Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.

Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?

Right now I’m on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can’t find a clear “winner”.

    • renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      88
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      1 day ago

      Yes, which is good, but the lack of federation is a deal-breaker. It means that you either:

      1. Use their servers - This requires entrusting them with your communities, just like Discord.
      2. Host your own private instance - You can control it, but the lack of federation means it’ll be isolated from communicating with other communities. This makes it really difficult to convince people to use your self-hosted servers.

      Until Revolt adds a way for different instances to federate, Matrix is really the only other option.

      • mamotromico@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 hour ago

        I have yet to try revolt, but I thought you could just add stand-alone servers to your client (like idk, mumble). Is a revolt instance a whole separate ecosystem/infrastructure and not just a server entry?

      • aleq@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        30
        ·
        1 day ago

        My experience with Matrix is that the federation itself is a deal breaker. I have a pretty beefy server and good connection which was getting ddosed by running Matrix and timing out on so many requests for avatars/profiles etc. Maybe I did something wrong, but the whole experience rendered me quite skeptical to the viability of it as a federated chat.

        That said I’ve had nothing but good experiences using it with big servers set up by pros.

        • renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          16
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          1 day ago

          I get why Federation can cause issues (most of the time it’s moderation related), but why would an extra option be a deal-breaker? Federation can always be disabled on a per-domain basis if you prefer. In fact, I’d argue it’s best practice to only allow domains on a case-by-case basis to prevent spam and abuse.

          On the converse, you can’t enable Federation on a platform that doesn’t have it.

          • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            8
            ·
            edit-2
            23 hours ago

            They were talking about matrix itself, not a specific option. And I’m not going to lie, having to hand hold your servers federation choices seems like a hassle. At that point why not just use a self hosted, non federated option?

            • white_nrdy@programming.dev
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              4
              ·
              23 hours ago

              I think the point they’re making is you can effectively have a self hosted non federated option with Matrix. Just disable federation as a whole (which I’m pretty sure is completely possible. Given companies use matrix for comms, and might not want federation, for similar reasons to what is being discussed here)

        • hobovision@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          1 day ago

          Why would an optional feature be a deal breaker?

          It also seems like an issue that could be easily solved by whitelisting.

          • JackbyDev@programming.dev
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            edit-2
            13 hours ago

            Yes, which is good, but the lack of federation is a deal-breaker.

            The federation itself is a deal breaker

            Why would an optional feature be a deal breaker?

            Because the person they’re responding to said the lack of the optional feature was a deal breaker for them on a different piece of software.

    • drkt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      20
      ·
      1 day ago

      That doesn’t really change that it’s one company hosting it. Unless you’re willing to make 10 different accounts because your super-FOSS friends aren’t willing to join each others instances?

      • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        13 hours ago

        I guess the easy solution here to to make it use oauth2 authentication. Then you can just authenticate using one account elsewhere. If fediverse services also at some point become oauth2 providers, then even better.

        • Tekhne@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          12 hours ago

          That’s still not a solution. That entails non unified communication, access, and search. Making it easy to log in to others still doesn’t solve easy sharing between others. Also oauth2 is a pain to set up, and many people hosting their own instance aren’t going to bother.

          • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            12 hours ago

            Sorry but what exactly do you communicate and access between discord servers? Are you talking about PMs which are by default independent of servers?

            Unified search could easily be achieved through third party tools at the least, like for IRC. I don’t think even discord has unified search between servers.

            • Tekhne@sh.itjust.works
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              11 hours ago

              Oh hey, you’re totally right, that’s crazy. I use Beeper (hosted matrix setup) to aggregate my chats and I guess I’ve always been using that to search across all servers without realizing. Fully thought the DM search would also search across servers.

              DMs are definitely also another case though - you can’t easily DM people on another server if that requires you to log into another server.

              • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                11 hours ago

                That’s true about DM, however DMs are not a core use-case for discord-like services. It’s the group/voice chats etc. I could see a workaround like lemmy does, where if you want to DM a user in another server, you might be able to do it through your fediverse instance (i.e. a DM simply has your fediverse instance DM their fediverse instance), but I’m sure there can be more elegant things like. However DMs by themselves are a weird thing by themselves, so much so, that even bluesky had to bolt DMs on-top and outside of their protocol.