Technology

The practice of making a "free" thing so you can whore your MAU numbers out to private equity to keep the lights on should be wholesale abolished.

I keep researching alternatives, and every time I circle back around toward Matrix, despite criticisms. Part of it is a question of what everyone is using. I pretty consistently see that groups who use or used to use irc are now using Matrix additionally or as a replacement.

Part of me would like xmpp to be the best answer, but I've yet to see an implementation that handles public communities well, particularly for anything that functions at all like Discord. Matrix seems to be at least gaining voice/video chat support?

I'm already making backups and deleting all the posts and DMs I made on discord. Yes I know they probably have everything backed up, but there is always a possibility that they lose that shit or don't fully back up everything. I am not interesting in playing along with their bullshit.

I mean I've wanted to change anyway since the enshittification started. I think the first thing was a paid avatar/profile decoration store. Annoying enough, but if they're decent cosmetics and not crazy prices I can understand. I still wish there was an internal, native seeing that would just remove all the visual teasing of paid options, but I can ignore it. (Mainly I hate trying to add an emoji to chat and just seeing pages of emoji from servers that I can't use on the one I'm on- which is already super annoying, but they put the regular result ones behind all those so you have to either scroll past them or manually switch to the default emoji page- that's just pure rage bait- default should be first, followed by the ones from that server that you can actually use)

But my main problem was when Nitro showed up.

Unfortunately, of the up and comers none are quite ready yet, and none have the full suite of functionality.

This change actually doesn't affect me at all, I don't really engage with any communities. I have one that I use just to mess with admin options and see what kinda choices there are and how it works, one server with a few friends (like 5 regulars counting myself) and one for some of my siblings that we only really use to play Jackbox remotely.

But I still resent the change and have wanted a good alternative ever since subscriptions started.

So anyone who knows some good altenatives that are either FOSS or EU based?

What features did they exactly disable for unverified accounts?

I wasn't a huge discord use but I just removed all the channels before deleting the app on every device.

Not going to make a huge difference but if everyone does it, maybe it will!

I hate all age verification checks, I even hate Steam's when they present me that dumb number drop list before I see a game's store page based on its content. If you know my age, you don't need to ever fucking ask me. If I've told you, with a straight face and no malicious intent that "I'm over 30" "I'm over 30" "I'm over 30" then STOP ASKING ME FOR MY AGE!!

Now something I don't see some people talk about is that, there are people out there who have lied about their age. It's nothing new. You've done it. I've done it. We've collectively been building a platform for this to eventually be coming and we're paying some of that price.

With Discord going Public in March and this rolling out in March, it goes hand and hand.

https://s3nd.chat/

Made by the same team that did s3nd.pics (the imgur alternative. Under heavy Dev at the moment but has promise.