Comment by bovermyer
15 days ago
Ignoring the implications of this for the moment, let me broach a related (and arguably more important) question: what do you do when you have multiple communities you interact with only on one platform, and suddenly that platform becomes intolerable for a subset of your community?
It is the same as what everyone did after the reddit fiasco i.e. protest, boycott, grudgingly use it while complaining and then finally accept the change.
May be this discord episode will have better outcome for the masses.
Reddit dropped a lot in quality after that. I suspect a lot of people stopped posting, even if they did continue using it in some capacity.
I uninstalled it from my phone entirely. Definitely helped curb my usage.
That was certainly my experience. I got rid of the app and only used reddit in browser mode to read without participating. The noticeable quality drop after the migration, as well as all the artificial hurdles they put up to force you back on the app eventually made me stop using it entirely.
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Platforms lose momentum when these events strike, and momentum loss is the death knell for social platforms. Reddit's missteps have put it on a downward spiral. They may hang on, even for an impressively long time, but recovery from this point is very difficult and usually involves transforming or re-forming the vision.
It can be done. It takes the right leaders. Most are unfit for this particular challenge.
For me, I just stopped using Reddit. Turns out that I’m happier without it.
Hah I did the same thing. I only ever interact with it now when it appears in search results.
In the attention economy, you rarely become obsolete overnight. It's a more gradual shift of user focused being spent other places.
That's not what happened with the X nonsense, a lot of people went to mastadon/bluesky.
I moved to Lemmy and it reminds me of 2006 era Reddit
In a good 'niche forums and quirky local cultures' type of way, or in the annoying epic bacon kind of way?
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It seems like the answer is pretty obvious. That subset of the community stops using it and uses something else, and the others either follow them or don't.
You, if you're not in the first group, can continue to use both to communicate with everyone, but some of them lose the ability to communicate with each other.
The ideal outcome is for everyone to stop using the intolerable thing and switch to a tolerable thing. That's even what often happens over time, but not always immediately. Probably do anything you can to make it happen faster.
People tried warning that moving all your discussion forums into a proprietary, closed, unsearchable platform was a bad idea. And it was. But nobody cared.
I'm seeing Groups.io show up more for hobbies/interests I have. It seems email can be a way to slow down heated discussions. Perhaps at the expense of push-back on using more email?
Anyone have any experiences to share with moving their discussion groups from Discord to Groups.io?
discord being a closed, unsearchable platform is one of its main features.
So you want to go back to mailing list and run your own email server?
No, we’d like to go back to the culture that created protocols to solve our needs, such that people could create interoperable servers and clients to implement those protocols.
Maybe time for a Usenet renaissance?
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Email is an open protocol, perfectly suited for delivering messages between people. Discord is a closed application, unsearchable, any server or account may be nuked at discord's discretion, thus it's entirely unsuited to replace e.g. a forum.
You do understand the difference?
I don't want to run my own Whatever server.
I want Whatever to be designed in a way that allows me to go find a provider of Whatever that I'm comfortable with, to run my server for me, and for it to interoperate with Whatevers of other people regardless of which provider they are using.
I also want it to be possible for me to take all my data - chat logs, membership etc - and move them to another provider of Whatever if my current provider enshittifies.
And yes, I do want it to be possible to self-host, if it turns out that no remaining providers of Whatever meet the bar.
If this happened 15+ years ago, a huge chunk of the userbase likely would've migrated to alternatives, potentially resulting in Discord being replaced and falling into irrelevance.
Today, though, no chance that happens. The current generation literally grew up with it, same for most of the other established social media apps. The concept of alternatives largely does not exist for them. And besides, they were probably already sending pictures of themselves and other personal data to each other through the app, so it's not like Discord doesn't already have all of that.
There's also people who have been through enough of these moves and community splits that they're incredibly tired of it all.
I'm always exhausted by a migration. But I don't move off because there's an easy alternative. There never is. I do it to maintain principles, even at the cost of my social circles.
I remember back in the days of instant messaging, there were clients which let you chat with people in a manner agnostic to the underlying IM provider. I used this one:
https://adium.im/
Maybe we need similar omniclients for group chat platforms, with automated migration scripts etc. I think the ideal migration method would be to implement continuous archiving, so the platform can't block you from scraping your own chat archives.
I mean, I grew up with AOL AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC... yet I switched every time a new tech came out with more of my friends on it. Why do we think discord will be any more sticky than Digg or Slashdot, or any of the above?
People will migrate, some will stay, and it will just be yet another noise machine they have to check in the list of snapchat, instagram, tiktok, reddit, twitter, twitch, discord, group texts, marco polo, tinder, hinge, roblox, minecraft servers, email, whatsapp and telegram, and slack/teams for work.
Absolutely exhausting to be honest.
Kids today are alarmingly bad at technology. This is not a "kids these days" situation, this is absolutely true. They understand "tap on icon, open app, there's a feed and DMs".
I mean it, the tech illiteracy of gen Z/alpha is out of this world, I did not expect a generation that grew up with technology to be so inept, but here we are. But they grew up with a 4x4 grid of app icons, not with a PC.
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We start a new app. Opensource Discord, Self-hosted, federated. Serving that subsection that cares about privacy and security.
Discord is a good design, and should be replicated rapidly with mutations from competitors galore.
Revolt/stoat has existed for quite a while: https://itsfoss.com/revolt/
https://stoat.chat/
> Opensource Discord, Self-hosted, federated
Sounds like you want https://matrix.org/
> Discord is a good design
Then the main, reference client https://element.io/ or https://fluffy.chat would work great for you.
... With the only caveat being that general experience of using Matrix is awful.
I second the other commenter's suggestion of using https://stoat.chat/ or as it used to be called: Revolt, which matches the "Opensource Discord" requirement perfectly.
Matrix is slow, buggy trash with bad clients.
(Incidentally, this is also the incantation that will cause its primary maintainer to show up in the comment thread and tell me that I’m not using their seemingly annual complete new client rewrite that fixes all of the problems and makes it perfect now.)
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Mumble already exists. IRC exists. Matrix exists. Discord is a surveillance tool by design. Jason Citron pulled the same hijinx with Aurora Feint, but I assume he has been betraying users to CIA-and-Friends from the start so he gets a pass for breaking the same laws.
Nobody scales free, high-bandwidth services without some dark money support from feds or worse.
Remember when Tumbler banned porn? People migrated to other platforms like Reddit, and it died.
Musk being a Nazi made twitter lose big enough chunks of their community to start Bluesky. Not big enough to do any real damage to the platform, but it still provided critical mass to a fledgling app.
WhatsApp having a sketchy relationship with the US government boosted Signal.
Sooooo, what is a good discord replacement?
Oh I think it definitely did damage, just not enough to kill such a massive platform overnight. Twitter has lost a significant amount of users while other social networks grew or held steady, and the cultural impact seems to have waned a lot.
I've never been a regular user of Twitter, pre or post elon era, but a lot of people I follow in other ways used to be very active on there and discussions would often spill over into other venues. That still happens a bit, but much less than before.
Its hard to say. Reddit is still a shit show, but I still peer into niche communities you won't find anywhere else on the internet.
Discord is even more niche than that. There's tons of IRC esque group chats of that's what you need. But a community: not so easy to replace.
Most everyone will go down the path of least resistance. A few outliers will try to resist, get old and/or tired. A few of the few will reach acceptance, comprehend the serenity prayer. A few of the few of the few will reach enlightenment.
What you do depends on where you're at - statistically, you'll go down the path of least resistance which is totally, totally fine.
Try to tell them it's a bad idea. And be ready to leave that community if nothing changes. That's pretty much the way of life for an internet vagrant. Maybe you hope the community migrates too. Maybe you try to remake the community. But those aren't in your control.
I left Facebook, left Reddit (never really had a Twitter). This won't be different.
One of the starkest social desirability biases in tech is between federated and centralized platforms. Most people, in public, say they support distributed, federated systems, but when push comes to shove, they all use centralized platforms anyway.
atproto is a really good attempt at solving this issue
Shake your head and move on.
It's not like we haven't seen closed source applications become hostile to their users before. And it's not like we didn't warn people about it.