What's interesting about acquisitions like this is that the actual value that is being transacted is the userbase and their data, along with the inability for either of those to easily move elsewhere.

No one wants to buy the actual chat application itself, because they could build equivalent technology on their own. But users are locked into platforms so heavily and for such long time periods that they themselves give the platform almost the entirety of its value (not to single out Discord, since we all know this is how a lot of acquisitions work in practice). [As an additional caveat, I will add that Discord has definitely built something that its users love, and I don't want to undermine the absurd amount of UI, feature refinement, and scaling work they've done successfully. It isn't negligible, but it is also not >$10B of software engineering.]

I've read many discussions where someone says something of the form "I wish I didn't have to use X, but my friends and family all use it, so I'm forced to", and I think upon consideration of this statement that there is something deeply wrong with the way network effects and protocols function on our Internet such that this can even be a common scenario. We really do have quite a crisis of non-interoperability that generalizes towards a complete lack of user control, be it software, hardware, data, or anything in between.

With that said, if Microsoft does purchase Discord, it might not be as bad as some foretell. While we can point to something like Skype as a failure, we can also point to something like Github, which has been doing very well post-acquisition, and in my opinion hasn't gotten worse at all. It's quite possible they wouldn't want to profit off of Discord individually, but rather use it as another tool to expand their general ecosystem horizontally. On the other hand, they could also do the exact opposite and start harvesting data and maximizing advertisements en masse, lest my post become too optimistic in tone, since this is still HN. Lastly, remember that this is still just a rumor that various news outlets have picked up on and is nowhere near guaranteed.

For those looking for alternatives due to this, or just because they'd like to own their own data for once, I think Matrix is likely to be the best general solution in this product space, both with respect to similar app functionality as well as quality constraints (real encryption, decentralization, FOSS, etc).