Please, pretty please, be the spark that will stop OSS projects from hosting their “support forums” on Discord.
I wish it was only limited to support forums. I’ve even seen a Linux kernel driver where the Issues sections was closed and you should go to Discord instead. No thanks.
It’s horrible. We already had that stuff figured out. Wiki pages and forums to make information accessible even after 20 minutes have passed. Fuck that development and everyone that was/is pushing for that.
🤮
Who are the morons that keep making these decisions?
Several open source developers in this case
It’s people that don’t want to have to maintain things, which I understand. It’s trivial these days to host a forum with a cloud provider, or have a github, but Discord is one click. It’s not the ideal tool, but one click, no payment, and you have a place everyone can talk to each other.
I guess, but even without talking about forums, even a subreddit would at least be publicly accessible and searchable. Using discord is effortless but antagonistic, at least a subresdit would be both effortless and in the service of the public.
Sure, I’d prefer an open source self hosted platform, but I’m hard pressed to find anything worse than discord
Sure, except that Discord was accessible when these were set up. There is nothing stopping Reddit from doing the exact same thing next year.
Discord is just as inaccessible from the open internet as it’s always been, if not arguably worse so, although you’re right in giving Reddit no further credit in that department.
This is my biggest pet peeve of OSS projects. Someone writes some code and that is where it ends for them. The rest of the infrastructure is so free and so easy that there is no need for dedication to the project.
It’s too bad the open source community couldn’t find some programmers to help them make an alternative.
As long as the alternative is not another chat app that is not indexable by search engines. Forums fill the role pretty well, I don’t understand why devs would use Discord in the first place.
Hear hear!
Matrix is an ok alternative to Discord for what Discord does.
Support forums are not an appropriate use of Discord, or of Matrix. Discourse is pretty great open source forum software. NodeBB forums even added ActivityPub support! I never particularly like when companies use Reddit as a primary communication method, and for the same reason I’d rather they didn’t use Lemmy or Piefed, but all of these are vastly better options than Discord, Matrix, or other un-indexable private chats.
Fluxer apparently has that on their roadmap. https://blog.fluxer.app/roadmap-2026/
As part of #3, I’d also like to add the ability to publish forums to the open web. That way, people can discover, archive, and access discussions without logging in.
Sounds great. I hope it has video chat and screenshare or will implement it soon.
They do have those things from what I can tell.
As someone who has spent the last 2+ years testing revolt/stoat, matrix with element, and teamspeak, desperately searching for any viable discord alternative, I’m very interested in this. Where did you come across it? I tried to create an account but stuck pulsing on a loading screen.
@craigers @other_cat can I ask what was the issue with using matrix as a discord replacement? I would like to propose it to some friends, so it would be good to know if there are some fatal flaws
My issues with matrix were mostly around the voice services.
@craigers oh ok! So far everything seemed to work fine with them. I hope they’ll keep being stable in my experience. Thanks for sharing!
One of my friends’ husbands brought it up, so good old word of mouth.
I did notice I wasn’t able to get logged in last night, though the night before I was able to make an account without issue. I wonder if they got a hug of death like Stoat did.
Haha I opened a github issue on that and the main Dev confirmed they were getting the HoD.
I saw earlier that Zulip already has that option, but I still would much prefer a regular old forum.
As long as the alternative is not another chat app that is not indexable by search engines. F
For me this is the biggest probem about Discord and Discord alternatives why not just use Lemmy what’s the problem with Lemmy?
Also not very searchable on engines, especially due to fediverse server name differences, you can’t !lemmy because many of the communities don’t have Lemmy in their domain or titles or however that works. At least I have only gotten Lemmy results for like 25% of my searches.
But you don’t need Google to search lemmy,. lemmy’s internal search is very good and you got whole index (even without an account)
Discord took the place of IRC. Chatlogs for IRC were rarely indexed by most channel admins until after about 2010 when projects like freenode hosted all the open source projects for the whole web.
It was purchased by some right wing billionaire and now it is no longer.
But in a success story for open source software, the entire community migrated from freenode to libera.chat in like 2 days.
The way to defeat enshittification is by disallowing lock-in.
Gen Z will not comply with this. They’d rather lick boots and get bullied by chuds. They treat social media networks like kids in the 80s treated 7-11. And they will not leave.
There is stoat.chat (formerly Revolt). But you wont find much help on Lemmy or Mastodon. A lot of people on the fediverse have an aversion to Discord because when they try it, they have difficulty with it like a senior citizen with a smartphone. Even though Matrix and Discord arent similar, people on the fediverse will still try to recommend you Matrix, because they think Discord is just another messenger and not like having a forum, teamspeak, jitsi and other stuff in one program. And even if you explain it like that, they will be like “but then you can just use a forum, matrix, jitsi and a screenshare program separately” or something like that.
Lol. I can vouch for this.
Hell my friends are still Stans for IRC and will literally argue it has everything you need.
Open source community always loses to capitalists, because people won’t do the work unless there’s money involved. Otherwise there would be open source alternatives that are better and more popular. What incentive do smart programmers have to help the open source community when they’re better off earning 180k+ per year programming for the financial sector? Especially in this ever increasingly oppressive economy. I’m sorry but unless leftists are donating billions to the open source community, it’s idealistic at best to depend on them.
Nonsense. Open source built the web. Open source isn’t some new anti fascist trend… What are you smoking?
Open source built the web
Yeah and how’s that working out, in the context of the subject of this thread. I don’t see any open-source communities competing with Google or Microsoft or Palantir.
Open source didn’t crumble under the weight of inevitability. It fell apart because corporate interests profiting off of it decided it was more profitable to create cultures antithetical to the guardrails that open source presents to exploitation and co-option.
A las, capitalism wins again. I don’t like it, but it’s a fact.
It was pruned. It will grow back. It’s growing back now. There will be an Internet post American dominance and it will use open source.
I deployed several docker containers using an image from this one guy. Later when I needed help with an image I realized the support is provided exclusively through a Discord server. To nobody’s surprise the guy is an asshole who shouldn’t interact with users.
Yes, thank you.
IRC still supports most of the FOSS core.
More modern alternatives include Jitsi, Matrix and Simplex. Mumble also works well for voice.
Every time I see Simplex it reminds me of a virus.
Simplex is the most secure option available with the most resource intense client. I’m a fan, it’s much newer so the code is less mature but they’re comming along well, hitting roadmap targets, listening to the community and auditors.
Americans- If you’re thinking “this isn’t so bad” please consider that all it takes is a teeny tiny, insignificant api added to the back end with absolutely no notice to users and suddenly the DHS has a database of dissenters, with cross-referenced IDs, photos of faces, chat history, link share history, raw uploaded photos, and approximate locations.
Say no to this. If you need a temporary alternative that’s quick to get going, create a signal group chat with your friends.
Y’all just aren’t thinking about the shareholders.
It’ll be the new Victorian age all over again. Morals and acting righteous up top and secret human stuff just underneath the surface. Just look at what is happening in the bad old usa today. This is not about protecting minors.
sadly people will forget about this next week
Note, this is happening for the same reason Reddit started enshittifying much harder all of a sudden. Discord wants to do an IPO and so they’re going to suddenly start squeezing their users to make the numbers look good just in time for that IPO. Their bet is that they have enough momentum that enough people will stick with them long enough for the IPO to succeed, and after that happens, it’s someone else’s problem.
Good.
Discord is overused for help forums and wikis, which makes them extremely difficult to search and dependent upon third party software to be maintained. I hope this will force people away from that behaviour and back to good old fashioned messageboards that have been working just fine since at least the 80s
Ive been trying to migrate off since 2020
Communities I follow refuse to, and no other service is close to parity. Guilded was the closest until they allowed themselves to golden parachute with their Roblox purchase, so they’re now not longer worth considering
Teamspeak and teamspeak6 is a joke, anyone who prefers it is off their rocker
I’ve been following Revolt/Stout, River on FreeNet since I found it on FUTO, and others but frankly all alternatives I’ve found suck for varius reasons
Stop a calling this “age.verification” and start calling it what it is, “identity harvesting”.
The absolute shitload majority of users will not care about this enough to stop using the product
After what happened in Nepal last year, this 100% tracks with the dystopian narrative we are currently living. The powers that be saw a small country use it as a tool to affect change. To me, and tell me if I lm jumping to conclusions here, its obvious as to why this policy change is happening at all, to prevent the site from being used in that manner again.
Definitely uninstalling discord. I hardly use it anyway.
“I categorically cannot trust tech companies with that kind of personal data,” wrote one frustrated user, with many hoping they might be able to convince Discord to do a U-turn with enough public pressure. Others went further. “What a great way to kill your community,” added another longtime user, while some predicted “that’s game over for Discord” and remarked ruefully that “privacy on the internet is truly dead”.
LOL. Just like Netflix price increases, or reddit third party apps thing, the protest will barely register in usage metrics and discord will carry on.
These companies have effectively infinite resources with which to test changes with user reference groups, model potential outcomes, and mitigate risks. It’s pure hubris to suggest that you have a better understanding of Discord’s user base than they do.
The vaaast majority of users will just do the video age test and never think about it again.
I dunno about netflix, but at least the reddit debacle diverted a lot of users to the fediverse.
If we get a similar exodus from discord to matrix, that would work wonders for spreading the fediverse to others. Most of them still haven’t even heard of it.
A blip of users
I mean, do you want more people on the fediverse or not?
Thats not my point though.
At the time reddit closed their API to third parties loads of idiots were saying it was the end of reddit.
In reality reddit just sanitised their user base.
In reality, reddit gave a userbase to a platform that previously had none.
… and yet, that’s not what im talking about.
If you call that sanitised…
Well they got rid of the users they didn’t want so from their perspective, yeah.
They lowered the lowest common denominator by driving away the users that wouldn’t tolerate their BS.
Idk, they lose users from stuff like this. For every one real user they lose, they are picking up several fake ones, the mechanized troll divisions, loitering chatbots with air support and artillery cover from amplifier accounts, influence agents, and political support to back them up.
The internet is dead, and those metrics are not the real metrics, the traffic from fake users, inauthentic users, is now greater than real people using the internet it’s been reported.
So your metrics might even go up in user numbers/volume. It doesn’t mean real people didn’t leave, and while your value might not decrease having fake users and bots fill the void, the real value of that website decreases, and that real value will show through eventually.
LOL. Keep telling yourself that mate.
This is just supposition. They have the hard data.
Figures don’t lie, but liars do figure.
It’s not at all false that the true value in something lies in the true value, and that our clown economy that prizes confidence men and confidence games that value Tesla at a trillion dollars are unsustainable, and will in time come back to intrinsic values.
Having fake users may keep the company looking just as good, but it lessens the value. Interactions with bots doesn’t satisfy most people, and will lessen the value to them, and they will use the site less. Moreover any advartising on the platform will see less payout because more of the accounts being served the ads are fake accounts operating under false pretense.
Just like reddit, they more than make up for users that left with new fake accounts, and they are already overrun with them, but when people are stuck interacting with those fake accounts they will generally use it less, because they aren’t witty, they aren’t insightful, they are spitting out learned answers that only sheep would enjoy fraternizing with. The fake accounts shout down real users, drown out real discussion anyplace that that discussion threatens the entrenched interests that employ those mechanized trolls, not just governments but corpoorations, all of them basically, they have trade groups that farm out contracts, often to AI, Actually Indians, to run the influence operations with the help of regular ai and computer programs because they are low cost and speak english well enough.
While the ivy league hacks running our businesses and government don’t care if they have fake users that run off real users that makes their site less valuable intrinsically, because for now it doesn’t affect their profitability, and they are unable to look beyond their next set of financial statements, it will catch up to them.
They will use their corrupt influence and anti competitive tactics to try and crush any upstarts that are nearing critical mass, so they don’t think they have to cater to the user base at all, that we have no options, no alternatives. Let’s make them wrong about that. Because following their lead is the end of the world.
This is exactly what I’m talking about.
After the reddit “collapse” of 2024 their market cap was > $6b following their IPO in November 2024. Right now it’s $28b.
Yes, reddit is a cesspool and the UX has dropped off a cliff.
I’m sure /u/spez is tarrified that some dweeb on lemmy decided “it’s going to catch up with them”.
They’re right. Have you used reddit before and after that? Many decent users just disappeared, at all, and the new users replacing them are not nearly as decent. So in terms of usability and utilitly the website died. It is like titktok. No less no more, but with text posts.
This might shock you but they don’t care about your experience. Everyone made loads of money.
Not only that, verification is not mandatory. So, unless you frequent some questionable 2 furry goatse 1 cup channels, there is literally nothing to worry about. The rest will gladly verify their age and jerk off to their favorite AI generated porn.
They’ve stated elsewhere that even though they’re deploying “age inference” (whatever that is), verification is mandatory if you don’t want your account to be restricted to PG-13, basically.
Man 100%. Every now and then you hear that Facebook is “hemorrhaging users” or “it’s all over” but most normal people just don’t give a fuck and use it because they’re already there and their friends are too. This’ll be no different.
I’ve been off Facebook for at least 15 years. I’ve been trying to move people away from it for so long, or at least getting people to stop sharing shit about their kids, but a lot of people use it as their primary means of communication, news, photo sharing, etc. I just don’t get it. I do think most people I know just have ghost accounts now, though. But for some, Facebook is their internet. When they send me Facebook links, I just don’t interact with it at all. I don’t know what they sent me because I refuse to click the link, and even if I did, Facebook is blocked by my firewall and DNS so I won’t even be able to see it without getting around my own network. I just don’t even respond.
hmm idk, i only know like 2 people in my life that still use Facebook heavily. i know it’s different in India though.
Facebook has seen stagnation or user drops in most mature markets, it’s still growing in growing markets. India especially represents like half of all Facebook now.
no idea where you might be from, but this is not a globally universal issue. this will likely play out differently in different markets.
That’s a real good point. Here in the UK I’m the only one out of my friends group who doesn’t use it. Here’s me also jumping to conclusions that it’s the same everywhere !
In India, it’s pretty much the old generation and elders who use it due to old habit I think. Most kids nowadays use instagram.
Thats why it is important to have an alternetive ready people can switch to. If there is a backlash (for any platform) and a decentralized alternative is there this is the biggest chance to become the “norm”. So thanks to all the people working on lemmy, peertube, mastodon, etc.
I found this little substack article that lists out alternatives. The timing is is great & I hope it helps people out.
