A couple weeks ago Discord announced their plans to go down the IPO route. This means that there is now a ticking clock until the platform goes full-on enshittified like so many others before them.
Last time i checked last year there weren’t many options to migrate to, mostly Matrix communities (which are not quite the same thing) and Revolt Chat (which is a non-federated but FOSS and self-hostable drop-in replacement for Discord). Revolt sounds like the logical route as it’s clearly designed for just this exact role, but it seems it’s still early in development and not yet ready for the average Discord user (looks like the voice functions in particular are still in development)
Has this changed or improved since then? I feel like the use case of “IRC servers, but modern!” should have been solved years ago but feels like it hasn’t, i have lots of non-technical people who heavily use Discord who I’d love to rescue from it before it starts actively burning, a replacement that isn’t complicated and has all it’s features would be welcome.
Color me surprised.
I loathe that platforms treat themselves this way. We see this happen over and over again when a newcomer comes into the field to shake things up. They become, eventually, the best alternative. They eventually become the only thing.
And all that they turn out to be, are just portfolio fluffing projects to be made into an IPO. Then the enshittification and oh, there is next to no where to go.
What a world…