Nobody Can Be Discord

[tee]

Recently Discord has announced that it will start requesting face scans to prove your age to access mature content channels. At first this was being done on the device, with only simple json metadata being sent to Discord to verify the age. People quickly realized how to abuse the system however, and have started presenting workarounds before the proper rollout. It seems that this has made Discord switch to an alternative that did in fact store your sent personal data, going against what they previously stated. The outrage has caused people to start looking for alternatives not plagued by corporate greed that can still satisfy the common demand. Though the question is...

What alternatives?

As it stands, there is little to none direct competition to Discord.

Around the start of ~2020 there was Guilded, a kind of shoddy but extremely promising alternative to Discord. It had many genuinely unique and actually useful features, including ones that people have been asking of Discord to add for years. Too bad it got acquired by Roblox, instantly killing itself and any chances of success it could've ever had, forever immortalized as the "Discord for Babies."
Then there was Revolt, an extremely bare bones yet still barely functioning prototype aiming to be almost exactly like Discord but with an open source approach. It dropped off the face of the earth around 2024 or even earlier, but has recently come back under Stoat after a Cease & Desist forced rebrand. Almost five years later, it is almost the exact same barebones prototype that still has no basic features like screensharing, something I've seen randomly added out of boredom to crappy self-hosted nostalgia pandering social media. In an attempt to be exactly like Discord, it has ultimately become nothing of its own to stand on, with seemingly no signs of it pushing forward beyond this hype cycle.
Around the time of the Fediverse hype we got Matrix, a decentralized open source fediverse based safety first chat platform with different clients each hosting their own features incompatible with other clients, all being connected to either matrix.org or a self hosted instance. Remember Mastodon? If people struggled adapting to Mastodon, Matrix would make them reconsider ever touching a computer. When the server hosts aren't busy deleting child pornography off of it's servers and telling people to leave their chats for their own legal safety, Matrix loves to make you jump through hoops to achieve any semblance of cohesive discussion. Want to chat with someone? Please exchange a cryptographic key and solve each others riddle three before sending off your blood sample and awaiting 5 business days, repeat every person.
The newest kid on the block now is Root! Hey, this looks alright! We got nice smooth text chat experience, voice chat and even screensharing! That's all we needed!! Sure there's no stuff like emojis, their website not even a week ago had tons of placeholder and AI imagery and a bunch of promised features mysteriously missing, but atleast it's... something!! So what, is Root the way to go? Have we finally done it?

Root is a privately owned company, and their software is closed source. And so was Discord. Root will follow all the same steps of Discord, and so would Guilded.

Fuck.



In 2009, a guy called Jason Citron launched Openfient. It was a revolutionary social app for mobile gaming, amassing tens of millions of users. As any successful business, they immediately got hit with a class action lawsuit in 2011 on charges of invasion of privacy and selling all of it's users data to advertisers. A novel concept at the time! After that they couldn't stay afloat, especially with Apple's own Game Center taking center stage, so they decided to sell off Openfient to some random company and fuck off. After dicking around for a few years Jason decides to finally use his Bachelor of Science in Game Design to release their own MOBA "Fates Forever", with the most cultural significance the game getting being referenced in a startup blurb in their next venture: Discord.
The idea of Discord came up after Jason wanted to be able to easily talk about Final Fantasy with his friends. What started out as a mostly simple barebones chatting program proved to have extremely good fundamentals that rivaled the alternatives at the time. People were getting fed up with Skype as it kept getting more bloated and bloated and IRC chats felt outdated, Discord seemed like a viable alternative to jump to with more than rock solid features. It helped that it was quite novel too! Being able to assign roles, create channels and edit their permissions was extremely powerful and opened doors to extremely easy creation of community gathering spots and all seemed great! Though, isn't it weird how you're able to upload any file you want for free, and how there's no ads anywhere?

Discord is and always was a company. They always would have needed money to grow and keep up with rising server costs. And you think a measly 5$ a month would save them from that? The real funding came from outside investments from companies like WarnerMedia. Products like Discord are made to be a sinking ship, with any leaking hole being temporarily taped off with million dollar bills as they figure out how the hell can they make money off of this. But if you make the people pay, then people realize the product kind of sucks, so you have to lure them in with too-good-to-be-true promises first, and now we are here!
This can and will happen with any new privately owned chatting service like Root or Guilded, so even if they look good or even at the very least passable, we will be stuck in the same predicament only a few years from now if people make the switch.


Where are we left now? I feel like a lot of these alternatives aren't really worth a squat, so what the hell are we supposed to do now?
Almost as if as a response to Discord's popularity, we started seeing stuff like niche forums (hi) or self hosted social media pop up a bit more. While not supposed to be alternatives in their own right, I've seen a few times and even shared the sentiment myself that "the internet would be way better if we just went back to forums and self hosted web!" And honestly after living life a bit more... nah. The old internet is gone for a reason, and as people get more nostalgic I feel like their judgement gets a bit cloudy. Forums have fantastic applications in their own right, but it is a fact that people much prefer real-time communication with one another, and that writing telegrams anytime you wanna talk about a funny youtube video isn't for everyone. Forums are cool and I'll always have a soft spot for them in my heart, but I wont ever really actively use one. I am writing this here because it's the only reasonable place I can let off my catharsis, after which I will most likely be gone yet again. And that's okay.
For what it's worth, Discord got popular because it did something different. It took something known like IRC chatrooms and built upon them, with a wide array of useful features to boot. It's also why I truly believe that anything that just tries to be a carbon copy of Discord will not gain life. With social media today, everyone wants to be The One. Everyone tries to replicate each other's features to the point that nothing ever has something unique to it. Everything has Shorts now (shocked Discord doesn't!) There's studies that show how people way prefer familiarity over new things, but I think it's those same new things that give genuine purpose to something and make it stand out from the crowd.
If we truly want to move on from Discord, we need something that tries to make an earnest attempt to try and do something unique, even if just a little. Instead of focusing on stuff that's already been done or going even further into the past, I think people should look forward into the future and that developers try to make something that will genuinely stand on it's own.

Nobody can be Discord, nor should they be.

(P.S The new thing should let me edit the server css file and shit and have sooo much customization and let me self host everything too this will fix everything)

 

[tee]

sorry for the catharsis everyone, i've been looking at discord alternatives ever since 2020 so this has been brewing for awhile. i don't really write big texts like this so sorry if some of this is hard to read

 

[Andrew]

This is a really fantastic writeup. Top notch article, genuinely.

Highlight for me - "made to be a sinking ship". All of these tech companies were built with one idea in mind: nonexistent Obama era interest rates (made to counteract the recession) were a timebomb. The goal for each and every one of them was this: to be the best that you could be until rates increased.

As the waters get choppy, go public, take a big CEO exit package, and quit caring about what happens next. You've got your Ferrari, so who cares what happens to the lil peons?

As the US govt begins to eye going back down to those rate levels I'm curious to see if another wave will hit like this. Nobody learns their lesson, which is the only lesson we've learned.