its like if you gathered all the knuckledraggers around the world onto a shitty IRC network and just let them run loose

no thanks

Hearing about whatever person got groomed on Discord to do some crime is always wild to me because I just use Discord to like, sit on vc while my friends and I watch anime. I must imagine the other stuff is what you get into if you start hanging out on those servers with like three vent channels.

I really wish alternatives were more mature and more would use them. The best that comes to mind is matrix, which has plenty issues of it’s own (granted it’s much better than discord), and more importantly isn’t as seamless. There are multiple clients, the best ones having features that others are missing (no custom stickers/emojis in Element, no/broken calling capabilities in FluffyChat and Cinny). This isn’t even mentioning issues with outages, matrix.org (by far the largest server) just had a massive outage that broke matrix for many users. Discord is more stable and convenient, and while custom stickers are free on Cinny and matrix supports end to end encryption (E2EE) and is much safer, most clients don’t have E2EE calling seamlessly (and even then it doesn’t support audio screen sharing), there may always be federation issues between matrix.org and other servers (federation is nice but comes with its own other set of issues), and just recently there was also an issue with room security that requires all rooms to be updated. Granted in the trans matrix space this was done pretty seamlessly (thanks to the admins ), but this also has to be done in every room and I guarantee you there will be many rooms that continue operating despite the security vulnerability.

There are other alternatives as well, but I mention matrix because it feels like one of the safer ones, as well as one that is the most feature-comparable to discord. It’s getting there and I hope it does well, but at the same time I worry it’ll keep stumbling. I don’t like discord, but I’ve recently decided to mostly swap matrix out to have that stability and convenience with a girl I love. Discord actually allowed us to do more, while preventing certain quirks matrix has. I may go back to matrix for text*, but discord calls are simply better, and having that backup in the event of downtime made it an easy choice despite my overwhelming anxiety.

This isn’t to sway anybody from using matrix either, it’s nice, and I enjoy using it. If I could easily get more people on it (or on stuff like Signal), I would.

*I also started using discord again with the expectation that everything is logged. If I had anything really sensitive, it would not go through discord.

Got off of discord 3 years ago thanks to it being an obnoxious black hole if you have adhd

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/ https://www.privacyguides.org/en/social-networks/