I mostly lurk here, and I know we’ve had this discussion come up a number of times since Discord’s age verification changes were announced, but I figured this video offers value for the walkthrough and comparative analysis. Like me, the video authors aren’t seasoned self-hosters, and I’ve still got a lot to learn. Stoat and Fluxer both look appealing to me for my needs, but Stoat seemingly needs self-hosted servers to route through their master server (unless I’m missing something stupid) and I replicated the 404 for Fluxer’s self-hosting documentation seen in the video, so it’s looking like I’m leaning toward a Matrix server of some kind. Hopefully everyone looking for the Discord exit ramp is closer to finding it after this video.
What I’m upset about is the absolute wealth of information that will be forever trapped behind Discord. What ever happened to good old fashioned forums? Hell, even a subreddit would at least have been scrapable. If there’s a mass migration away from Discord then all that information just gets lost. Example that Lemmings might care about - CachyOS has a forum, but I’ve seen the vast majority of troubleshooting and user input made on their Discord channel.
Maybe some people will migrate things back out. I wound up moving a bunch of stuff to a self hosted wiki.
Old fashioned forums are old fashioned. Circular logic but there’s a lot holding them back.
You’ve got some points but I would argue that antiquated UI will be what saves the Internet. Keeping out bots and AI scrapers with good old fashioned phpBBS systems that have been around for twenty years will be our clean data as we build systems outside of AI and the techbro properties.
I’ve also always liked how old school forums are structured. Nice, neat categories and most active/recent stuff on top.
Rather than paying for hosting and operational costs that goes with a forum, social media and the desire for immediacy happened as Yahoo created Groups, then Facebook followed suit with their own.
omg, you guys are almost there. you’re so close, I can feel it.
so…why is the information locked behind a corporate entity?
Because people prefer convenience to privacy and accessibility, I guess? If there was an easy way to scrape/crawl discord data I would be hoarding everything I could to repost on lemmy or something but AFAIK there are no easy ways to access the data.
and that’s no accident. it’s by design.
creating a community is neat, but many are started irresponsibly. they don’t take into consideration how to move if things “change”.
people just willingly and blindly trust corporate suppliers because they do “so much stuff”. not a care in the world as day by day their dependency grows.
That’s why my side project energy has been focused on making decentralized solutions infrastructure more appliance-like reliability and boring. So app environment on top can have as close to equivalent advantage as centralized solutions.
As a Giant Bomb fan, it’s somewhat renewed interest in forums over there from the operators and users. Discord was always a bad forum anyway, but it was great for immediately being able to have a conversation with people to find answers to problems.