Ignoring the implications of this for the moment, let me broach a related (and arguably more important) question: what do you do when you have multiple communities you interact with only on one platform, and suddenly that platform becomes intolerable for a subset of your community?
It is the same as what everyone did after the reddit fiasco i.e. protest, boycott, grudgingly use it while complaining and then finally accept the change.
May be this discord episode will have better outcome for the masses.
That was certainly my experience. I got rid of the app and only used reddit in browser mode to read without participating. The noticeable quality drop after the migration, as well as all the artificial hurdles they put up to force you back on the app eventually made me stop using it entirely.
Platforms lose momentum when these events strike, and momentum loss is the death knell for social platforms. Reddit's missteps have put it on a downward spiral. They may hang on, even for an impressively long time, but recovery from this point is very difficult and usually involves transforming or re-forming the vision.
It can be done. It takes the right leaders. Most are unfit for this particular challenge.
It seems like the answer is pretty obvious. That subset of the community stops using it and uses something else, and the others either follow them or don't.
You, if you're not in the first group, can continue to use both to communicate with everyone, but some of them lose the ability to communicate with each other.
The ideal outcome is for everyone to stop using the intolerable thing and switch to a tolerable thing. That's even what often happens over time, but not always immediately. Probably do anything you can to make it happen faster.
People tried warning that moving all your discussion forums into a proprietary, closed, unsearchable platform was a bad idea. And it was. But nobody cared.
I'm seeing Groups.io show up more for hobbies/interests I have. It seems email can be a way to slow down heated discussions. Perhaps at the expense of push-back on using more email?
Anyone have any experiences to share with moving their discussion groups from Discord to Groups.io?
No, we’d like to go back to the culture that created protocols to solve our needs, such that people could create interoperable servers and clients to implement those protocols.
I want Whatever to be designed in a way that allows me to go find a provider of Whatever that I'm comfortable with, to run my server for me, and for it to interoperate with Whatevers of other people regardless of which provider they are using.
I also want it to be possible for me to take all my data - chat logs, membership etc - and move them to another provider of Whatever if my current provider enshittifies.
And yes, I do want it to be possible to self-host, if it turns out that no remaining providers of Whatever meet the bar.
Email is an open protocol, perfectly suited for delivering messages between people. Discord is a closed application, unsearchable, any server or account may be nuked at discord's discretion, thus it's entirely unsuited to replace e.g. a forum.
If this happened 15+ years ago, a huge chunk of the userbase likely would've migrated to alternatives, potentially resulting in Discord being replaced and falling into irrelevance.
Today, though, no chance that happens. The current generation literally grew up with it, same for most of the other established social media apps. The concept of alternatives largely does not exist for them. And besides, they were probably already sending pictures of themselves and other personal data to each other through the app, so it's not like Discord doesn't already have all of that.
I remember back in the days of instant messaging, there were clients which let you chat with people in a manner agnostic to the underlying IM provider. I used this one:
Maybe we need similar omniclients for group chat platforms, with automated migration scripts etc. I think the ideal migration method would be to implement continuous archiving, so the platform can't block you from scraping your own chat archives.
I'm always exhausted by a migration. But I don't move off because there's an easy alternative. There never is. I do it to maintain principles, even at the cost of my social circles.
I mean, I grew up with AOL AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC... yet I switched every time a new tech came out with more of my friends on it. Why do we think discord will be any more sticky than Digg or Slashdot, or any of the above?
People will migrate, some will stay, and it will just be yet another noise machine they have to check in the list of snapchat, instagram, tiktok, reddit, twitter, twitch, discord, group texts, marco polo, tinder, hinge, roblox, minecraft servers, email, whatsapp and telegram, and slack/teams for work.
Kids today are alarmingly bad at technology. This is not a "kids these days" situation, this is absolutely true. They understand "tap on icon, open app, there's a feed and DMs".
I mean it, the tech illiteracy of gen Z/alpha is out of this world, I did not expect a generation that grew up with technology to be so inept, but here we are. But they grew up with a 4x4 grid of app icons, not with a PC.
I don’t think people understand the true level of tech illiteracy of Gen Z. A couple years back I did an internship with the IT guy at my high school, and the vast majority of the problems students had with the Chromebooks we used were, in no specific order:
- Not understanding that a dead battery means it won’t turn on
- Trying to use them without an internet connection
- “The screen won’t work” when trying to non-touchscreen models like a tablet
- “I can’t see my stuff” when using the guest mode rather than their login, or when they used a PC and they couldn’t see the docs icon on their desktop
That’s not even to mention the abysmal typing skills of most students, so many 15WPM hunt-and-peck typers..
There’s a mountain of issues along those lines we ran into, and it was honestly frightening to watch.
I feel like asking someone working IT about the average technical literacy of the people they work with is similar to asking an EMT about the health of an average person. Not to discredit your experience, but you should account for the fact that a lot of the people you helped were the ones who were already filtered out by their inability to fix trivial problems.
I'm not saying this issue doesn't exist. But I want to reframe it as the low bar for using tech dropping through the floor. Previously, you had to have at least somewhat of an idea for what you're doing, but nowadays most people who don't care about tech are reliant on using the "grandma school of thought" in memorizing basic patterns and relationships without having a bigger model of what's going on. This mostly affects newer generations and older people who only started using technology recently, because this strategy didn't fly in the past. But technical literacy is falling for everyone.
But the absence of the low bar doesn't mean that everyone's chasing it. In high school, I was surrounded by peers who were interested in tech, sometimes being far better than me. The average level of understanding was pretty alright. In university, lots of people did just fine. I know countless people my age who are highly skilled in computer science. We're not in the majority, but there's plenty of us. I'm tired of it always being framed as an issue stemming from some kind of unique lack of personal responsibility and low intelligence related to age, used to apply stereotypes to hundreds of millions of people. Every average user will optimize actually understanding anything out of their brain if given an opportunity, it's just that that opportunity had only appeared fairly recently.
Yeah, I work with kids and it's admittedly a bit disheartening having conversations like
> why don't you make a separate account for your sibling
> I don't know how to make an email
> but you needed an email for your account
> yeah, I just use my school email
By that time my age as a young teen I knew how to make new accounts and research what I didn't know. And I'm not sure of its my place to help them create an email without knowledge from their parents.
Correct. From my personal experience (have kids and nieces/nephew this age), and all think an app is the thing that they scroll in, and any attempt to explain the very basics on internet connectivity, servers, databases, etc, ends up in them basically experiencing blue screen moment and backing away to the safety of the endless scroll.
The most complex concept they can understand is mail/post attachment or capcut, but then this is it. 10 minutes later they will download phone flashlight app that requires Google services for app delivery.
Shocking.
I ended up with refusing to help with anything related to technology in any other way than pointing to help/manual/search engines and asking questions.
... With the only caveat being that general experience of using Matrix is awful.
I second the other commenter's suggestion of using https://stoat.chat/ or as it used to be called: Revolt, which matches the "Opensource Discord" requirement perfectly.
(Incidentally, this is also the incantation that will cause its primary maintainer to show up in the comment thread and tell me that I’m not using their seemingly annual complete new client rewrite that fixes all of the problems and makes it perfect now.)
Pretty much why centralized billionaires will always win. It takes a lot of resources (in terms of hardware and engineering) to make things at scale and smooth. The rich abuse this, the not rich can't afford to be principled.
Mumble already exists. IRC exists. Matrix exists. Discord is a surveillance tool by design. Jason Citron pulled the same hijinx with Aurora Feint, but I assume he has been betraying users to CIA-and-Friends from the start so he gets a pass for breaking the same laws.
Nobody scales free, high-bandwidth services without some dark money support from feds or worse.
Remember when Tumbler banned porn? People migrated to other platforms like Reddit, and it died.
Musk being a Nazi made twitter lose big enough chunks of their community to start Bluesky. Not big enough to do any real damage to the platform, but it still provided critical mass to a fledgling app.
WhatsApp having a sketchy relationship with the US government boosted Signal.
Oh I think it definitely did damage, just not enough to kill such a massive platform overnight. Twitter has lost a significant amount of users while other social networks grew or held steady, and the cultural impact seems to have waned a lot.
I've never been a regular user of Twitter, pre or post elon era, but a lot of people I follow in other ways used to be very active on there and discussions would often spill over into other venues. That still happens a bit, but much less than before.
Most everyone will go down the path of least resistance. A few outliers will try to resist, get old and/or tired. A few of the few will reach acceptance, comprehend the serenity prayer. A few of the few of the few will reach enlightenment.
What you do depends on where you're at - statistically, you'll go down the path of least resistance which is totally, totally fine.
Try to tell them it's a bad idea. And be ready to leave that community if nothing changes. That's pretty much the way of life for an internet vagrant. Maybe you hope the community migrates too. Maybe you try to remake the community. But those aren't in your control.
I left Facebook, left Reddit (never really had a Twitter). This won't be different.
One of the starkest social desirability biases in tech is between federated and centralized platforms. Most people, in public, say they support distributed, federated systems, but when push comes to shove, they all use centralized platforms anyway.
