Hot take: looking for a single silver-bullet Discord replacement is solving the wrong problem.

Cassandra is only carbon now

That inevitably hits pressure from folks who are, rightly or wrongly, averse to having more applications and services in their world. If you set up a family Discord "server," that may not require them to create a new account.

But I think there's ways to solve that without concentrating corporate power, and that those ways look more like federation than anything else. E.g. if your project forums run on Lemmy, folks can use their Lemmy accounts from other servers.

Cassandra is only carbon now

Regardless, though, the everything-app concept is, I'll argue, an inherently corporate idea. We don't need to reproduce that in trying to de-Discordize our lives.

David Fleetwood - RG Admin

@xgranade I mean yeah, I agree but also I'm GenX and nearly digital native. It's a lot tougher for people who didn't grow up in this era to grasp and as a result ends up with a major accessibility problem.

I wish apps followed some more universal design guidelines so we could more easily separate our spheres without leaving people out of increasingly critical infrastructure and comms.

V

@xgranade Partner of mine just signed up for an XMPP server (I already used XMPP) - which, similarly works across servers, and can cover almost everything I needed from discord (+ allows end to end encryption)
The hardest part of them signing up was waiting for the server admin to approve their account.

So, there's options that aren't particularly difficult to use or set up, that also don't lock you and all your friends into a singular server/provider.
... some of the options ~ 30 years old.

V

@xgranade and tbh, I think the reason some of the 30 year old options still work well is precisely because they're open protocols, without a corporate overlord, and without the built-in perverse incentive structures to profit off users.
Self-hosting an IRC server works about as well as a discord 'server' - except you actually own the server and can do what you want or need to with it and control who gets what data yourself - for most purposes (voice chats being the primary gap)

V

@xgranade (self-hosting of course has a higher barrier to entry on the host side of it, but, for a personal one, isn't particularly expensive... you could likely host one for the same cost as whatever discord's premium tier thing was called anyway, but, there's still the added work of setup and maintenance, so, not a real option for a lot of folks.)

Canageek

@xgranade It's been weirdly hard to find a fully self-hosted chat program that has message playback when you log in.

I'm not even looking at voice chat since I've already got a $3 a month teamspeak server, but when I look at chat options so many of them still need to talk home to a central server or involve federation or other such nonsense?

Cassandra is only carbon now

@Canageek I'm not sure I'd say federation is nonsense, but I think in principle you could run Matrix without turning on federation by blocking those endpoints entirely at the reverse proxy level?

Canageek

@xgranade I mean in terms of it's a major complication that makes moderating and the technical knowledge need to make everything work much more significant.

I've heard advice against doing that because Matrix clients assume you're federated and don't support more than one user account

Cassandra is only carbon now

@Canageek I've heard advice against partially federating (e.g. blocking some instances but not others from using federation endpoints) as that can cause rooms to get into inconsistent and malformed states, but I've not seen any advice to the effect that disabling federation *entirely* is bad? Perhaps I'm missing something, though.

Canageek

@xgranade So it *works* but apparently it's a problem as most clients assume you are only going to use one login, so if you want to log into two servers they have to log out of one and log into the other every time

Cassandra is only carbon now

@Canageek Ah, got it, sorry for misunderstanding. And yeah, multiaccount support in clients is... not great.

Canageek

@xgranade Yeah, I'm going to wait a few weeks to see what happens when people who know what they are doing try them various software but right now I'm leaving towards Zulip or IRC or XMPP on my own server for text and TeamSpeak or Mumble for voice.

(I've already rented a TeamSpeak server for about $3/month but it's text chat is worse then IRC)

tef

@xgranade Yes, the problem that makes discord hard to replace is everything-in-one-place. People hate the idea of dropping this but it is how everything worked before, and it *did* work that way. I *remember* it working. I kind of hate the repurposing of that streaming-service meme as if once you say 3 different programs people can't process it anymore x_x

I guess one of the things that needs to get better standalone is multi-person video calling, but the *rest* of what Discord provides can 100% be replaced now if people don't demand it to be all together with identical UI

mr_daemon

@xgranade A great example of this is DeltaChat being essentially ideal at replacing the "group chat with friends" part of the equation, while being delightfully straightforward to self-host and demanding almost no resources.

It doesn't fit the "big public rooms" part just as neatly, like IRC ou Discord would, however, and I think that's ok.

I'm at the point in my life where I don't really need "decentralized" I just need federated with a hearty dose of data sovereignty. If that happens to come from a handful of good things, I'm ok with that.