Something I would love BOTB to have is a Matrix room, maybe with it's own homeserver or something else.
Matrix

(not to be confused with the film series) is a federated FOSS protocol, that although started existing since 2014 only did relatively recently take shape.
It's closer to Discord and Slack in design, and has support for a lot of what i consider to be "Modern IM Features" like custom stickers and emojis, text formatting, message redaction, etc

Although it happens to have an official homeserver (matrix.org), that one sucks and it's better if you host your own even if it can be quite difficult. There are tools like Draupnir

which make the moderation effort a lot easier, along with bridges like a Matrix-to-IRC

one

I've been feeling increasingly hesitant towards having to depend on Discord as my main IM platform. I know that, at least on it's early years, it raised the standards of how an IM should be among other things; but nowadays it just feels quite corporate among with many worrying stuff on it.

Some of the stuff that worries me has been on that platform for a while, like it's closed-source spyware nature, but there have been recent trends like how they're shilling Gen AI (once again, they tried with the Clyde bot but that failed miserably), their increasingly corporate feel and stance, how a former T&S employee warned how such functionality that was meant to protect the platform against abuse might end up weaponized to censor political dissent against the current US administration

and their recent talks about an IPO (archive link, original post on NYT)

However, Matrix also had it's own challenges and issues. Until relatively recently, the moderation situation inside it was a nightmare. Only since last year that there have been more proper moderation tools in the specs along with bots that actually help you defend against spam and abuse.
Also, while it's E2EE might be one of it's biggest strengths when it comes to DMs and small groups, it becomes a pain when you wanna make a community due to bots and other stuff not working well around it. You can disable it when making a new room at the very least

The biggest obstacles to this request of mine are the networking effect and the staff's resources.

Just entering on a Discord guild and talking to people there is way easier than actually having to find homeservers, registering there, seeing if they didn't defederate with the people you wanna talk, finding communities in other homeservers, etc.
And then hosting homeservers, making sure bots work, etc costs money, resources, time, etc; and the BOTB staff are already busy in general.

I see the potential Matrix room of BOTB less as a replacement of our Discord (that isn't gonna happen anytime soon) and more like how our IRC functions: people who don't wanna rely on Discord still can communicate to the #botb chatroom via Matrix, which is also bridged to the Cave Dingle Discord guild.

I still personally am for a Revolt server due to their policies, but this is definitely a possibility.

I'm all for it

is there matrix nitro to make me feel superior and elitist?

nope lol. although technically you can make a client that adds discord nitro-like stuff to it if you really want to x3

tbh having something like this sooner rather than later is not a bad idea - i give discord less than a decade until it is fully in the shitter (unfortunately; i was a huge fan of it when it first appeared, it was the first good messaging + voicechat client in years)

you are right though that our resources are stretched a bit thin as admins, and puke's doubly so as the one developer of the site

I am ambivalent about all chat clients so I'll do whatever people do

we just wanna be careful not to... SPLIT THE ROOM https://tenor.com/o9MiTdtetuM.gif

A jackbox reference, in MY battle of the bits?!

I fucken love that cat

Not against it in principle, however are there bridging capabilities for those that don't make the jump?

yes there are.
i linked to a Matrix to IRC

bridge that seems quite fully fledged; there's also one that's Matrix to Discord

but that one's a bit more lacking in features due to the later being more complex that IRC.

just looked at Matrix and I'd totally make the jump! and probs be far more active too

Discord was a huge step up from Skype ime but yeah, same, just feels too corporate. even getting started w Discord was hell; got locked out immediately after making profile, was prompted for phone number, my cell phone didn't count as a real phone number to them; long story short I got everything to work; maybe? feels like Discord is the best of what corporate america can do here. even the top floor of hell is still hell; I'd love to get out

so many of us got out of "X", got out of Spotify, deleted that old Facebook page once and for all; refused to follow Windows into 11, bit the bullet, went Linux; set up real home sites for real computers on Neocities and, when it felt just a bit too slick over there, made a real home at Nekoweb. yeah Discord may not be an absolute monstrosity. yet. at one time Google was just a fast search engine with the least clutter, bloat, and bs. if we can't have Cohost in this world I can almost settle for getting everything else. if and when Matrix is set up for BotB I'll be there!

I do like the idea of trying out an alternative for discord as i am not a fan of how it became almost the only one platform for messaging/voicechatting so if matrix botb will ever become a real thing i am eager to try it out

Timely thread! Discord just announced today that they are beginning a pilot program for introducing "reward-focused" video advertisements in their mobile app

.

It looks like the approach they're taking is like those mobile games where you can watch an ad for perks or coins or whatever. For now, this program is only showing ads in the form of "quests" that you can complete to get rewards like profile decorations. These advertisements are limited to what Discord calls "reward-focused ad experiences", and they stress that it's opt-in. Not terrible and easy to avoid entirely, but still a possible sign of the beginning of Discord's decline.

In terms of alternatives, I am not in favor of Matrix. Your criticisms regarding moderation and encryption are entirely valid, and those aren't the only problems. I've tried to use Matrix in the past and found it to be shoddy, with an unintuitive interface and usability issues. In terms of more technical criticism, this post

has some good details about Matrix's structural issues. It's not a good Discord replacement and is arguably more trouble than it's worth. IRC is far less problematic.

Revolt

was mentioned briefly above, and I think that looks way more promising. Like Matrix, it's open-source and self-hostable, but it isn't federated so it wouldn't have the implementation and moderation challenges that tends to introduce. It could be an ideal choice if self-hosted and integrated with BotB's account infrastructure - imagine if you could have just one account for the site itself and community chats! Self-hosting it like this would be best, imo. Otherwise, if Discord does decline and users mass migrate away, the official Revolt instance would be swarmed which could result in trouble both for moderation and performance. But I'm sorta spitballing here.

The best course of action for now is to keep an eye out for possible future options just in case. If Discord fully goes to shit, there will surely be many more alternatives to choose from.

Hey, so I don't even really like Matrix.
I am looking for a proper IM option that has modern features like what those I described, but the protocol and it's ecosystem still aren't in a good state.
I made this post before the GNOME Matrix space was recently subject to a harassment campaign, and that make me reconsider what I said here x . x

I still believe that Matrix, if the developers finally fix up a lot of it's issues and make sure the moderation aspect of things is in a good state, will be able to be a proper IM contenter... but it's been 11 year since that protocol came out and only since last year did thet start actually trying to improve on these aspects x . x

I feel skeptical about Revolt, mostly due to how it's been stuck in development hell and the new official client that will fix a lot of the issues of the current one is still unreleased; but at least since it's also FOSS you can make your own clients just fine at least.
However just like how people will use Element and the matrix.org homeserver when trying Matrix only to find themselves in hell world, a lot of people will rely on the official client and servers for Revolt rather than hosting their own and/or contributing to third party development (mostly due to lack of time, resources, the fact that these fields are specialized, etc)

I am still keeping in mind about it, waiting for the moment new developments around it finally properly happen.

what if we just gave irc a really cool name like "HardWire"

bumping this thread because i want my proposal to become a reality at some point.
development of draupnir 2.3.0 is happening rn, which will address a lot of the remaining obstacles when it comes to abuse and spam protections in matrix

also proposals for MSCs 4204 - 4207 and 3911 are there, hopefully enough people give a shit about em so they get accepted and developed properly; because i want a free and federated IM protocol that also is not an abusers' paradise to be a thing.

i just wish stuff like this happened sooner on the matrix protocol ecosystem. i hope than a free and open IM protocol can coexist with it being safe enough for regular use, without some fucking asshole spamming gore in a room i was on.

about revolt, there's still not much progress going on last time i checked. it's a shame because it's the most discord-like alternative IM chat app and specification, and if it picked up in development speed again it would be a serious contender.

anyway good day

curious if anyone will create a matrix equivalent on atproto since bluesky kinda won the war in terms of these federated platforms

i think there was one of these in atproto, but so far it's in very early development last time i heard about it.

I think it may be best to wait until the updates you've mentioned are pushed, and then we make the decision on which platform to use. There are benefits to acting sooner rather than later but there are also benefits to waiting to see how this new fediverse based protocol will be adopted. A year or even six months from now, something really good night be released while we're waiting for the matrix updates. I just anticipate and dread starting to build a community group server thing on matrix, only for something way better to appear a couple months later.

But as for leaving discord, I agree, this needs to happen eventually.

Discord itself was never an issue to me, personally.

It's people I interacted with in it (including a mummied BotBr) that scared me.

heck, at this point why not write our own chat protocol and use that built-in to the site?

We use Matrix at work.
Every few weeks something happens and all older messeges can't be decrypted anymore.
This might be an implementation issue at my workplace though.

ok so Roomy Chat is kind of like the matrix equivalent built of atproto. It's actually advancing really fast in development, but is still alpha software
It's still something to consider once it gets to a more stable state i think.

bumping this thread due to the recent news

Could you clarify what news you're referring to, for people who may not have seen it?

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/discord-confirms-its-moving-toward-becoming-a-public-company-as-it-hires-a-former-activision-executive-as-its-new-ceo/

I'm pretty out-of-the-loop on any chat services that aren't Discord, but I've been hearing people toss around Signal

a lot.
Is that worth considering, too? Or is that better suited for one-on-one communication?

what if.... hear me out... we all just used IRC

[This n00b ashamed of what written. - BotB]

@damifortune history deleter smh