NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I admittedly haven’t looked very hard for an alternative. But I fully expect to be forced to move elsewhere in the next year or two due to their increasingly belligerent chasing of profits.
What genuinely confuses me is who they’re finding to buy this shit to begin with.
I’ve seen so many of these failed “Join our club to score points to get tokens to buy virtual dongles that you can use to get into our more-elite clubs with better points and color tokens” schemes over the last ten years. It’s like everyone wants to be Chuck-E-Cheese, nevermind that the company went bankrupt five years ago.
Oh it’s undoubtedly going to fail, but it should milk enough money out of their users to keep them going while their investors cash out
ah yes, seeing deepweb market-esque exit scams on the surface web is a sign of a healthy system
Microsoft had a check ready for $10B.
I can’t imagine how a new flavor of Buttcoin could compete with that.
It is a bit baffling. I think it’s more ethical than the alternative though: pay gating useful functionality. Offering paid pallete swaps doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, someone who would never pay for that, but it does at least mean I can just ignore it. If they were to, say, restrict voice calls to a paid subscription, suddenly I’m in a position where either I’m paying for the service or ditching it entirely.
They already do pay-gate useful functionality, this is just an alternative revenue stream
The replacement is matrix.
Yikes, hope matrix really improves soon.
Matrix 2.0 is class they just need to get spaces support
increasingly belligerent chasing of profits.
The word you’re looking for is enshittification.
I thought it was called capitalism.
They are the same thing.
enshittification is a part of capitalism, but capitalism also has other things going on
Enshittificaiton is a uniquely capitalist thing, so…
Keep an eye on Revolt.
Is it open-source? Sounds like it does exactly what I want. Maybe I’ll create a shadow group there and make the permanent jump once discord becomes untenable.
It is open source. But from what I can tell the accounts are still hosted centrally, and it isnt federated in any way, which isn’t great.
Still a step up from Discord though.
Oh well. Matrix it is, then.
I believe there was talk of opening it up to the fediverse but not sure where they landed on it
If you’re after text, there are a number of options. If you’re after group voice, there are a number of options. You could mix and match both, but “where everyone else is” will also likely be a factor in that kind of decision.
If you want both together, then there’s probably just Element (Matrix + voice)? Not sure of other options that aren’t centralised, where you’re the product, or otherwise at obvious risk of enshittifying. (And Element has the smell of the latter to me, but that’s another topic).
I’ve prepared for Discord’s inevitable “final straw” moment by setting up a Matrix room and maintaining a self-hosted Mumble server in Docker for my gaming buddies. It’s worked when Discord has been down, so I know it works. Yet to convince them to test Element…
It feels like literally the entire open source and games communities are on discord. Will they move too? I care about that even more than my DMs.
They were on IRC before and on a number of other chats systems before that.
They will move as soon as something better will come out, for various definitions of better
You read my mind
Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net 5 days ago
Same. I just hope my friend group and by some extension the gaming community chooses something that won’t fall into the same pitfal of closed source for profit organizations.
I hope the transition is towards matrix or something like it.
NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Hopefully, I would love a discord alternative that does the same thing but is open sourced similar to the fediverse.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 days ago
What exists that cannot be sold to a high enough bidder? Even Lemmy isn’t magically immune. If the admins of .world got handed checks for a couple million dollars in exchange for the rights to operate the servers, what would discourage them from cashing out?
The internet is fundamentally a privatized system that exists to generate profit for investors. There is no true public domain. Its all just turf up for sale, some of which hasn’t gone to a notable bidder yet. If you do manage to improve a patch of digital real estate to the point where someone will pay you enormous sums to divest, you’d be a fool not to take the money.
Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net 5 days ago
Nothing, but it would be far less disastrous than say some billionaire buying the town square of the internet.
Because it’s federated, everyone can just leave. There is nothing stopping people from ditching .world and moving on.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Because of the networking effect, people don’t leave. People have stubbornly clung to Twitter and Facebook and YouTube in the face of enshittification.
This notion that everyone’s just going to pick up and leave Lemmy hasn’t even worked on Reddit, the OG thing everyone was supposed to pick up and leave after it went to shit.
SufferingSteve@feddit.nu 5 days ago
If I care about my account, it would suck. Can’t migrate unless server allows me to
wjrii@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Not immune, but let’s say resistant. Due to federation, they couldn’t lock down existing federated content; due to open source they couldn’t lock down the user experience; and due to those two, nobody’s going to offer them a check for a couple million dollars.