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”.
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.