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 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.