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Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

As much as they have made a really good app, it's chat. The moment discord starts becoming expensive , people will switch to mattermost or zulip or ircV3 by that time (ps or matrix). The privacy issues are real and the moat to exit is shallow. We already switched our community to mattermost because , discord doesnt seem sustainable for long term, and we also have control that can't be taken away. It would be really nice if these teams focused on creating an interoperable standard for chat instead of trying to lock in users. Basic protocols like chat should be decentralized, and will probably end up being so.

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Privacy issues don't outweigh convenience and familiarity, and are provably not a barrier to massive scale and longevity (see every large social network with 1B+ users). I don't think you appreciate how convenient the single-account, cross server approach is. Discord has made its way across a ton of communities and likely will continue to do so. It held up to scale and scrutiny especially in early covid times.

The problem with basic protocols is they are inherently very slow to develop and iterate, so problems stick around for a long time. UX can vary widely across different clients for the protocol. SMS has had huge longevity and will stick around for a good while longer, but I don't think anyone is arguing that SMS is actually better than the internet based closed systems that exist today.

The thing with discord is, its communities are offspring of other communities. The parent communities are either some subreddit , or some gaming group somewhere, or some forum , or some crypto community etc. The communities centers are elsewhere, not on discord. Most of them can move between chat apps like nomads.

In my experience, there is a huge difference between people active on discord community vs the reddit community in most cases.

But theres still a reddit community. Is there a case where the community went discord only? And are they willing to pay when discord stops being free?

I mean, If there isn't a huge overlap in users of both reddit and discord, then it's an entirely different community on the same topic.

But to answer your question, plenty and not sure if they are willing to pay. Many open source projects now a days start on discord and then eventually add a subreddit. For example, deno.

> It would be really nice if these teams focused on creating an interoperable standard for chat instead of trying to lock in users. Basic protocols like chat should be decentralized, and will probably end up being so.

Have you heard of Matrix? Because it sounds like you're describing Matrix almost perfectly.

https://matrix.org/

Yes of course, Matrix too. In fact i am waiting for them to make it easy to integrate existing user base to switch to them. Matrix will probably be the ultimate replacement to discord, because it lends itself naturally to the case of a medium sized game-based community.

But it's not just chat. It's a community.

People don't want to "switch". They don't want to host software. They don't want to register for a bunch of different communities.

They just want to click "Join" and build relationships. Or click "Create" to create one. You can't just try to solve chat and protocols (IRCv3), you need to solve community.

I certainly agree with what you're saying. But so far our attempts at decentralized social systems are clearly early on in the experimentation process, to put it the nicest way possible. Open protocols are a great idea, but that is the easy part that we like to fixate on. The hard part is a compelling experience that people will want to use so that you have people to chat with.

And so far we're still trying to figure out what that solution looks like.

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