this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.

Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?

Right now I'm on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can't find a clear "winner".

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[–] renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net 72 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, which is good, but the lack of federation is a deal-breaker. It means that you either:

  1. Use their servers - This requires entrusting them with your communities, just like Discord.
  2. Host your own private instance - You can control it, but the lack of federation means it'll be isolated from communicating with other communities. This makes it really difficult to convince people to use your self-hosted servers.

Until Revolt adds a way for different instances to federate, Matrix is really the only other option.

[–] aleq@lemmy.world 23 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

My experience with Matrix is that the federation itself is a deal breaker. I have a pretty beefy server and good connection which was getting ddosed by running Matrix and timing out on so many requests for avatars/profiles etc. Maybe I did something wrong, but the whole experience rendered me quite skeptical to the viability of it as a federated chat.

That said I've had nothing but good experiences using it with big servers set up by pros.

[–] renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net 9 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I get why Federation can cause issues (most of the time it's moderation related), but why would an extra option be a deal-breaker? Federation can always be disabled on a per-domain basis if you prefer. In fact, I'd argue it's best practice to only allow domains on a case-by-case basis to prevent spam and abuse.

On the converse, you can't enable Federation on a platform that doesn't have it.

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

They were talking about matrix itself, not a specific option. And I’m not going to lie, having to hand hold your servers federation choices seems like a hassle. At that point why not just use a self hosted, non federated option?

[–] white_nrdy@programming.dev 3 points 12 hours ago

I think the point they're making is you can effectively have a self hosted non federated option with Matrix. Just disable federation as a whole (which I'm pretty sure is completely possible. Given companies use matrix for comms, and might not want federation, for similar reasons to what is being discussed here)

[–] hobovision@lemm.ee 3 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Why would an optional feature be a deal breaker?

It also seems like an issue that could be easily solved by whitelisting.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Yes, which is good, but the lack of federation is a deal-breaker.

The federation itself is a deal breaker

Why would an optional feature be a deal breaker?

Because the person they're responding to said the lack of the optional feature was a deal breaker for them on a different piece of software.

[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 2 points 12 hours ago

but also with request ratelimiting