Thanks for sharing, that’s an interesting read. I hadn’t come across this when I was looking (to be fair, it might be been posted after I looked, I’ve been mostly on stack overflow for a month).

I’m in agreement with many of the author’s points (I’ve ticked all of their requirements except markdown support and the only stretch requirement I don’t meet is being able to scale up to thousands of users - but I never wanted to do that anyway).

I am really torn on “everything needs to be federated” though. I feel like credential fatigue/ease of joining a server is largely solved with SSO/SAML or magic links with guest access. I want to love federation, I really do… But my own lived in experience with matrix has soured me on it. It was a pain to maintain and the eventual tipping point was one of my “trusted” federated services (Arch btw) flooding me with CSAM.

I think there are many discord users that use it for voice/text/screen share with a core group and don’t really care about all the extra stuff or having these huge servers filled with people they’ll never interact with. It’s just the only realistic option right now to chat with their friends. Those are the people I’m hoping to attract. I’m not saying what I’m offering is a perfect solution but what I am offering is that core functionality without the gradual enshittification and constant slurping of your data.