Hot take: looking for a single silver-bullet Discord replacement is solving the wrong problem. Corporate power has pushed us towards everything-apps, but it's OK for the tool you use to communicate with other users of an open source project to look different from the tool you use to text your spouse and the tool you use to run voice chats with your gaming guilds.
@xgranade EXACTLY THAT!
#Discord is like #MicrosoftTeams a "Shitty #App that tries to be a jack of all trades, and thus is a master if none!"
#IRC, #XMPP+ #OMEMO ( #gajim & #moniclesChat), #PGP/MIME ( #deltaChat), #Zulip and #RocketChat exist for good #TextChat.
#JitsiMeet offers #Vieocalling and #ScreenSharing and #Mumble offers #VoiceChat…
Instead if one #Bloatware, multiple smaller tools can do the same aspects better.
@kkarhan @xgranade I never understood what the problem of splitting "services" is. It's a great way of decentralization
A forum is easy to use, easy to maintain, easy to migrate, searchable and platform independent.
RT communications are way better when people are actually present, this does not require "push notifications" (we all have and ignore way to many of those).
Voice communication is never "all the time" and can easily be done via ventrillo, teamspeak, jitsi whatever you flavor is.
@waldschnecke @xgranade also #discord is an #InformationBlackhole worse than #MicrosoftTeams.
Also any halfassed #Forum has a proper #SearchFunction and doesn't require an account to find answers!
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.
@xgranade I actually thought Mozilla Persona was a descent approach to the "yet another account" problem. Pitty it never really wet anywhere.
@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.
@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)
@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.)
