Asking because I value opinions here.
Personally I don’t think anyone can influence what the general audience of chat users ultimately coalesces around. That’s going to happen, and it’s going to be out of anyone’s control as people discuss and compare and decide which they prefer of the dozens of alternatives appearing.
This however looks interesting to me. I know it’s not Matrix and thus not secure like everyone here wants. But it is fully open source and it is AGPLv3.
It feels like it’s getting some traction and interest. If it has problems that anyone here can spot (besides the full encryption which isn’t something the rest of the discord users looking to leave are going to demand), I am interested in hearing them.
realistically, they’re mostly going to grumble about ID verification but ultimately stay on Discord, for the same reasons people are still using the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
I will say, every encryption issue I’ve encountered has been fixable either by giving it a moment to think or by restarting my chat client, which isn’t too different from when Discord has periodic blips.
I don’t think so. Groups that want to chat go where community leadership determines they go. If people want to participate in the x twitch streamer’s off-stream chat they are forced to go where that community decides to be. They do not have to follow an audience by going to discord, they make the audience go where they prefer. They don’t get the audience from discord, discord gets the audience from them.
For this reason chat programs are uniquely vulnerable to people going elsewhere. They have no inherent audience of their own, they are not social networks, they are tools and they can be replaced by another tool at literally any moment. People will run discord and an alternative side by side until they can drop discord altogether. That’s exactly how other chat tools died historically as well.