Technology

Fundamentally the problem with leaving discord is no other platform has fucking remotely any kind of quality of life close to discord. Matrix is a flaming pile of shit that basically is an insult the very concept of user friendlyness. It also is missing about 70% of the features your avg gamer/internet deweller actually wants.

Teamspeak 6 is a barely functional trash heap that still doesn't have a bunch of quality of life your avg normie expects. There's been open feature requests for years that are unlikely to ever manifest.

Stoat is a half finished poorly managed train wreck that would be good if the devs actually had anything resembling a decent pace of development. Feels like Wayland moves faster then them for basic functions they should have had two years ago.

Discord is basically 5 apps in one and you can't convert people to go from 1 universal app back to like 5. It just won't happen.

You need actual cross platform support for voice chat on desktop ios and android, text chat, screen and window sharing, gifs, emojis, dms, group chats and THEY HAVE TO BE SIMPLE AND UNDERSTANDABLE to computer illiterate normies.

And that's just the basics. People expect customization and personalization. You need to be able to jump around, colab, hop in and out of calls and basically have digital mobility. Which while it sucks from the outside. Inside discords walled gardens it's a VERY open space.

Matrix gets close but it's just so user unfriendly and 90% of clients have one or the other half of the feature set people expect.

It's just a mess.

Anyone with sense saw this coming when they did the same thing in Australia and the UK but I otherwise agree with your point. I think this is a very calculated move.

When the deadline gets here in a month, 80% of the group that would’ve migrated out of disgust won’t be affected because they just use Discord for group voice chats anyway, and the competition isn’t ready. The rest have been trained to put their personal info out there to anyone who asks for it. And, when (not if) they eventually roll out “IDs for Everyone”, the outrage won’t be nearly as detrimental to their bottom line because it’s already happened before.

I'm with you.

Considering that age verification will only be mandatory to browse NSFW content, and that without it you can still join servers and keep calling during gameplay as per usual, my bet is that exodus won't happen. There is going to be part of people who will verify, and the unverified half either gonna leave or keep using discord just without NSFW.

Reddit exodus, unfortunately, barely had any impact. Bluesky had a good influx of new users, but it didnt kill xitter. Doubt that there anything going to happen with discord.

Enshittification is not single step. It's more a "boiling a frog"-kinda process.

It probably also says something of the ones that stay: they can keep getting further exploited. And these are the ones they want.

Because it's not actually about the kids, the kids are just the excuse. That's all they ever are.

Yeah, I agree. I hope Discord both fails as a company and as a concept.

Information siloed inside a non-easily searchable interface? No thank you.

The problem is finding a good alternative immediately. I don't mind to hop and check out multiple services, but some of my friends wants to just install one thing and be done.

My checklist is not too much either, but for some reason video calling is not something included with the lot of them.