[junon]

Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management...

and is open source.

And yes, we've tried Matrix. IRC doesn't speak to people anymore either. Slack is worse.

[dijit]

Wanting everything for free is certainly a problem though.

I’m not sure how anything can compete with free and convenient, even things that work really well that take time to set up are hugely inferior because hosting is a cost if nothing else.

If something is free you have a responsibility to be even more diligent to understand what happens when it goes away, is no longer free, or how they plan to extract value from you. Discord is not a charity or government subsidized project.

[anthk]

There are public servers for Jabber working just fine.

[dijit]

and I run an IRC network from my own pocket.

But when I die there needs to be some altruistic nerd who has the capability and desire to take it over.

[anthk]

XMPP does far more than IRC. And, as I said, there are public servers with nice clients everywhere, such as Monocles Chat for Android, Dino for GNU/Linux/BSD, or PSI+ for Windows. With video chat and everything.

[dijit]

my point is about offering services free at point of sale for communities. Not necessarily about what technology I use to do that.

If I stop running the community it will die unless a benefactor steps in as I pay it from my pocket. thats the point.

We are coded to expect services for free but it rests on the altruism of individuals or as an investment for companies.

If its an investment: at some point those companies will want something back and likely more and more over time.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

This is a given. Is your only point that we should be more skeptical of free stuff or is there something deeper here?

[KronisLV]

> Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management... and is open source.

Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/

Rocket.Chat: https://www.rocket.chat/

Nextcloud Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Self hosting and some assembly required. I've run all of them on cheap VPSes to explore a Slack/Discord replacement, neither was mindblowing but all of them seemed okay (Nextcloud's offering was rather barebones, though).

Audio and video support varies because getting those right is challenging, at best you'd just integrate with something like Jitsi, that one's actually pretty good for meetings and such: https://jitsi.org/ and has a cloud version too: https://meet.jit.si/ (yet people still go for Zoom and it's odd UI/UX choices)

When it comes to exchanging information (especially if you want things to be searchable later), I actually rather liked forums back in the day, but I guess nobody will be setting up that many phpBB instances in the current year, though projects like Discourse also seem promising: https://www.discourse.org/

I don't think many people at all will be leaving Discord, due to how entrenched the platform is (network effect): if you want people to be a part of your community, you go where they are, not vice versa. Plus, it doesn't seem that many out there are building gamer-centric platforms since the idea of making an enterprise version in parallel to the free one and earning money off of that is... unlikely?

[exceptione]

simplex.chat? I heard it improved a lot.

When do you need voice and video with a big community btw? I can see if you have a group of like 8 core devs having their own communication channel, but that is something else then hosting the whole community.

Also, your boring, regular forum is searchable. Discord is a black hole, so if the value of information is more than just personal, Discord-like things should be a no-no, even if one doesn't value privacy issues.

[williamvds]

I don't claim to offer a perfect solution, but the first step is admitting the problem. I'll be seeking out alternatives myself.

> with good ownership management

This part is questionable. As the advertising news highlights, a private company operates primarily in the interest of its owners. For a venture-captial backed company, you expect to see the cycle of benevolence in order to grab market share, a model that induces lock-in (social lock-in, in this case), followed by exploitation (advertising and the other predatory FOMO stuff they have with the subscriptions).

The writing was on the wall from the get go, but people fell for it anyway. And now I'm hit by it too because I have to use it to hang with my friends.

It's all so tiresome

[junon]

I don't mean ownership of the server. I mean managing it, administrating it, creating granular roles, managing bans, etc.

[anthk]

Jabber?