Pawslut420So here’s an effortpost about Discord, and migrating off of it.
It’s well known that Discord has been under lots of fire in the past week or two, first with a CEO change (with a former Activision leader), lawsuits from governments about “child safety” (which is a very real thing, see the “Discord Groomer” meme, an organized child abuse group being busted, etc.), and its half-hearted attempt to please governments worried about child safety with ID scanning exactly like what VRChat does (but without the carrot of “you won’t see kids and griefers ever again").
Yet, at the same time it’s very important to realize just how Discord got huge. Discord got big because of its extremely low barrier to entry, combined with the decline of Skype that was years in the making. I’m talking blocking old clients like Skype 4.2 (which I used for ages because the New Skype was kind of meh), making the new clients bloated, the network slowly getting buggier, etc. Everyone was wanting to find a new client, and boom just out of nowhere Discord came about (thanks to communities like FFXIV embracing it) and every group over time moved to it.
Discord is now in the position Skype was in the mid-2010s to some degree, with the “stink” of having a userbase that’s the punchline of everyone online ("discord kitten" is now in the online lingo). Yet just like Twitter at the time of Elon Musk’s buyout; nobody is sure where to move to.
Matrix is hyped up as a similar program and replacement for it, yet hosting a server for it is a total dumpster fire and it screams “consultancyware”, where they want to sell you hosting to avoid dealing with the pain of hosting it. Moderation also leaves much to be desired, as major FOSS chats have been spammed with gore and illegal images. It can do video calls at least, but the moderation and server hosting issues are turning some people away.
XMPP is a very solid protocol that can be combined with WebRTC as Jitsi shows and even supports video (XEP-0167, XEP-0320, etc.), and it’s a damn good way to chat online (probably better than IRC imo). Yet, it has a small and niche userbase and suffers the same issue “dead” online games or IRC have. People tell each other its dead and I’ve seen Mastodon side fedi posters talk endlessly as if it’s a thing of the past when referring to the Google Talk shitshow (when the “should Threads federate with us” question comes up). At the same time, it powers everything from Cisco WebEx/Jabber to more obscure programs like VSee (used for Telehealth and developed by a former XMPP dev). It really just needs a good client and way to do video calls more constantly and it might take off more in that regard. Dino for example does Jingle sessions, but gajim does not.
There’s also revolt chat, but it hasn’t taken off in the circles I’m in…yet. I’m not sure if it’s any good, or how hard it is to host since many in the FOSS sphere have been dabbling with Matrix or XMPP. It seems like they got the UI/UX downpat as in mimicking Discord very well, something I cannot say about XMPP clients right now (though XMPP clients are way past the days of Pidgin or Trillian). Yet, it seems to be a much more niche option given how mature XMPP is. To me, it seems as if it's another variant of the XKCD standards comic, and I'm sure it'll have "growing pains" if it grows. I see no reason to use it though if nobody I know uses it, unlike XMPP or Matrix.
There are several problems that every single one of these has to tackle however. The first is that they need to make the UI easy for anyone to use (this is a client thing and someone can easily make a Discord or Telegram-like client). The second is it needs to work and be a good experience. The third thing and most important thing, is they need to get people to use it.
Discord right now has two things going for it: the network effect, and the fact that as of now it “just werks”. Discord got so big because there was no friction as opposed to the dumpster fire of trying to host a TS server (complete with the "paid" tiers), you’d just click and sign up. Now there’s tons of Discord groups for everything from your favorite library/framework to some niche hobby to some game engine, and the big servers will always cross link other servers which are into related topics with active populations and discussions. It doesn't help that the official community for many games and projects also are set up on Discord and not a forum, I recently had to submit a bug and the devs actually used Discord more than Github to check bugs!
IMO it’s going to be a long way to get communities off Discord, and I mean like days long outages or frequent outages that disrupt a community to the point of moving off, or a series of extremely unpopular changes that lead to users ditching it in protest.
Yet, AIM, Skype, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, and many more of the IM clients people used 15-20 years ago didn’t last forever, and the same can be said about Discord. The big question is, what will replace Discord, will it be good enough to get the normies away from its tentacles, and what will be the future of communication online?
All I can say is, people should learn from the past and not use something that's a centralized point of failure and anti-user decisions. Skype went to shit because Microsoft ignored the userbase, and Discord will inevitably go to shit for the same reason.
When you don't control the code or the server, you are always at whim of the corporation. It's why you can still run a IRC server, XMPP server (even after Google Talk was killed), or even something esoteric like a Hotline server or BBS in 2025. It's why these communities will outlive Discord, and people should be taking notes IMO.
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Johnny Peligro
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WhiteExodite
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