I didn't think Discord could get any worse!
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
130 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
78543 readers
3161 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
let the enshittification continue
"I wish all my friends would leave discord and go to an alternative chat platform"
The monkey paw curls and all your friends move to MS Teams.
ICQ
Slack! 😱
I could live with all my friends using slack
what practical alternatives are out there? every gaming and streaming community seems to use discord, but i hate it on the basis of it being an enshittified, proprietary walled garden.
https://stoat.chat/ is fully just discord but FOSS
Edit:their GitHub page
This will not take off until their native apps release and support self hosted rooms.
Is this the 3rd name change? or the 2nd?
The first. They've only changed name once.
Cause Revolut BANK sued their ass
Revolt != Revolut
Silly lawyers
Ahh interesting, thanks for the learning
None. Closest is Matrix, and it sucks for that purpose because it's more like Slack.
This news comes immediately after they floated the idea of embedding AI, you say?
Pretty much immediately after yeah
How that MIGHT change things?
Just look at every other tech company in the space that’s gone public to see how it WILL change things. It’s not a mystery at this point.
The real question is how do you enshittify a product that is already shit?
Since when is Discord shit? Oh no, an easy to use application with incredible sound quality! Ahhhh
Anything annoying I can think of is stuff that makes a lot of sense considering said application is, for most people, 100% free.
The gamification, closed protocol and grey patterns make sense? It really doesn’t have to be that way.
That said, up to this point, Discord at least appears to have made a good faith attempt at providing a useful service while also making a profit. I suspect we’re about to see the dial crank over into “turn a profit for the next quarterly report” territory.
You don’t need to engage with the gamification thing. Closed protocol sure I guess, and also I’m sorry I don’t know what “grey partterns” are and am gunna assume that you’re not referring to the colour palette.
But it’s a solid product that largely just works. I’m still worried, obviously, that certain voluntary things will become less voluntary and things will get much more frustrating as they search to go public.
Discord is technologically lightyears ahead of their competition. Its by far the smoothest large scale chat application out there. The only "dark pattern" is them pushing Nitro and you know what users should buy nitro not free to run a service at that scale.
discord is one of those things i struggle to find an alternative to. not because i lack the skill to do it myself or to make something else do the same tasks, but because all my friends who aren't as techy as me or big servers i like talking to wouldnt migrate.
having seen its decline since 2016, sooner or later ill have to make the jump but its gonna be harder than ditching google or microsoft because of the community aspect of it.
A great problem of our society is there being too many problems to have any group of people focus on enough to get any of them solved.
If every issue has just 2% of people caring about it, companies can easily just write those 2% off and do business as usual.
This is why to not have an enshitifed world it has to be top down, and people have to participate in politics logically as opposed to based on which groups of people they hate.
The basic maths of it just doesn't work for any sort of bottom up action.
It would have to be a relative time of quiet and one company sticking out like a sore thumb for long enough for them to be damaged.
You have seen how rapidly things are getting worse.
There is not going to be that happening, and even if there were, it wouldn't be enough as there are thousands more issues.
And so many things using it instead of a forum for information or questions
It’s especially bizzare when git repos for “open source corporate alternative” type software uses it over their own repo’s issue trackers and forums.
WTF
They want the social media engagement, I guess. But still. It’s ridiculous how much of a blind spot folks have for it.
It also makes giving or getting any kind of support a hellish time sink, but that’s almost besides the point…
It is an insane choice for a support tool.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Let the final enshitification commence
╰( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )つ──☆*:・ﾟ
Is discord not enshitty?
I open it and it updates 6 times, then I get a full page ad for nitro. Then all the settings push nitro. And all the “servers” push nitro.
load more comments
(21 replies)
Well this gives me time to start my own Mumble server now
I ran one off a raspberry pi for years before we switched to discord. It just worked for voice chat.
It will inevitably focus more on pleasing its public investors than anything else, therefore enshittification.
Maybe Steam/Valve is a unicorn, but it's not publicly traded and it's doing just fine.
It is a unicorn. I dread the day Gaben dies and Valve ends up going public. It feels like the last bastion of decent online services.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I'm guessing this will lead to more things being locked behind their subscription model. Ransoming core features for cash is the standard template of this process.
view more: next ›