If you advertise your community on Discord, especially if you are working on something open source, you are part of the problem.
Use Matrix, Jabber, or even IRC before giving companies like Discord money. The cute icons are not worth it.
Unfortunately I just don't see Matrix's priorities going towards UX. I'm dropping them. Revolt has promise [1], at the very least as a stopgap.
Meanwhile the old Element apps aren’t improving because all our (limited) bandwidth is going into Element X, which we hope to be ready this summer.
The problem is entirely that the alternatives are worse than Discord.
There’s no point in a boycott if there’s no destination to boycott to. The reason that the Digg->Reddit boycott was successful was that there was a better place to migrate to.
In the short term people want pretty but enough bad outcomes will push people to consider that UX is not the only thing to value in a communications tool.
There's nothing concrete that Discord holds that makes them remotely better for the users. Discord isn't even mutable, can't be heavily changed or swayed; it's someone else's closed proprietary product. Where-as Matrix or XMPP or irc can be bent, extended, changed to do more, to meet users where they are.
I don't know how any of these assertions that it's Discord or bust are made. This is an article of faith that Discord is simply the one and only way to go, or else, and the tautological definition of an article of faith is that which relies on no external support to maintain itself.
I do think there's a lot of possibility to figure out how to better bring users onto matrix or XMPP or irc, with easy to use web clients & better feature sets. But I also think culture shifts because culture does. For whatever reason there's doctrine that Discord is how it's done, and it's easy as fuck, but if we tried doing other maybe this Discord manifest destiny would not look so horrifically locked in as it is. But that would require not accepting the dogma of Discord crit-hype, that would require multiple folks trying.
Behold, for the answer has revealed itself.
People use what they think is best, where "best" has a wide variety of answers and very rarely is the answer "a feature set that programmers think are good".
We offer free software and free support. We do not feel it is an unreasonable ask that people use open standards to collaborate with us on open software.
Many have created accounts on Matrix because they wanted our help. It works.
Unlike "consumer" platforms like Discord, they're used to talking with serious businesses, and usually have more sensible rules and customer support procedures in place, but things still can go wrong sometimes.
This is one of a very few things that can actually be solved by a blockchain (because there's no way to have a human-friendly naming system without financial incentives, and there's no way to have decentralized financial incentives without a blockchain), but that causes its own share of problems. Your domain might be impossible to take away, but if you get hacked and your keys get stolen, there's also no way to get the domain back.
It seems that no matter what you do, this is just a risk you're going to face.
Unsure why a distributed ledger like a blockchain would be needed for DNS independence :)
You can go the DNS way and have a centralized registry. It may be hierarchical and/or distributed, but it's fundamentally still centralized.
You can go the free-for-all way and allow anybody to register any handle/domain under any public key. This works for closed networks with trusted participants, but on an open network where name registration is at no cost, a profit-seeker will inevitably register all the names for themselves and try to sell them, probably at somewhat extortionate prices.
The only way to deter profit seekers is to introduce a small cost to register and maintain a name. You need fees to be high enough for most names to be unprofitable to snatch, but low enough to still be affordable to a vast majority of users. The only way to collect fees in a decentralized manner that we know of so far is via a blockchain.
The crucial realization here is that, with a human-friendly naming system, there's always going to be a cost to acquiring a name. It may come from the designers themselves or from the people who got all the names in a gold rush, but it's always going to be there. The cost doesn't necessarily have to be financial, many centralized system require scarce resources (e.g. phone numbers or human attention to solve captchas) to squat on.
Connect via IP and you can connect with no issues. Self-signed certs work well for IRC too.