Or maybe some branch of Operation Mindfuck is converting rich silicon valley cryptobro jackasses into useful idiots to trigger an open source social media revolution.

Any replacement for Discord is going to run into the AIM problem. Even years after nobody was on AOL, AIM remained the biggest instant messenger client simply because it had the most users. A big factor in it losing its dominance, though, was Trillian. Once you could have all your accounts in one place, it kind of made it starkly obvious which ones were redundant. At the same time, it made the barrier for entry feel lower.

Instead of needing different clients for ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, and MSN, you could have it all in one place, packaged with a totally garbage IRC client. So if you had friends on, say, ICQ, there was little reason not to register an account.

This is what we need with Discord. A client that people can migrate to because it’s objectively better, which allows them to connect both to Discord and to an open source Discord killer (a Disczilla, if you like). That way nobody has to convince whole ass communities at a time. You can slowly osmosize over as the client gets popular without having to have that critical mass from day 1 to draw people.

This right here. Honestly, if we’re taking the time to hop platforms and start bolstering the next wave of popular sites and services, why make the same mistake again as the last time around?

No matter how much a company talks about how ethical they want to be or how much they value doing the right thing for their clients, once money enters the picture on a wider scale and people start looking in the direction of an eventual IPO, everything goes to shit.

Meanwhile, IRC is still working just fine. No degradation of services after decades. You can still throw your own ircd up on a $3/mo VPS and be golden.

Moving everything to open source, decentralized platforms can only be a boon for all of us in the long run. Anything less is just kicking the problem down the road a little.