Several years ago I had a Discord community with hundreds of users. This was an IRL community, so it was very difficult to abandon but I did anyway. Tried to get people to leave but they were unwilling. So I handed it off to another member and deleted my account. Now that admin has contacted me again and let me know everyone is ready to leave. I found Fluxer yesterday while poking around #Discord on Mastodon and I think we’re going to end up there.
Fluxer is still very early in development and they have plans for many advanced features in the roadmap but it’s very feature-rich today. Current monetization plan is freemium + Patreon-like monetization. I understand that may be a dealbreaker for some but there aren’t a ton of other great options, and everything is open source, and self-hostable, and if you do, you get all of the premium features for free, while still communicating with the main instance over federation (in roadmap). That still leaves it susceptible to Mattermost-style enshittification but honestly rolling back updates solves most of those style of problems.
Why are they already selling a Discord Nitro equivalent for an unfinished Beta???
This feels like a bad sign to me
I’m actually cool with projects being sustainable from the start, rather than hyper scaling off private equity funding before gutting features and selling them back at a later date.
Revolt/Stoat not talking about paid options at all on their main page makes me more suspicious, if anything.
How… Do you think projects get seed money? Like do you think daddy bezo just appears from thin air to grant people endless wealth to work on major projects?
Well lots of ways but immediately adding a paid subscription should be a HUGE RED FLAG. Donations, one time payments, etc are fine. Paywalling features from the get go is bullshit tho. And the fact that discord got away with turning normal features into paid ones for years is insulting and laughable. Using custom emojis being locked behind nitro when fucking MSN messenger from 1999 had that is a sad example of how far we’ve fallen.
Any replacement candidate that’s just “discord from a few versions ago” can go fuck itself. Discord was a blight upon the Internet and it’s downfall should be celebrated, not “hey anyone have a clone of this piece of shit? I want something still shitty, just not this shitty”.
Someone said above that it’s all open source and if you self host your own server you can access all the premium features for free. That seems pretty reasonable.
That’s good to hear. I’ll have to give it a look as I sort through alternatives. In fairness, I am in favor of a nitro style subscription for HD voice and video and larger attachment file sizes when you’re not self hosting and relying on their servers. But all the paid profile customization and emoji use stuff needs to go. We need to no longer accept that anywhere.
I think a lot of digital things, including video games, became much worse with the loss of dedicated servers. It used to be expected that you would rent a server to host your ventrillo/teamspeak server. It used to be much more common to rent a server for your Counter Strike games, or play on someone else’s who did. You’d rent some server space and host your vBulletin forum or hang out on someone elses. We used to be much more self reliant on hosting our communities and now we outsource it to a company that offers it for free and turns us into the product.
You want to not be the product? Self host your services or pay for a server hosting service, one that treats you as a customer and not as some free resource to exploit.
And honestly… For fucks sake how did we get to this point where we expect everything online to be free because it’s “just digital”. No. Fuck no. Bandwith and server space and server time costs money. It cost electricity. It costs actual tangible resources that people love to bring up when you’re talking about how evil AI data centers are, but that’s the whole fucking internet! Data centers and cables and all that shit that makes it work. And so many of y’all sit here and act like it should all be free. It’s “free as in speech, not free as in beer”. That’s what we meant. And it got twisted into this abomination we have now…
Yeah I went off on a rant there. Nothing personal to you, person who responded to me. Just went off on a tangent lol. I appreciated you telling me it can be self hosted. That’s awesome 👍
They could’ve just made it donations, or made less of the features require premium.
Stoat and Matrix do fine with that model.
I mean, there’s literally a job title called “investor”, where the whole point is to go around looking for things that are in early stages of developing and going “HERE’S SOME MONEY, IF YOU GIVE ME A PERCENTAGE OF ALL FUTURE PROFITS”
Edit: no autocomplete, I don’t want to say “Wales stage”, wtf
Having checked a year ago and checking again now, their UX has barely improved and the GUI is still significantly worse than Discord. They need some sort of monetization strategy for funding and leadership that isn’t a shitshow so that they can make something that people will actually want to use.
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/19197183
Why are we acting like investors are a good thing now? The platonic ideal of “an investor”, someone who seeds money and hovers hands-off to watch the investment grow, has been dead so long you could be forgiven for thinking it never even existed.
Maybe they don’t want a single revenue source to present undue influence on development. If their revenue is entirely supported by their premium model and they make a decision bad for the community, money dries up. You think Discord would be doing dumb shit like it is, if they weren’t floating off investors and whatever Palantir is throwing at them?
Of all the things to complain about, the fact that people can pay to have an animated avatar or screenshare in 4K (a resolution that a super-minority of people even have a monitor capable of rendering at) is baffling.
y’know, yeah, I’ve been convinced by ye and others, fluxer also feels like it’s not a complete shambles too, which the money was probably a helper towards that
Because people don’t like to donate.
Ideally there will many other self-hosted and federated instances to join without any payments.
Not saying anyone should jump on it right now, just to have a look and keep an eye on it. I definitely wouldn’t invest anything into it until after it’s self-hostable, at the very least.