[smoldesu]

This is unfortunate, and while I do like Discord (enough to pay them $50/year), I hope transgressions like this drive more people to set up self-hosted places to hang out. Discord is responsible for driving a lot of innovation in the communication sector, and they'll always have a place for doing that: but it's going to be difficult for such a large company to keep the interests of their shareholders out of the business of their users.

[ve55]

The percentage of normal users that know how to (and are willing to) setup self-hosted instances of something is definitely far below 1%, as unfortunate as it may be. Discord is definitely here to stay (and IMO will continue to do extremely well this decade - network effects are an amazingly strong force) as far as I can tell. Although I do think it's good news that they have a decent profit model, the future of the platform still may not be as bright as most of its users (who do not understand the business nor the data collected on them) may hope for.

[panic]

If there are 100 people in a server, only 1 of them needs to be able to set up a self-hosted instance to get the whole thing going. People do it all the time for Minecraft, for example. I think the problem is less the barrier to entry and more the fact that Discord is actually better than any self-hosted option available right now.

[stiltzkin]

Is there any good self-hosted alternative to Discord?, the only good that comes to mind are rocket.chat and Matrix.

[smoldesu]

Fosscord is trying to do that:

https://fosscord.com/