Technology

I sure did fucking sucks and they didn't make it easy. First had to delete all servers first then delete my account. Fuck Discord.

Don't even have to go that far. Just stop paying for Nitro. They'll get the picture when their revenue stream dries up.

My community just setup a Matrix instance and we're migrating everyone over. Several already cancelled their subscription.

I actually ran into a colleague in a random room, who is also leaving Discord.

It's pretty nuts, there's a big exodus going on.

Anyone want to script through the signup process and feed the damn thing a bunch of AI generated faces?

Typically when a signup page is difficult to automate, you can use a library meant for automated testing within a browser—like Selenium. Also, disposable emails services come in handy—like mailsac. If they block all the disposable email services, you can also use your iCloud+ custom email domain (if you have it) with the Allow All Incoming Messages setting turned on—then you use randomly generated user handles for each signup. A better way would be Gmail accounts so that they blend in more, but I’m not sure how to script through Gmail signup when they often require a phone number verification step.

Not sure about the easiest way to recycle your IP, in case they monitor signups that way too. I’m sure there’s a way to overcome that too via VPN.

If 2% of Discord users did this 50 times, that would make half of Discords user profiles and face recognition data completely fake.

I hope this means people will slowly start going back to forums. Highly doubt it though.

Speaking as someone who is currently planning to move a community away from Discord to something self-hosted, it's not as easily said as done.

Apart from the need to run your own infrastructure, competing software is typically finicky and comes with caveats. Plus you have to worry about discoverability if you want to attract new users.

It's doable, sure, but it requires a lot of planning and work. Honestly, it's probably going to take us months to get our own service fully up and running.

https://stoat.chat/

These guys have been at it for several years now. Check out their GitHub, look at the components.

I'm trying to modify their dockerfile a bit so it runs in my container manager and uses my reverse proxy, instead of the one they included, and it creates more containers for this one application than I have for all my other projects combined.

All of which is to say: "pretty hard" is the answer. It is pretty damn hard to build this stuff.

How hard is it to create discord?

A lot of the technical difficulty in that type of app usually centers around scale. If you only ever have 10 users in a channel it's not so hard. When you have 10,000 or 50,000 things start to get more tricky.

Still as per usually for small scale (and slightly larger too) there have been options for a long time. The main difficulty is in getting other people to use your proposed option.