Discord has announced that it's rolling out age verification checks globally from March – and the decision has sparked fury from many privacy-conscious users.
As long as the alternative is not another chat app that is not indexable by search engines. Forums fill the role pretty well, I don’t understand why devs would use Discord in the first place.
As part of #3, I’d also like to add the ability to publish forums to the open web. That way, people can discover, archive, and access discussions without logging in.
As someone who has spent the last 2+ years testing revolt/stoat, matrix with element, and teamspeak, desperately searching for any viable discord alternative, I’m very interested in this. Where did you come across it? I tried to create an account but stuck pulsing on a loading screen.
@craigers@other_cat can I ask what was the issue with using matrix as a discord replacement? I would like to propose it to some friends, so it would be good to know if there are some fatal flaws
Also not very searchable on engines, especially due to fediverse server name differences, you can’t !lemmy because many of the communities don’t have Lemmy in their domain or titles or however that works. At least I have only gotten Lemmy results for like 25% of my searches.
Discord took the place of IRC. Chatlogs for IRC were rarely indexed by most channel admins until after about 2010 when projects like freenode hosted all the open source projects for the whole web.
It was purchased by some right wing billionaire and now it is no longer.
As long as the alternative is not another chat app that is not indexable by search engines. Forums fill the role pretty well, I don’t understand why devs would use Discord in the first place.
Fluxer apparently has that on their roadmap. https://blog.fluxer.app/roadmap-2026/
Sounds great. I hope it has video chat and screenshare or will implement it soon.
They do have those things from what I can tell.
As someone who has spent the last 2+ years testing revolt/stoat, matrix with element, and teamspeak, desperately searching for any viable discord alternative, I’m very interested in this. Where did you come across it? I tried to create an account but stuck pulsing on a loading screen.
@craigers @other_cat can I ask what was the issue with using matrix as a discord replacement? I would like to propose it to some friends, so it would be good to know if there are some fatal flaws
My issues with matrix were mostly around the voice services.
For me this is the biggest probem about Discord and Discord alternatives why not just use Lemmy what’s the problem with Lemmy?
Also not very searchable on engines, especially due to fediverse server name differences, you can’t !lemmy because many of the communities don’t have Lemmy in their domain or titles or however that works. At least I have only gotten Lemmy results for like 25% of my searches.
But you don’t need Google to search lemmy,. lemmy’s internal search is very good and you got whole index (even without an account)
Discord took the place of IRC. Chatlogs for IRC were rarely indexed by most channel admins until after about 2010 when projects like freenode hosted all the open source projects for the whole web.
It was purchased by some right wing billionaire and now it is no longer.
But in a success story for open source software, the entire community migrated from freenode to libera.chat in like 2 days.
The way to defeat enshittification is by disallowing lock-in.