A couple weeks ago Discord announced their plans to go down the IPO route. This means that there is now a ticking clock until the platform goes full-on enshittified like so many others before them.
Last time i checked last year there weren’t many options to migrate to, mostly Matrix communities (which are not quite the same thing) and Revolt Chat (which is a non-federated but FOSS and self-hostable drop-in replacement for Discord). Revolt sounds like the logical route as it’s clearly designed for just this exact role, but it seems it’s still early in development and not yet ready for the average Discord user (looks like the voice functions in particular are still in development)
Has this changed or improved since then? I feel like the use case of “IRC servers, but modern!” should have been solved years ago but feels like it hasn’t, i have lots of non-technical people who heavily use Discord who I’d love to rescue from it before it starts actively burning, a replacement that isn’t complicated and has all it’s features would be welcome.
The most popular ones I know are Revolt and Matrix as you mentioned, but Fosscord also still exists under the new name SpacebarChat (had to change name for legal stuff). It’s still very alpha but good to keep an eye on.
Offtopic (some FOSS ways to reduce enshitification on Discord for now if you can’t migrate yet):
spoiler
In the meantime, to reduce enshittification you can use Vencord which is a FOSS modded client for Discord. Technically breaks their TOS but I’ve never heard of any bans from it except if people do dumb stuff like try to log chats or spam with it. Also Vesktop is made by the same people and still FOSS, but it is a wrapper around the web version as a standalone app instead of the regular app. Pros and cons for either are listed on their Github pages
I have joined revolt servers purely based on size just to see if anything was happening, and every single one of them was basically dead, especially anything with a focus. At most I will see one or two people talking. Makes it very hard to hang around on a daily basis.
Are there any servers you know that have decent activity?
Webcord is also a great client with great settings to limit fingerprinting and rendering of specific things. Has support for Fosscord (Spacebar) built in.