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.
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.