You can nowadays create a signal account without a phone number, you'll get a user name instead

I hate how discord has replaced this forum culture in many places for this reason, but overall it's incredibly good for participating in communities in real-time, especially smaller ones. I agree with the forum part, but aside from that it has also replaced IRC, Skype/MSN/ICQ, TeamSpeak, etc. all in one place, while even expanding on their features. It's unbeaten for friend groups or smaller communities to create a space just for themselves that features text chat, voice chat, screen/video sharing etc.

Unfortunately though the open source alternatives, even the ones trying to be fully compatible with discord, have not yet reached this featureset and usability level. Also one big issue with communications tools like this is they rely heavily on adoption. Doesn't help me when I can convince my closest friends to switch to Matrix for example, when there's so many more people that I interact with on a daily basis through discord who I have no control over. Especially when the alternative just doesn't cut it for all these normies who don't understand the implications of big companies controlling such exclusive spaces.

It's even become mandatory by communities in some games, which is something I hate with passion. For instance, many MMORPG communities are on Discord these days (e.g. Guild Wars 2, more specifically the raiding scene).

So I subscribed to these communities and started using Discord. I still don't get the appeal, it's a cluttered mess all over the place and it doesn't feel intuitive to use. Maybe I'm getting old...

I think the main thing is that it's the lowest friction for just sending a message, making a "post" gives people pause, but sending a message people will do no problem, so small communities get more activity in Discord than anywhere else

Hey, listen I know it's bad and all but discord makes it really easy to create your own channel, customize it however you want and organize study/gaming with friends.

Since it's convenient and easy to setup and use, people use it for things they really shouldn't.

To bring back forums we need another equally easy to setup and host forums system that modernizes the bbs.

Might finally open the doors for viable alternatives. If Spacebar (former fosscord) garners tractions for example due to mismanagement by discord they might make the transition over from discord to an open source, decentralized alternative for the everyday discord user viable. Although I haven't tried Matrix in a while.. But convincing users to switch to a completely separate service is way more difficult.

That's tech companies for you.

Why else would they make all this for free?

Matrix is probably be the best bet atm, although I'm hoping for Spacebar to get more mature as they are aiming for feature parity and compatibility with discord. This way you can host your server with Spacebar, use their client and still be friends with discord users/be in discord servers that haven't switched yet. Only thing impossible with Spacebar is discord users joining your self hosted server, but once they reach feature maturity (esp in regards to voicechat and videochat) it'll make switching super seamless.

Nothing comes close to the feature set offered by Discord, Matrix' bad priorities unfortunately made sure of this. There currently is a project to fix their shit even if it means to break some bad decisions, Tuwunel, however it's neither ready nor is it clear where it will end up. The previous project it forked, Conduwuit, got bullied into giving up.

You'll probably be best off with a classic 2-way approach for now. Stick with Mumble for Voice and get something nice for Chat and Organizing like Mattermost or Revolt (or even IRC if you're a purist). With some luck Discord's strong enshittification will give projects like Tuwunel the necessary push it needs to force Matrix to finally care for more than just the needs of governments and their perfectionism that gets them nowhere for years now. That or we'll see some kind of soft-fork with even more bad blood.

Shareholders want quick profits & they don't care if the service shuts down in 10 years, or becomes largely unusable in 3-5.

Cause things that make most money for shareholders make the worst experience for the end user.

Public companies have to account for the shareholdres' expectation of, well, making money (and more money, and more money, and growing the numbers as much as possible). Shareholders have some degree influence on how the company works, depending on how many shares they own, e.g. they can vote for the CEO. This usually leads to the company to introducing more aggressive ways of making money off the users/customers, enshittification, etc., as it has to satisfy the shareholders and not so much the original customers.

Small note on Revolt: You can't chat with other people which are on other servers. Revolt does not federate and is not encrypted!

I've got 2 gaming Discords I want to bridge with Matrix (and maybe Revolt too?) can you suggest an instance? one is for Deus Ex Randomizer, and the other is for The 7th Guest fan club

Note that when you join a Space, you are not automatically joining all the rooms inside it.

this is going to be a bit painful for people who are used to Discord

you can search public rooms but not public Spaces? how do you find Spaces? they should've copied the good parts about Discord lol (EDIT: I found the way to search public Spaces, I guess it can't search across instances though which is a shame, it probably wouldn't require much disk space to index the name and description of every Matrix Space)

I don't even see rooms linking back to their Space?

tchncs.de has a lot of public spaces, I created my account using my Google but it just assumed my username :(

Three, before there was Discord there was TeamSpeak and they're still fighting

I can't tell for sure, but it doesn't look like Revolt has voice chat yet? Which was what attracted my friend group to Discord initially.

Never heard of Revolt before, nice.

As a community I'd use Revolt if my game/mod/whatever is built upon extensive bot functionality, and Matrix if not.

No it wasn't

Because he “has experience managing a public company” and in his portfolio only focuses on cherry-picked KPIs and no mention of any negatives at all.

I hate that our society encourages failing up and instead of punishment because of poor management skills and decisions, they do mass layoffs and give themselves fat bonuses because of “cost savings”.

Frankly, if a company fails, they will ruin other companies; it’s never their fault because of “complicated reasons”.