its meaningless.
Federating mitigates the flaws of OG Mastadon, as it allows individual users to stack threads from multiple participating instances. But as soon as their native instance goes to shit, they've got to pick up a new account somewhere else and rebuild their profiles. And people - by and large - don't like doing that repeatedly.
"It takes 10 minutes to set up an account in App X" is the same line I've heard explaining why people would leave Twitter or Facebook or Reddit.
Why doesn't BlueSky have all of Twitter's business if it's so easy?
If you control the main server, breaking federation is not a problem.
If I care about my account, it would suck. Can't migrate unless server allows me to
Not immune, but let's say resistant. Due to federation, they couldn't lock down existing federated content; due to open source they couldn't lock down the user experience; and due to those two, nobody's going to offer them a check for a couple million dollars.
What genuinely confuses me is who they're finding to buy this shit to begin with.
I've seen so many of these failed "Join our club to score points to get tokens to buy virtual dongles that you can use to get into our more-elite clubs with better points and color tokens" schemes over the last ten years. It's like everyone wants to be Chuck-E-Cheese, nevermind that the company went bankrupt five years ago.
Even if all you care about is profit, it seems like this is an abysmal means of generating it.
Oh it's undoubtedly going to fail, but it should milk enough money out of their users to keep them going while their investors cash out
ah yes, seeing deepweb market-esque exit scams on the surface web is a sign of a healthy system
Microsoft had a check ready for $10B.
I can't imagine how a new flavor of Buttcoin could compete with that.
It is a bit baffling. I think it's more ethical than the alternative though: pay gating useful functionality. Offering paid pallete swaps doesn't make a lot of sense to me, someone who would never pay for that, but it does at least mean I can just ignore it. If they were to, say, restrict voice calls to a paid subscription, suddenly I'm in a position where either I'm paying for the service or ditching it entirely.
They already do pay-gate useful functionality, this is just an alternative revenue stream
The replacement is matrix.
Yikes, hope matrix really improves soon.
Matrix 2.0 is class they just need to get spaces support
Not really. The network is currently undergoing massive attacks of spammers who flood people's servers, rooms and dms with child porn and videos of animals being tortured. Maintaining a public matrix room or homeserver is a nightmare and the Matrix foundation has only now come up with a solution. But these servers are slow to release and many people have been left with no choice but to leave Matrix all together. Discord is a shithole but we need to make sure people are aware that the alternatives have their own set of issues too
Not had any spammers in my server. To handle that sort of stuff on discord I have a bot that removes messages based on regexs I’ve set and restrict new members from media,urls, etc til they get their first 10 posts in the server.
Keep an eye on Revolt.
Is it open-source? Sounds like it does exactly what I want. Maybe I'll create a shadow group there and make the permanent jump once discord becomes untenable.
It is open source. But from what I can tell the accounts are largely still hosted centrally, and it isnt federated in any way, which isn't great. Anybody can host an instance or server.
So ultimately it looks like a massive step up from Discord, with some small issues here and there.
https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html
https://github.com/revoltchat/documentation/blob/master/docs/faq/instances.md
Oh well. Matrix it is, then.
(I prefer XMPP but no group chats kinda ruins it if it's a feature you expect)
I believe there was talk of opening it up to the fediverse but not sure where they landed on it
Edit: From the linked FAQ actually
However, this does not necessarily mean federation is off the table, possible avenues are:
Any federation that is implemented MUST exercise caution in:
The word you're looking for is enshittification.
I thought it was called capitalism.
Enshittificaiton is a uniquely capitalist thing, so..
They are the same thing.
enshittification is a part of capitalism, but capitalism also has other things going on
You read my mind
It feels like literally the entire open source and games communities are on discord. Will they move too? I care about that even more than my DMs.
They were on IRC before and on a number of other chats systems before that.
They will move as soon as something better will come out, for various definitions of better
Slack does the same thing as discord i believe