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.
I do want to say Matrix. You’d have to find a server first --> https://joinmatrix.org/ .With its discord bridge, it does allow users to switch to matrix and still be in the community if the community is bridged.
Matrix also supports voice chat rooms and video chat rooms. It isn’t monetized so there aren’t custom stickers, premium accounts, and so on, but if more people used matrix and donated, maybe that’ll happen. Someday.
The tough part for me is going to be plugins and such. pbd groups use a lot of dice rollers and initiative trackers and such.
Damn, this is going to be way more tricky than migrating away from Reddit. I have too many “servers” and friends on that platform so moving to matrix or something else seem unfeasible :(
You can try to convince the Discord server moderators to bridge their servers to Matrix with something like T2Bot:
https://t2bot.io/discord/
That’s what I did when I was running a Discord server,
worked nicely in both directions.
