Start considering moving your communities out of Discord now. Don’t wait for the enshittiffication to arrive, the clock is ticking. No one will listen to me, but let’s talk again later. https://www.reuters.com/business/chat-platform-discord-confidentially-file-us-ipo-bloomberg-news-reports-2026-01-06/
@djlink Discord was "enshittified" through and through before the term even existed, and all the alternatives that exist (XMPP, IRC, TeamSpeak, Matrix, Revolt, Telegram, DeltaChat, Signal) straight-up suck for a whole host of reasons ranging from:
An IPO isn't going to change anything at this point.
@djlink there has to be a bot to scrape a server's entire message history
@djlink ok, this sucks. unfortunately i have no idea where one would move. and even if i did, how you'd get more than 1-2% of people to go with you.
discord only got so big because steam, xfire, teamspeak and foremost skype all sucked at some part of the problem. but discord doesn't suck in the same visible ways.
@aurelia @djlink This, there is no proper alternative. Matrix is a buggy and convoluted mess, XMPP is cumbersome and Rocket is, to my knowledge, insecure (not like Discord would be secure, but there isn't sufficient incentive to move over or recommend Rocket over it).
I'd love to switch to anything that offers proper chat AND voice channels in a secure, accessible way. But even that seems out of reach.
@davecb @Natanox @djlink signal is a great base but they have zero community features and they don't seem to be too interested in compromising on being a secure messenger to have those.
meanwhile discord will refuse to delete your messages, even as a GDPR request, because being able to follow conversations in "public" (they consider any channel public) outweighs right to be forgotten. according to them.
but also we're using a protocol with zero expectation of privacy right now so that isn't per-se bad as long as you come in with that expectation.
@aurelia @davecb @djlink Unfortunately 99.9% of people don't come with that expectation. They just use it to communicate, no separation between secure and insecure as DM's *appear* private to the untrained eye.
Signal isn't good for common voice communication outside of purposefully calling someone. Especially for groups you need a set of base tools such as Voice Activation and Push-to-talk features, as well as noise reduction and of course device selection, per-user volume etc.
@djlink id love to, but to where? no other chat service works as well as discord does for large communities
@stella for large communities and access to information/questions forums work perfectly. For IM I don’t think there’s any problem to keep using it for now to chat with friends etc since it is usually smaller circles and might as well use what they use. But people with large communities should consider not to be subject to whatever thing shareholders decide next until it’s too late.
@djlink what we need is "Mastodon, but Discord"
@puppygames @djlink *points at matrix*
@khaleer @puppygames @djlink Lol, as if. Matrix is a dumpster fire and not even remotely a Discord replacement.
