I'm not super up to date on Fluxer and how it works but I do know that they're still working on getting full self hosting available. Without any other context, my assumption is that's a requirement for their hosted instance for whatever reasons they have.

Besides, if it's just asking for date of birth, is it really that much of an invasion of privacy? I mean the internet has been like that since the 90s and it's been fine. You just lie if you want and the liability theoretically then moves to you instead of them.

They have a support page for this

The closest modern communications standard would be Matrix (which is why I can take what I have in Commet (client) and move it to Sable or FluffyChat (other clients) for instance, because they follow the same standard).

Centralized platforms do not deal with open standards because it literally goes against their premise - User retention via vendor lock-in. You can scrape to an extent, it won't ever be perfect, and if everyone did it, it would get patched in some way to be limited.

This was always the Discord trap though - Discord is a treasure-trove of knowledge that's now behind a walled garden thanks to "community leaders" who thought they understood the importance of community longevity. Many are scraping whatever they can moving from one walled-garden just to move to another - Make it make sense.

I use it but honestly it's very overrated.

On one hand it's useful for clans/communities (especially if you have community game servers) but at a certain point all meaningful discussion goes right out the window when there are too many people in one place. It works best with a small group of friends as a kind of meeting place.

It's nice cause in a big chat server with a bunch of channels and voice channels. It's always on and persistent

It's AIM and Yahoo messenger in a group message format with work spaces and gif support. You can organize stuff in there as well and use it like a pseudo Teams. Its good for keeping in contact with a friend group.

It got popular because someone in your game could just send a link and you could temporarily voice chat without ever needing to make an account.

One of my professional organizations uses it over slack. My RP groups use it to organize, save stuff, and plan sessions. It's impossible to get away from now, so now is the time for it to enshittify.

Since everything has moved off forums into discord, so much information can no longer be found through search results. This hurts for niche hobby stuff that would usually be in open forums, but are now hidden behind discord's non-indexed wall.

If it enshittifies and servers shut down, then all that information is lost. There's no easy way to export all that information.

Rooms, Chats, and most importantly voice chat with very good noise suppresion AND push to talk. It always works, and is overall polished. Minimum volume level for sending voice, Noise suppression, and support for push to talk, is all very important if you game with others. Some prefer PTT, i don't. I like the minimum volume ans noise suppression. Works great. If Element or another Matrix app had these features me and my friends would instantly switch

Something that I don’t think has been mentioned is that even the free tier has screen sharing with audio at 720p30 or better resolution at like 1 fps for text legibility.

This makes Discord great for things like watching a friend play a game that you may enjoy watching them play but not enjoy yourself. Better coordination in team games when your friends are bad at game comms. Troubleshooting PC issues, collaboration on projects etc

Still being worked on

Because Discord gave up on age verification when they saw the backlash.

But it's only a matter of time before they try again, or before the enshittification becomes unbearable. And in any case, it's always good to have a more diverse ecosystem with active alternatives to any one product.

What happened with the Stoat devs?

Is this a review for v2?

Looks like they offer a self-hostable version, which is probably the point.