With Discord announcing age verification globally, people are searching for alternatives. But a Discord alternative on the open social web might just look structurally quite different.
With Discord announcing age verification globally, people are searching for alternatives. But a Discord alternative on the open social web might just look structurally quite different.
We need a damn federated Discord! Stoat and Root are bandaids until they either shut down themselves or degrade.
Do NOT reply to me with Matrix. It’ll be a federated Discord when it actually gets some uptake for more than just Fediverse instance rooms.
I agree with this but why are we all pitching for completely new platforms. Why don’t we all just go and contribute to stoat and implement federation instead of waiting for an entirely new platform to come up. I understand many open source people like fragmentation, but I personally would wish for more concentrated dev time on a single project. Also having one centralized place for most work makes it easier to fork later and have a solid base to work off of instead of a bunch of different ideas over and over
Stoat have not designed their platform to federate and aren’t interested.
Why do we need federation though? I like my discord ‘servers’ being disjointed.
Same reason the Fediverse does. Because a would-be piece of software can’t scale without it. If each instance is entirely disconnected, then you can’t jump between different communities on them without new accounts. This depresses growth. Your average would-be Discord instance host is unlikely to be able to scale up to any meaningful size to be a large host, and nor would that be desirable anyway as its just a form of centralisation to begin with.
Barring the single account, I want them entirely disconnected though. Discord had not suffered in growth because of a lack of interaction.
Centralization is irrelevant for what users want outside of a niche. The average user doesn’t care.
And I should note I’m not against competitors and open source but they all need to realize that the thing that matters to users isn’t the underlying architecture or that they’re foss. It’s the features, community, and experiences they deliver.
Lemmys a good example. From the outset having to ‘choose’ a server is already an anti-pattern on seamless user experience.
@Skavau @ieGod OK but you see how our goal is to make that stuff matter to users, right? Getting more users isn’t the goal.
I have never heard anyone complain that they have to choose an email provider.
Why? You could always self-host a federated Discord alternative and not federate it with anywhere else if you wanted it like that. You can use it like that and others can utilise its federation functions. Why is Federation presumably desirable for you when it comes to Lemmy but not Discord?
Federation is necessary here for long-term resistance to corporate greed and decline. It isn’t a selling point specifically for the individual user experience here.
Snuck in an edit that touches some or your points. I’m not on Lemmy because of federation, that’s incidental. I’m here because it’s another option to explore. But I still use reddit, too, because the community is there.
I can assure you here that the majority here will always want federation in anything even if it makes the sign-up process more complicated slightly to new users. For many reasons.
And sure, features also matter. If they didn’t, then Matrix would be already winning here.
As you seem to appreciate, 95% of the time matrix is exactly what’s needed. People seem to hate it because it’s slightly different than discord, but anything that isn’t discord is going to have that problem. It also has other problems, but at least it’s not as bad as fucking discord.
I mean Stoat and Root just do not have that problem. They look like Discord.
All that we need is that but federated.
Also Matrix lacks key Discord-like features in terms of voice chat, screen sharing etc.
Can you explain which features are missing for you?
No audio/screen sharing, incredibly basic community or “space” customisation tools. No roles.
Imo all it needs is for 2.0 to come out and for discord-like clients like cinny to mature to get to a point where it’s a good discord replacement, and both of those seem pretty close to happening.
Fluxer.app looks promising. It’s still in very early dev, but according to the site:
The public beta looks pretty good but it’s currently very slow. There is a large refactor going on so I’m hoping for the best, but even in its current state it seems to support many of Discord’s biggest features quite well.
That feature list looks too good to be true ha ha
I can dream lol
I am now waiting manual review
Really? That’s new, I signed up this morning and it just worked. They must be being hammered by people leaving Discord too
Well yes, it says: “To manage the influx of users during our public beta, we are throttling registrations…”
There’s Shoot.
Any active Shoot instances?
Don’t think so. I mean there is the web client which does give a default instance, but it requires an invite code.
Yeah, if that can develop further and some people start to take it up - it could become more of a thing.