Btw they have Github Discussions now

Discord is a good service to engage with communities but what I hate most is when services, platforms and whatnot use Discord as their primary means of official communication like for announcements.

Having to be in a lot of servers purely to get announcements results in an already limited total sever count that one can join to be even more limited.

Discord isn’t a forum and shouldn’t be used as one, but it’s a fantastic community chat room/hangout space. It’s my main hangout these days :-)

I personally don’t mind Discord. I do in fact like it. (If you want to convince me otherwise, please don’t)

But I really hate that OSS uses discord for their lack of documentation. I understand that documentation is hard and boring to create, but I don’t want to go on some discord to ask a bunch of questions that thousands of others have before. Instead I will try and find something using search engines and I will read the open and closed issues. If I don’t find anything, I give up on the software.

I recently soured on Discord myself and here is my story. I have been part of the same private chatroom since 1999. We started on IRC as a Pokemon community and some of us just never left. We moved the chat off IRC to Discord in 2015? At first it was great, discord is miles ahead of IRC in terms of accessibility, now we were sharing photos and videos in chat and now we had it on our phones. We had seen myspace, facebook and countless other social networks go from good to terrible in our lifetimes and I guess we’ve always known the writing was on the wall for Discord. The end of last year we saw a few different things happen that really creeped me the fuck out.

1. USA government has access to unencrypted push notifications on Android and iOS. Discord does not offer any encryption. Wired Article
2. Discord is moderating private chats PC Gamer,
3. Discord moderating policy is becoming more ideological and political. TechCrunch
4. Tencent Ownership
5. General fear that our 25 year long running chat will be sold as AI training data or other BS against our will.

So we moved to a Matrix instance. It was a struggle, some people just flat out refused and to this day (months later) will probably never come. The tech is I’d say, 90% on par with discord. Element (the main Matrix client) sucks at voice chat. It is embarrassingly bad, WHY ISNT THERE PUSH TO TALK? HELLO? Youtube videos won’t play in chat, which sucks too. Otherwise we gained encryption and a sense of independence I feel. Looking forward it is possible we will buy rack space for our own instance to further get off the grid. Definitely pros and cons overall but thats my experience. Anybody looking to try out Matrix hit me up you’re welcome on my server.

Edit: I completely forgot about the mobile app redesign what a shit show that was! The devs attitude during that is what lead me find Matrix in the first place.