Recently I accidentally made a Fediverse post which went viral:
stop using discord for your open source communities
That post is short, punchy, opinionated, and prescriptive, which I suspect is the cause for its virality.
Unfortunately, like many micro-blog posts, it lacks nuance, which many replies highlighted. I made the post to vent my frustration at needing to join a Discord server to interact with a community, so it is far from a measured critique of the subject.
This blog post is an attempt to address those nuances in greater detail. This is not an exhaustive analysis, and I’ve resolved to not let “perfect” be the enemy of “done”.
Have you tried Revolt? It’s supposed to FOSS and offer similar functionality to Discord. I keep meaning to try it, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
I do have a few of questions about that site that basically explain why people haven’t moved there. Does it have the same level of software support (bots, clients, etc)? Does it have a similarly large set of large and niche communities to Discord? Does it have a barrier to entry as low or lower than Discord? Is there both a large incentive for friend groups and communities to move to Revolt and a large disincentive to stay on Discord that the average person cares about enough to act upon? It doesn’t seem like the prognosis for Revolt overtaking Discord is very good, unfortunately. I wish I knew how to overcome all of that and the network effect but I don’t, unfortunately. One major problem is that it’s not unlikely that Revolt servers could become effectively centralized in practice if it does overtake Discord simply because the vast majority of people to not have the time, knowledge, or resources to read and modify Revolt’s code and/or host their own web server. ~Strawberry
I think we already know what would have to happen to get people to move. Discord needs to screw up and drive people away. Like why most of us are here. Lemmy was around for years, it had most of the problems you list, less software support, fewer communities, higher barrier to entry, it still has most of that actually. Reddit gave Lemmy its chance, by screwing up their own platform, Discord will need to do the same thing to see an exodus.
That isn’t all though, Revolt needs to be ready, to have communities and people talking about it, while Discord pisses its users off. Matrix already has that capacity, the question is if/when will Discord screw up?
That’s another major problem. Waiting for that is like waiting on the lottery to read your number. Well, maybe not quite the lottery, more like some sweepstakes that’s kinda popular but not really? I don’t know, you get the point. ~Strawberry
I absolutely agree. We have no idea if its ever even going to happen, Facebook has never had an exodus the way Twitter and Reddit have, for example. There are also a variety of scenarios where Discord fails and no one migrates to decentralized FOSS platforms. Some AI product steals our attention more effectively than social media, or the infrastructure supporting the Internet breaks down, or climate chaos upends all our lives and no one has time for Discord or anything like it. Frankly, I expect something like that to be what does in most online platforms.
I think you’re right in your original comment, it’s probably not gonna happen.
So if it’s unlikely for Discord to mess up badly enough all at once for people to move en masse that way, is there any other way to incentivize enough people to move? ~Strawberry
I think so, but I don’t know what it is. I have some ideas, small and large, at least.
We could try to move niche communities, or build them up ourselves. Maybe there is potential in getting the founding members of certain communities to move, or we can build some ourselves. This won’t move everyone, but it might shift some core users away, and help enshittify the platform long term.
We could try to change society. As it is now, many of us have fewer social connections than most humans did even just a few hundred years ago. This is not direct, and unimaginably harder, but it is also how we can avoid many of the bad outcomes that otherwise await our species if we do not turn from our current path. Getting people off Discord and such would be a side effect of radically changing how we live, or through forming the communities we need to make broad social change.
Thanks for your question, I was framing this in a pessimistic sort of way, but you brought a different perspective out of me. It doesn’t seem immediately doable, but there are things we can do that are still worthwhile even if they do not lead to huge changes right away.
Someone said that Revolt haven’t support voice chat and screen sharing, I think that may be the reason why ppl still uses discord