dsciord suxi think discord sucks.
discord would be a great platform if it weren't for how it was set up. the way it's currently set up heavily encourages making your own little corner with your close friends and Maybe random people who are heavily invested in your project or doings. for many communities that used to be active and thriving previously, the advent of discord has made them obsolete in a way that makes it so that information regarding them has become almost completely private, or extremely hard to find due to how intentionally stuffty discord's search is made to be. this community, the community surrounding facepunch, an untold amount of game and server related forums and how interactions online work in general were torn down completely by discord.
the other issue, due to how discord is set up, is that it's significantly harder to stay in contact with new people and also significantly harder to get away from bad people. i've an unreasonable amount of experiences with discord friend groups which were spread over multiple places, with all of them having some absolute weirdo which would try their hardest to grip onto it and spread their bullstuff everywhere they went. eventually the friend group would come under the control of people who were friends with the weirdo in question, and nothing could be done about it but continue the cycle of new servers, information loss, meeting new people and losing them just as fast. this was literally not a problem when my primary method of communication was steam. was there a Weirdo in my friend group? literally just ignore them and they can't do harm anymore. with discord, the only thing i can do is block them, which only works for minor nuisances at best as there are loads of ways to get around it or situations in which blocking them does nothing due to the effect they have.
the moderation is very, very lax. i have met multiple child predators on discord, as well as repeat groomers and multiple people who sent me unsolicited richard pics. many of these people are still active, since discord is not a forum and therefore simply being on a new account makes you fully anonymous.
let's look at the statistics:
the vast majority of reports for child research, CSAM, are not investigated and are instead probably put through a library similar to
nsfwjs and automatically banned based on report context, and at the time of this audit and now there still exists an active and open child enthusiast community on discord. all it takes to find an underage dating server is a few seconds on disboard, and even one time i saw an actual child predator who served time for it and the murder of a trans prostitute and was well known among the /lgbt/ community, whom had invited a 15 year old girl to the server and was posting risque pictures of a thirteen year old girl. i reported the server immediately and checked again a few months later, not having received an email from discord. the server was still there, the evidence was still there, and the user had been banned but came back on an alt to do the exact same thing until me and my friends pressured the owner into getting rid of them.
all in all, discord is a terrible platform. it makes it even worse that the speculated profit margin for nitro doesn't nearly cover the cost of keeping up the service and paying back their investors, so it's more than likely that the CEO, who previously created 2 different platforms which collected and sold information, including OpenFeint, a social media service for games, which was sold for $104 million and was almost immediately revealed to be data collection software, and declined a $10 billion buy offer from microsoft, is selling it to his investors. that's just schizo talk though.
da alternativesgiltedguilded is in no way serviceable. not only does it have a lot of the same issues as discord, it has really extreme feature creep, is slow and clunky, and is owned by loving roblox corporation. even if this service was popular, i would not use it.
matricethe api and it's clients seem serviceable, but not to be considered a complete discord alternative due to some key differences in how the api works and discord features. also pretty hard to convince your friends to use it.
reboltrevolt is a pretty fair alternative powered by the fine, golden energy of FOSS rhetoric. it seeks to get rid of a lot of issues discord has, has developers that are Human, active and not driven by venture capital, seemingly active moderation, and a much better system to help it replace things like forums through it's discovery system and the fact that it's self-hostable. when your account is deleted on revolt, all of your messages are Gone, unlike discord which stores the information and simply changes your username.
it's still in early days, and i've made a server for it for the sake of seeing where it goes -
https://app.revolt.chat/invite/g0xxwYKy
