Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.

Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?

Right now I’m on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can’t find a clear “winner”.

  • @[email protected]
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    21 month ago

    it’s Element/Matrix if we’re lucky. Revolt is just another Discord - surely this single company will last! With Element/Matrix being an open protocol, it won’t be a “platform” you have to leave when it goes corporate.

    • @[email protected]
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      21 month ago

      Nheko provides an interface that is reminiscent of Discord. Fully featured and fast Matrix client.

      • drkt
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        11 month ago

        That doesn’t really change that it’s one company hosting it. Unless you’re willing to make 10 different accounts because your super-FOSS friends aren’t willing to join each others instances?

      • @[email protected]
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        11 month ago

        Yes, which is good, but the lack of federation is a deal-breaker. It means that you either:

        1. Use their servers - This requires entrusting them with your communities, just like Discord.
        2. Host your own private instance - You can control it, but the lack of federation means it’ll be isolated from communicating with other communities. This makes it really difficult to convince people to use your self-hosted servers.

        Until Revolt adds a way for different instances to federate, Matrix is really the only other option.

        • @[email protected]
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          01 month ago

          My experience with Matrix is that the federation itself is a deal breaker. I have a pretty beefy server and good connection which was getting ddosed by running Matrix and timing out on so many requests for avatars/profiles etc. Maybe I did something wrong, but the whole experience rendered me quite skeptical to the viability of it as a federated chat.

          That said I’ve had nothing but good experiences using it with big servers set up by pros.

          • @[email protected]
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            11 month ago

            I get why Federation can cause issues (most of the time it’s moderation related), but why would an extra option be a deal-breaker? Federation can always be disabled on a per-domain basis if you prefer. In fact, I’d argue it’s best practice to only allow domains on a case-by-case basis to prevent spam and abuse.

            On the converse, you can’t enable Federation on a platform that doesn’t have it.