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 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, if they make a decision bad for the community, money dries up. You think Discord would be doing dumb shit like this, if they weren’t floatinf 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 that can render, is baffling.