Discord, the social chat app popular with the video game community, has met with investment bankers in recent weeks to discuss preparations for an initial public offering as soon as this year, two people familiar with the talks said.
Let the turbo-enshitification begin!
Pay/Loginwall-free article archive:
Original article on New York Times:
Why does Jason Citron look like an Amish man trying to pass as a “businessman” in that picture? 
How long you think it’s going to be before the nitro subscription starts going up in price AND becomes required to use Discord?
I give it 4 months post-IPO.
Maybe this will get my friends to move to something else finally? Haha, no chance. 
yeah, fat chance. What answer would you give them when they ask “move to what”?
I was going to take a screenshot of my answers, but on my tablet that would have been rather NSFW. So you get text. 
For servers, Matrix seems the closest 1:1 and most popular. Revolt is interesting, but I don’t know much about it.
For one on one or single room servers, Signal is the big name. Though I’d like to try Delta Chat or SimpleX.
Telegram’s too hinky IMO and I don’t buy blockchain’s malarkey enough to give Session a second look.
Of course, they’re the lot that if they got off Twitter at all, it was to bluesky.
So…
shrugs
Considering “invest to return” usually takes quite a few years (see Netflix, where the investors only ever knocked on the door 10 years later), I don’t think we’ll see any immediate changes to be honest.
Discord already started with decorations and other micro-transactions a while ago so that course will just be kept.
I think that while it at some point may happen, at the worst I think that server creation or large scale community ownership would be limited to subscribers.
I personally wouldn’t mind if communities moved back to forums. Hell, for what it’s worth I wouldn’t mind NCB/CI to move to this forum here (I’d even be cool with a rebrand because Totentanz is probably a bit hard on the german crowd without Cyberpunk-knowledge).
We have a chat and all the categories to post in. And for weekly, other calls you could just hop on a Jitsi video conference somewhere.
Of course not as integrated as everything is in Discord, but could work just fine.
I’m pretty sure that there’s a Jitsi plugin available for Discourse. Totentanz could certainly become a self-contained, self-sustaining community. And I too like the idea of moving back to BBSes and forums, because I honestly think there’s a limit to how many people a single human can actually keep up with and intersect with on a daily basis.
But that being said, I also really do like the idea of federated communities because that helps me keep a global mentality just through casual contact with friends, friends of friends, and followers of friends of those friends.
There’s absolutely something to be said for forums, but I also think that there’s something equally loud to say about federation with other sites and communities, and having random “outsiders” bounce into one’s sphere of influence every now and again to make new connections just by pure chance.
Matrix protocol is IMO a good alternative, the problem is choosing a good client. Users don’t care about the protocol, they care about the client.
Usually I just tell people to use Fluffychat on Android and Cinny/Nheko/Neochat on desktop. If they do not care about custom emotes and stickers, Element is alright on desktop too.
I have been running my own Discord-like community thingy in Matrix for over a year now. I’ve added custom emotes and stickers to my Matrix space and if people use clients that support those, things work out well. I do not encrypt public channels, that just causes headaches.
The downside is the moderation for public rooms can be really annoying. Matrix clients can either have really good moderation tools built in, or not. For this my solution is just to run invite only community… Which I actually prefer. Less noise and less random idlers who never talk.
Perfect Discord replacement does not exist. But I could see it exist if people just, instead of arguing between what protocol is good, took at least one of those protocols (Matrix or XMPP) and began to work on a Discord clone client.
(I’d even be cool with a rebrand because Totentanz is probably a bit hard on the german crowd without Cyberpunk-knowledge).
As an English mono-speaker I have no idea what that means. I just know it’s the PWA with a T that isn’t Tumblr.
I do like forums for slower paced things like this, but I feel getting those who grew up with them to use them might be tricky, among other issues.
It is SO much easier to ask a question for random software than it is on a matrix or Discord server though.
I have heard from others that weak moderation tools on matrix is a massive issue for getting open rooms for trolled communities to move there. Discord is plain safer at the moment.
Totentanz literal translation is “death dance”
(Am not german but studied it a little eons ago)
That’s exactly my problem with Discord. There really don’t seems to be an alternative that’s as simple as Discord and values your privacy.
I know that matrix is a thing, but people already don’t get what instances are when talking about the Fediverse, sadly. And don’t forget the encryption problems.
There’s also Revolt, but that’s in a hobby project state.
I really hope that development here goes on. Currently I don’t know what to recommend to non tech savvy peeps.
I read this post today and think it sums up some of the issues we’re talking about here out-site of VC vultures:
Wow, that article is really good! Something I’ve been saying for a while now myself, but not nearly as well-put as Tante’s version. The FOSS community definitely has some significant attitude problems while at the same time spouting contradictory interpretations of what the words “free” and “open source” really mean, but I could never really put my finger quite on why these contradictions exist. It seems that Tante has finally answered that question for me.
Thanks for bringing this article up (as well as the post that mentioned it in the first place), as the very first response to that post was pretty much a case in point about how so many FOSS folks miss the boat. And I don’t think that they even realize that they’re doing it.
tldr; Well I was close to deleting my Discord account for the second time, this’ll do it.
I joined Cortex Implant (first dot com, now DotNet because Akkoma is cooler) then joined TotenTanz because it was where the cool long-form conversations were happening. Now I’ve rejoined Discord having quit it late last year due to the social media rot because a small group of old friends created a hangout there, oh and FOMO of the cortex impant calls.
This news pushes me back to why I left last time, and I’ve realised I don’t have time for calls as it is and can chat with the friends I want to keep in touch with on Signal.
To your point (eventually I get there) @SynAck I enjoy the asynchronous nature of BBS/forums and think I get more out of dropping into TT once a week or so and browsing CI on a daily basis as it fits my consumption needs. I never got into TikTok or more intense FB or Insta habits, and enjoy the sense of distributed community I’ve found here and on the Fedi.
LOL. Going to go back and add a tldr to the top now. So if you read this far, well done!