What is happening to Discord is what has happened and will continue to happen to all ‘free’ variants of this kind of application and it’s because these companies will chase profit over customer friendly features any day of the week. There simply is too much money to be had by abusing the depedency they have created due to the fact that it required zero cost to start your own discord channel.

Folk migrated to Facebook, Reddit and related social media, because running your own servers was (a) expensive and (b) required technical knowledge (especially if you want to stop the inevitable spammers and other threats).

I think we should revert back to IRC. The protocol has plenty of open source clients and servers, which makes it next to impossible to monetize and abuse compared to propiety protocols like Discords’.

The various ‘federated’ open source alternatives might work, but at best it will scatter the communities that used to be as few will manage to hold on to all of their users.

Remember : if it is free then you most definitely are the product.
I’m kind of surprised Discord managed to last this long before the actual en-sh!tification happened.

It will be interesting to see what happens with practically all discord channels within our hobby that were not funded by companies.

@sundancer I thought only the mutunus-tutunus and ‘thras-talk’ channels are ‘adult content’ sections in OTT discord, but then Discord might want to err on the side of caution/greed (I bet they want to do more with the id-documents they’re getting their hands on as a result of this new ‘feature’).

So far the one thing delaying things has been the absolutely massive negative feedback.
There’s only two things to keep in mind:
– the amount of folk that will follow through on their plans will be small (internet communities are really bad at this boycott thing, and even fewer will go scorched earth)
– it will at best be a delay; They will attempt this again, except they will try to be less obvious

I’d recommend curating your own list of discord servers and see which one you ‘need’ and which ones you haven’t used at all.