Isn't this the sort of moment that pushes users off of Discord into alternatives? Maybe pragmatic/opportunistic users should establish new channels or servers and advertise them when the shoe drops on Discord.
To be an alternative it had to be an alternative. Not "we had a great community with image uploads, voice chats, client parity across all platforms, miltiple servers set up in one click, songle login, game integrations etc., so now we move to this broken disjointed landscape of inconsistently implemented features"
Most users don't need every single one of those features. It reminds me of the conversations about lemmy and the fediverse after the reddit api uproar. The alternative link aggregators didn't need to do everything well, just the core things well enough to build a community that sustains engagement and becomes discoverable. But it failed at the major pieces: performance, scalability, media handling, moderation, governance, and federation. In contrast, I would argue xmpp covers a strong subset of commonly used discord features well enough to provide the chat/social component to many existing communities.
Most users only need 20 percent or so of your features, but among a large enough group of users they all want a different 20 percent so it kinda adds up. Or so the old saying goes.
I think this will be a pretty similar case because discord straddles "small personal servers with ten friends" and "large official servers with 500 users for a particular game" and "tech support forum for an open source project", and one user might be in all of those servers pretty easily.
Hasn't social media like HN, Reddit, fediverse, etc. become the real clearinghouse of information about those sorts of questions? I can see how it would be nice for xmpp.org to be an authoritative source of truth, but user response/consensus seems more relevant these days, at least to me.
Matrix has a for-profit, venture funded company (Element) that is effectively behind the reference/flagship server and client implementations.
xmpp is far less centralized. Virtually all of the modern clients are single developer projects that live off day jobs and grants.
There are different ways to look at it. Matrix has done a great job at organizing resources to push the platform forward. xmpp has an impressive ecosystem and some incredible client implementations on a shoe string budget, that would probably look/function better and have lots more features given funding parity.
I think as we've seen with other projects like Immich, organizing and recruiting resources is an important part of delivering the modern experiences that users expect today from open source projects. Open source and self-hostable can't be an excuse for missing features.
Trying to build a secure system on top of email is a waste of time and energy. Even if you succeeded, it would only be by compromising all the things that make email useful.
Scratched enough that it was not working any more? IME CDs work surprisingly well even with scratches, way way better than LPs though. You need to properly gouge the surface before things become problematic.
I remember friends of same age to also actually switch browsers by themselves, suddenly finding that their computer now used Firefox instead because it was simply faster. Same reason everyone switched to Chrome at a later point.
