Why does it feel like this has happened every couple months for the last 2 years?
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And I still won’t do it. If they try to shove it down my throat then I’ll stop using it. I don’t need discord. No one does. That’s what they don’t get.
Goodbye discord
I knew about Discord since the very beginning. But it felt always fishy. Why would they provide a service for frees? Teamspeak servers cost money on a monthly basis?
Over the time more and more small communities i liked to interact with were only accessible via Discord. Which was alright because you didnt even need an account to do it. Jump in, do the thing and fuck off.
At some point it was just convenient to make an account with an email adress i dont even remember anymore. Just to keep up with all the niche interest groups. Then a lot of them started to require my phone number. lmao. I just left those "servers".
But ngl over the years i found some communities which will hurt to abandon. The network effect is real. But its maybe time to fuck off forever.
I mean they shipped an increbible product. When out alternatives were Zoom, with no commhnity functionality, teamspeak with no streaming or video, or something like slack maybe for coordi ation, they stuck it all together and made it work. It is without exaggeration the perfect vehicle for everything ICQ and other bespoke instant messaging widgets started almost 40 years ago.
So yeah but of course if you have something everyone wants the tendency is to monitize it until it's a husk of its original intention. So it goes. I'm waiting for the next alternative that people want to actually shift to but I'm not giving them my money. In the meantime my actual RL commhnities are all here and they're not Meta-tier evil yet so I fon't have a problem with staying for now.
The base tier is free. If you want the flashy features, you have to subscribe. Most people want those features.
More and more features have moved behind that paywall. Streaming 1080, for instance, used to be free.
What has been most concerning to me about Discord was the trial of a call timer on random servers. By now this may of expanded to all servers, not sure. My thinking is how long until they are charging us for minutes like the phone companies did? Or more likely, giving unlimited minutes only to nitro subscribers.
I'm done with it, I set up my own teamspeak server like the good ol' days.
Fluxer has been an adequate replacement for my ttrpg group, for anyone else looking for alternatives.
I've been using fluxer for a little while now, and it is pretty good! Though I'm looking forward to bug fixes for the screensharing and eventually federation being introduced
It is pure Ai slop that won't be around in 3 years. I am open to counter arguments.
I looked up their GitHub repo and I don't see the "agents.md" file, AI/LLM disclosures nor signs of LLMs in the commit history. Is there any source of information on Fluxer being slop?
When I read the repo a few months ago, I saw one guy added more than 1m of code. They are deceiving everyone and should be punished.
Isn't this because Fluxer source code was published after the app has been launched?
People suspected he'd uploaded Fluxer in one big chunk to hide LLM usage. He admitted to using some AI help initially but claimed that he would use it sparingly.
This new issue is that he seems to be using LLMs heavily, based on the fact that he uploaded a million lines of code last month alone.
https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer/graphs/contributors?from=8%2F22%2F2026
I checked again today and it is 11m lines of code added. Do people not understand what it takes to code 1 million lines? PostgreSQL is around 1m. PHP the language and runtime are 1m. The man hours required for that much code is ridiculous.
It's free and open source, and I don't think perfect should stand in the way of good. If my group needs to migrate in 3 years, so be it; it's working now and isn't a Microsoft product.
So what you are saying is your initial version violated our privacy? Tell us more discord, how EXACTLY did it infringe on our privacy? What made you say that? We want to hear it from you.
My account is over 11 years old and still cannot see nsfw. Need to be 13 to start using discord so it should automatically age verify me to 24+. But they just want an excuse to track people 100%
I hate discord but I can’t convince the people I talk to to go elsewhere. And discord just this evening said my account of nine years is too young to see nsfw channels. Par for the course
Discord helps creating the problem, and gleefully announces a "least bad" option after laws are in place. Hmm.
This sucks but isn't surprising.
It's frustrating though, because getting friends to use anything else, let alone bigger communities that i follow, is nigh impossible.
Fluxer. We switch to Fluxer.
I can't believe any of you people have accounts left. Didn't you delete it after the last round of bullshit? Frankly if you stuck around you deserve bad things happening to you.
The last round of bullshit was "oopsie" rolled back and the movement lost momentum
Some nice communities literally only exist on discord. Goes for a lot of modern software
Direct laid back communication between communities and devs is right there
Some Information isn't even on websites anymore or it's plain outdated and not maintained, just a link to discord
We're fucked. That's thingie number 3373838 self respecting people should have left ages ago. Meanwhile most people religiously use instagram and whatsapp every waking hour of their day
I wish we could use something other then discord, like societally
At some point maybe Fluxer will be ready.
I'm hoping xep-0503 gets implemented in a couple xmpp clients at some point soon. That'll make xmpp have feature parity with discord, except for ease of use, which is a barrier I'm willing to help friends/family work through in order to never have to switch chat clients ever again, since xmpp has been around for nearly thirty years now.
My group's been using it since March.
Can you tell me more about your experience with it?
Sure, any specific questions? We use it for text chat and group video calls.
I guess like
How easy it is for non technical people to join and use?
What pain points or annoyances have you noticed?
Has it been reliable/what problems have come up using it?
It's no more difficult than Discord, as it is pretty unashamedly a Discord clone. Its UI and UX is very similar. I find it more user friendly for a complete newbie than a Matrix community.
We use video calling 2-3 times a week for TTRPGs and sometimes other group hands. It's gotten a lot more stable and better over the 6ish months we've been using it. There are still some weird tech issues on occasion, normally fixed by dropping out of the call and coming back in. I'd say this happens enough that it is noteworthy but not enough that it has made me rethink using the service. I think we had to cancel a session once, very early on, due to the service just being completely down, but not since then. Their mobile support was extremely lacking at first but past month or so they have come a long way and now mobile works great, even though it's still in beta.
My group and I floated around different services for a while, self-hosting what we could. The requirements for us were really just a server with text channels and persistent messages, voice chat, and screen sharing.
We tried:
- Stoat (Revolt at the time) but we moved on before voice and video were rolled out.
- Matrix but voice and video weren't really feasible.
- Steam chat but messages are deleted after 2 weeks and screen share didn't really work.
- Teamspeak 6 was amazing for voice and video but chat was really only useful while online as messages aren't really stored anywhere to load what was sent while you were offline, so we kept Steam chat for general conversations.
We finally landed on GameVox recently which has good voice and video, easy discord server import for channels and permissions, good chat features, and an extremely responsive dev who fixes issues almost immediately. I find that it isn't as pretty as other alternatives out there and unfortunately it isn't open-source, but the additional features compared to the other options will probably make it our new home for quite a while.
then normies wouldn't be able to pretend to talk to C-suits in their “servers.” The yard sold are yard sold.
This isn't targeted at you, zen_shinobi, specifically, but you are the latest example of one of my pet peeves, so I'm replying here.
Mumble doesn't have text channels.
Everytime time I see a discord alternative proposed it always has at least one major feature missing. Discord isn't just popular because it has almost always works out of the box, but because it has every single feature a communication platform could want. This makes it incredibly easy to use in practically every context.
Iphones revolutionized the phone space because they combined PDAs and cell phones in a very easy to use package, not because they did something completely new.
Discord combined video, audio, AND text into an incredibly easy to use package, and became the biggest chat platform in the world because of it.
Nothing is an entirely valid discord alternative until it has feature parity, including ease of use and compatibility, and I haven't found a single alternative that does that yet. (And isn't vibecoded slop, venture funded, incredibly early alpha, difficult or impossible to set up or even connect to, or some combination of the previous).
Gamevox is a new option I'm seeing, but it's also for profit, and I'm sick and tired of switching software just to see it get sold to a vc company and enshittified right underneath me.
I am not surprised Fediverse denizens tend to want to recommend IRC and Mumble and xmpp and whatever, but the truth is as you describe it. There is no one size fits all replacement yet that is viable.
Yeah. It sucks, but discord replaced all the old clients for damn good reasons. I just wish that the open source clients had the features that discord does.
Fluxer almost has feature parity, but yeah it's also still in beta and doesn't have mobile apps yet. That said, the desktop & web app work and are reliable. When it gets ready, I think it's the Discord alternative.
You're fine.
I know Mumble does have text but it's not archived like Discord. I can't remember off the top of my head if Channels have seperate chat from the main server. Pretty much Mumble is just like Venttrillo or Teamspeak is.
I will say, Mumble is very light on old hardware and uses a fraction of data on mobile compared to Discord. It's also open source. It's also nice to be able to self host (even through Tor if encryption is your thing).
Yes, Discord is great because of voice, image, text, streamimg, and audio. It sucks it's closed source.
I think the closes clone I have seen is Revolt (i believe it's called that) but it's really janky. It just sucks for us that it's Discord or nothing :/
I wonder what they could be doing to determine "server types" that isn't privacy invasive like reading messages
Edit: it seems discord has published a document that somewhat explains how this works. It's not as detailed as I'd like, but I think it's as detailed as one could expect without them spilling some trade secrets or implying how to bypass it.
https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-estimates-age-without-collecting-your-identity
- You can check your age group status at User Settings > Account Status. We've estimated your age group automatically from account signals like how long your account has existed or the kinds of servers you're a part of. We don’t look at your messages, calls, or other content. We're launching this over the course of this week, so it may take a few days to reach your account.
Yeah I noticed this, but the "kinds of servers you're a part of" line is what caught my eye.
I wonder how they categorize servers and what they use to determine this.
Ah, apologies. I absolutely misunderstood your comment. I definitely need to wake up more before I comment but at least the info is now here for people to see at a glance.
I don't see myself in a "fortnite" server, as I don't see kids on a "home_owners" server for example.
The "we estimated your age from account signals" bit is the polite version. Australia made the big platforms do this in December, and the regulator's first report found some of them letting under-16s retry the age check until they passed. So the kids get infinite continues and the adults get checked too.
France tried to ban social media for under-15s this summer and its Constitutional Council struck it down for exactly that reason: to check the kids you have to check everyone, and the law had no privacy guarantees for the adults. Discord just skipped the court part.

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