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Thank you for giving me more time to figure out alternatives
Yeah, keyword here is "delay".
I just found out about Fluxer today. I might tinker around and see if it’s any good.
Move to matrix. It’s very stable, maturing up well, and has almost all of the discord features including streaming/video chat.
Do you have a recommendation for which project to host and/or clients to use? There are so many.
Get element desktop or element x, and start by just having an account on matrix.org. If you are reasonably nerdy and have hardware or a VPS, then start a synapse server.
Tuwunel or Contiuwuity for the server and Commet for the client(though presently you'll need to provide another client to register)
Why do you think that’s a good suggestion for a newcomer?
I host two homeserver, one on synapse and one on continuwuity, both pretty small (tens of users), but with users in lots of large rooms. The second one was significantly easier to set up, and uses a lot less resources.
Also, element and element X work, but aren't great. It depends on the user, of course, but I don't think you get people by giving them the 'dumbed down' version.
The servers I suggested are much lighter and simpler to setup than synapse. Commet is very Discord like which lets you on board people much easier than Element. It also supports voice rooms unlike Cinny(waiting for this to merge https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny/pull/2680)
The best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago.
The second best time is now.
Chat platforms that cannot be gated behind corporate policies might seem small today, but they will grow if we use them.
The only acceptable option: don't fucking bother.
Don't forget that Persona, the Peter Theil backed company, was found by whitehats to contain a us government backend for them to run facial recognition against government watchlists and scanned your chat history to determine your age and also reported any "suspicious activity" to the government.
The time to delete this privacy cancer is now.
While not perfect, whenever people talk about Discord alternatives I have noticed no one mentions Steam Chat. It pretty much has the same features and drawbacks as many of the other suggested alternatives with the added benefit being most people already have accounts.
Edit: One of the biggest problems I have found with finding alternatives (besides finding an alternative that has screensharing and VC for mobile users) is finding one my friends are receptive of. Matrix, Stoat, whatever else my friends are not interested and seem they would rather just try and trick the Discord verification shit. But Steam Chat they actually considered and seemed fairly interested once they found out what features it had. The fact most of them already had Steam accounts was a major reason why they were willing to consider it.
My suggestion to discord:
Require age input when making a user
Then if the child wants an account, a parent has to make one and create their profile and choose what they can and cannot do. Sort of like parental controls for video game consoles, smart phones etc
No age verification required. No ID etc
That way i can check a box that disallows my kid to join any server, or he has to request access which i have to confirm etc
Same can be done for friends requests and PMs etc
To play devil's advocate real quick, that system has no teeth in actually stopping kids from signing up to services. I remember lying about my birthday for Neopets to register an account - and later I couldn't remember what I said it was originally. So if we assume that services should be responsible for keeping kids out of adult spaces, then some form of verification is necessary.
In reality, I don't think I agree with that assumption. I lean toward things being free and open - including potentially letting kids access adult spaces. There are certainly dangers in that but I don't think that segregation and surveillance are the best way to address those dangers. If anything, segregating kids into "for kids" parts of the internet puts them at much more risk of abuse because the abusers can go there to find a target-rich environment with few adult onlookers to expose them.
I got a simpler one...I stopped using discord 4 years ago and I was right! LOL.
Seriously, stop using it.
A lot of communities only exist on Discord. And no, you can't just find alternatives if they're locally based or similar.
We can make alternatives. That's how the Discord communities got started.
So stop using it? Yes, its hard... 1)Spool up server not using discord. 2) tell people to join.
Some of these groups have dozens or hundreds of people on them, no way I'll get even a fraction of them to. I don't have the time or desire to start a new community from scratch.
As much as I hate it, people join Discord because that's where all the communities are and they stay because all their other communities are there.
Alright! Happy doxing!
I’m just gonna not do that regardless. I don’t use it enough to give in to that shit. They’re not the damn government and had a breach like months ago. Fuckin donkey brain shit.
More options to refuse, nice