I was considering making a similar list since I was very interested in checking out alternative chat programs, but I have to say this list isn't that good. A lot of the alternatives here aren't ACTUALLY Discord alternatives.
Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people, follow news, talk in forums, etc... It also has a lot of features people hand-waive like a really good roles system, moderation and server management tools, a bot ecosystem, etc.
Signal is a Whatsapp alternative for 1-on-1 chats with friends and small groups.
Rocket chat is a Slack alternative for people wanting to host a server for a community. It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.
I haven't used Zulip but AFAIK it's like Rocket Chat.
Ditto on Mattermost.
Discourse is a forum.
Stoat is basically the only thing here that actually competes on Discord and it's really barebones. There isn't a genuine Discord alternative because it turns out it's really hard (and expensive!) to do what it does, kind of like a Youtube alternatives scenario.
>Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people
Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers, only when forced to by some projects that refuse to host their content anywhere else- and its always a terrible experience. 99% of my discord usage is just a group chat with my IRL friends, so when looking for alternative I dont really care about roles and moderation and bots at all. I just want a group text chat, a mobile client for it with notifications, and drop-in/drop-out voice calls
They have >200 million DAUs and guesses say they have >10K servers with >10K users. Assumptions from a tech crowd who were used to IRC should be taken with a grain of salt.
Now if we're just looking for alternatives for ourselves, cool. But I think the reality is that most normal users do fully lean into the social aspects of Discord. A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
I have said many times, Discord isn't just chat, it is 100% a social media app.
I think there's definitely more than 10 thousand servers... Unless they mean active? Even so... there's 3.2 million Discord servers with the Disboard bot installed, that's just Disboard, a way to advertise your Discord. There's likely millions more with no bots.
I'm just questioning the 'most users' aspect- just anecdotally among my 'normal' peers those big servers dont seem like the most common use case. For every big million-user server there could be a million private 10-user servers
Not necessarily, if Discord has more than 200 million Daily Active Users, and there are a few million-user servers. Those million-user servers could mostly be made up of the same million users (or only a small percentage still actively engage but they never left because there's no disincentive to leave servers instead of just muting them) meaning it's used by less than 1/200th of the total users of Discord.
Realistically, that's probably not the case, but it's impossible to know the true popularity without more statistics.
> A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
Going back to something you said earlier:
> Rocket chat is a Slack alternative for people wanting to host a server for a community. It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.
So the primary thing is that there is no SSO for each server? No centralized auth system? Because everyone I know that uses discord 'found' the discord via some official means of those million person discord's like the official Marvel Rivals one. If the only purpose of the centralized system is not requiring a new login for every server, then a centralized auth system could be implemented by relying on people's other social media accounts. Login with Google/Facebook/Apple etc.
you could sign into A and your friend could sign into B using the single sign in, but you wouldn't be able to message each other is the problem, there is no platform bridging the logic gap, so you would both need to have A and B open. (afaik. didn't read about Rocket yet)
> Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers
Large community servers are plentiful. I'm in a few that are definitely several hundred if not a few thousand users. It's pretty common to have a public server for cities too.
The question was not are there Discord servers with 1+ million people. The question was do most Discord users use Discord to join servers with 1+ million people.
> A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
That is totally true, but is that server really going to be one with NSFW content or channels? Those huge servers are great spaces, but every one I've been on is fully functional if you are on a "teen account" without doing ID/Age verification.
I don't join massive servers, but I use Discord almost exclusively with strangers.
All my IRL group chats are WhatsApp. Discord is for the local board game bar, various regional tabletop gaming scenes, my favorite basketball podcast, my favorite miniatures game, etc.
When I want to get into a community, these days I get a Discord link (which I guess I prefer to the Facebook Groups of a decade ago).
Any multiplayer game that doesn't have an integrated matchmaking have _big_ discord servers. Basically most paradox games, civ5 and civ6, probably others. All the organising that used to happen on forums now happens on discord servers
From personal experience, yes. Most of my friends are part of multiple large servers, often interacting with a small subsets of these communities. At this point, I don't think there is a comparable alternative.
My experience using discord for technical projects and communities is largely similar to IRC. I jump in, ask a question in the appropriate channel, someone answers quite quickly, i say thanks, I leave.
I’d prefer having openly searchable forums and chat archives and to use IRC but I can’t say the experience is that onerous.
Not for most users who are blindly following their communities, seeking lock-in, tasteless design, eating rat poison, driving off cliffs so on and so forth.
This may be a good time to consider whether one program should really be handling all those things, or if it's putting too many eggs in one basket and asking too much of any one program. Discord seems comparable to a Chinese superapp, made to trap its users and become an irreplaceable part of their everyday lives. I think I understand it's hard to give up some of these features once you're used to them, but it seems worth doing. Personally I use a mix of IRC, XMPP, and Matrix, mostly IRC (internet people) and Matrix (IRL friends/family), though. I believe XMPP and Matrix both have some sort of voice or video chat support across some clients and servers, but if someone were to try to call me through them, it would seem "weird" to say the least. I usually get people on Mumble if we're gonna play a game and want a voice chat going. It's rock-solid, everyone I play games with seems fine with it. When we're done voice chatting, we close Mumble, a bit like hanging up a phone call.
As for video calls and screen sharing, not something that's been super normalized in my circle. Some of us stream to Twitch with OBS, but it's rare to say "hey come watch my computer screen for an hour in a 1-on-1 call". There is just one guy who seems like a heavy Discord user who seemed to want to do this sometimes. I showed him Jitsi to placate him, we can both join a session in a browser without accounts and I can see his screen. I wasn't a big fan of that, though, I'd rather just not let that be normalized, personally. A screenshot, video clip, describing it to me, letting it go, any of that seems better than being trapped in a screensharing/video call of uncertain length.
The private servers I'm in always have a few people screen sharing whenever a voice chat is active. They're either sharing their gameplay (semi-privately, hence no Twitch) or they're co-watching movies. Oh and every so often, screen sharing is used for getting someone's opinion on image editing or a song in they're making. I've also given people remote tech support which is way easier to do when their screen is visible.
But it's worth noting that as an older Gen Z, this is just how people hang out nowadays, so we'll be watching anime together in the server until we fall asleep or whatever. That's why screen sharing isn't as useful as screenshots and video clips.
The benefit of one big app is a consistent identity. Seeing that an account was created years ago, and how long it's been a member of the current server, helps identify spam and scams. When a user you're familiar with provides a link to another Discord server, its more trustworthy.
Discord has also done a good job protecting identity; better than DNS has :) I use lots of other apps with "real" identity, Discord is good for centralizing non-work, non-family activity.
You can use as many different apps for yourself but good luck sustaining a community/team/org that requires learning 5 apps for participation, especially when not all users are savvy.
In order to sustain an ecosystem instead of mega-app, that ecosystem needs to be really smoothly integrated, and I know of no good examples of this
This article looks rather rushed -- the description of Zulip is not accurate, and I suspect that folks working on the other products may feel the same way about how their projects are described.
I lead the Zulip project, and I'd like to clarify that Zulip's free community pricing does not have user limits, either in Cloud or self-hosting. The 10 user limit for free mobile notifications only applies to workplace/business use. Larger communities are encouraged to submit a simple form to get approved for notifications beyond 10 users.
And this complaint seems quite strange:
> Even for self-hosted plans, anything above the free tier requires a zulip.com account for plan management.
How would a paid subscription work without an account for managing it?
This is an important and timely topic, but I wish a more deeply researched article was the one being widely circulated.
This a good point that I hadn't considered. At least in my experience, DMs are a useful but secondary feature that mostly are useful because it's not uncommon to make connections with people from interacting in the servers themselves. I had been mentally modeling Discord as a chat app, but in a lot of ways it feels more accurate to think of it almost like Facebook with just groups and DMs, only the groups are realtime chat. Over that years I've heard various people talk about using only groups and maybe events as the last things they still used Facebook for, and I deactivated my account years ago but still use Messenger because of the years of contacts I had already built up on it (and the fact that it still is possible to use with a deactivated Facebook account), which provides at least some anecdotal evidence that Discord is basically providing the stickiest features of Facebook.
Stoat isn't working well for me. It's taken over 24 hours to try to register a new account. First I couldn't register after doing several captchas. Then I had to wait for a verification email which took over 12 hours. I signed in to one client, but attempting to reset a password results in the same waiting game and error when selecting a new password.
I wish for the best, but they're probably putting out fires from the increased load
The closest realistic option is probably XMPP and Mumble. I just think both need a modern UI that supports everything that Discord offers OOTB. I am working on a client for XMPP on the side, nothing special yet, but I can login and chat with myself on a prosody instance, so there is that. Would love to work on open source full time, but it never seems to pay the bills. I do intend on eventually open sourcing my client.
All the people I know who joined big servers, have nitro and do it for their emotes. My impression of really big servers is that they also skew really, really young.
That said, I agree that not having to create a new account is a huge barrier of entry removed. A lot of the servers I’m in would probably not be a thing, or at least be even smaller, if everyone had to create an account to join.
being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people
Personally I would never want to join that noise. If an IRC channel has more than 50 people I tend to avoid it unless it is a technical channel that may have some knowledgeable people. If I want to reach millions of people I will find a way to join the conversation of an influencer on their podcast but hopefully such a need never comes to pass for me.
IMO most Discord channels I have to use could be better replaced by a traditional web forum. Then at least could you find the knowledge in there using a web search.
Nothing open source and self hostable will be a "platform" then. Being dependent on a central platform/identity server is the way they control you and increase the friction of leaving.
I think the client side could still be a "platform" like pidgin, allowing login and simultaneous participatiin in multiple servers, without needing to be fully centralized.
What disappoints me about this list is the lack of consideration for video calls and screenshare.
This was the one to finally stop getting me to distro hop. Cachy is very easy to use and very well maintained. The performance is usually the selling point people talk about, but it's also very customizable and beginner-friendly (especially for an arch-based distro).
It uses an online installer that lets you choose the desktop environment, boot manager, file system, among other things. You can follow the defaults if you're new. Once you install it, it also comes with a few helper applications that can quickly set up things you'd want to use, like a one-click button that installs all the gaming packages you want to use and their flavor of Proton which is (allegedly) faster than the default.
They also have a really good wiki which I contributed a bit to and a very active community if you need help. All around, 10/10 would recommend to anyone. I managed to convince my friend who's new to Linux to use this instead of Zorin and he's had a great time.
I really dislike that Linux proper doesn't by default have x.xx-server, x.xx-workstation, x.xx-laptop and x.xx-desktop kernel variants. Or just doesn't have defaults, requiring distros to think about what to set during compilation.
A lot of the current defaults stem from the 90s, and often were eyeballed by the creator of said code. They're not good defaults for modern servers nor workstations nor laptops nor desktops. And all of those devices work best with different defaults.
It doesn't seem (yes, appearances can be deceiving) to be that much work, because no extra code needs to be written. For each variant, just set different default parameter values for stuff like swappiness, lazy RCUs and what not. Make it a thing to revisit the defaults every 10 years.
CachyOS and some other distros already do this, but a big chunk of distros doesn't because they think the defaults are well-thought out.
> CachyOS and some other distros already do this, but a big chunk of distros doesn't because they think the defaults are well-thought out.
Based on what I saw 1-2 years ago last time I looked at it, most distributions to customize and don't use the defaults straight up. From memory, so someone correct me if I'm wrong:
- RHEL/SLES - Lots of patches to kernels
- Arch - Closer to just using defaults, some config choices and downstream adjustments (so the opposite of CachyOS almost, which is why we have CachyOS in the first place)
- Ubuntu - Probably the most patched distribution compared to upstream components, also includes a lot of Canonical-specific stuff on top of that.
- Fedora - Has some bleeding edge bits and bobs
- Debian - Bit more conservative than Ubuntu, but still has patches for stability, security and backports.
In my experience, distributions changing the defaults and customizations seems to be the norm rather than the exception.
> In my experience, distributions changing the defaults and customizations seems to be the norm rather than the exception.
Which makes each and every one of those totally different operating systems that can run similar code to each other. We need to stop thinking of these as Linux "distros" and start thinking of these as totally separate and distinct operating systems that are based around the Linux kernel. Sort of like a business cooperative model.
I agree, doubly so when you consider different packaging formats and package managers also, along with different release models.
I've been preaching for a long time that "distro" is the wrong term. Each "distro" is absolutely it's own, standalone operating system. There is no universal "Linux OS" outside of the kernel. Even userland can be swapped out.
I love the separation of concerns. It provides an amazing terminal-first kernel and everything graphical is maintained by various different organizations, and you can choose between many different options.
Maintaining a large distro is extremely difficult and every decision has several trade-offs.
Why would you want different kernels for different device types?
Genuine question! I maintain my own Linux distro (upstream Linux + portage) for all my devices and haven’t found much reason to go beyond kernel per arch. I’m curious if there’s something I could be missing.
vm.swappiness defaults to 60, which is default from when everyone was still running spinning rust with a swap partition. Servers these days usually have very specific storage+memory configurations, whereas the usual desktop or laptop has an SSD and 16GB+ of RAM with RAM compression expanding it.
Lazy RCU loading is good on a laptop because you only lose about 10% performance and only with specific workloads, but your idle and light load energy consumption improves. Most laptops spend like 95%+ in light or idle load scenarios. Conversely, on a desktop you don't care (much) about idle and light load energy consumption, you only care about keeping max load consumption low enough so that your fans stay quiet. And on a workstation you don't care about a system being whisper quiet so you can go nuts with the energy consumption.
> vm.swappiness defaults to 60, which is default from when everyone was still running spinning rust with a swap partition. Servers these days usually have very specific storage+memory configurations, whereas the usual desktop or laptop has an SSD and 16GB+ of RAM with RAM compression expanding it.
You don't need to compile a specific kernel for that, this is setup via sysctl.
Do you mean RCU_LAZY? Most distros will already enable that: it doesn't do anything without rcu_nocbs, so there's no negative impact on server workloads.
[calvin@debian-trixie ~] grep RCU_LAZY /boot/config-6.12.57+deb13-amd64
CONFIG_RCU_LAZY=y
# CONFIG_RCU_LAZY_DEFAULT_OFF is not set
[calvin@debian-trixie ~] grep RCU_NOCB_CPU /boot/config-6.12.57+deb13-amd64
CONFIG_RCU_NOCB_CPU=y
# CONFIG_RCU_NOCB_CPU_DEFAULT_ALL is not set
Swappiness and many others can be changed by some sort of system preset rather built that way. I know not ALL options can be done that way, but I'd want to see changes start there where feasible.
I totally missed that part of your comment, my bad. Thanks for elaborating on those, I feel inspired to experiment!
So far my kernel journey has been about making my hardware work + enabling features, and that’s mostly how I’ve been discovering config options. Do you have any suggestions on where one aught to read further on this sort of kernel tuning?
EDIT: doing some further research, couldn’t you just set those options via sysctl w/o needing to build a separate kernel?
Yes you can adjust them via sysctl or directly as kernel parameter arguments. That isn't my point. My point is that Linux has some horrible defaults :+)
I generally have three types of Linux devices I typically use. My desktop, servers locally/remotely, and "mobile" devices (more like tablets I guess).
For the first, I want the lowest latency for everything I do, together with the highest burstable speed whenever possible, for pretty much all the components.
For the servers, I basically have two types, one which does storage, they just need large disks that can be slow, and one which users actually connect to, that one needs focus on throughput, latency and performance isn't as important as "can serve all requests in a reasonable timeframe, even under load".
Finally, many of the portable devices run on batteries, so on those the focus is power-saving, even if it compromises on performance.
I'm sure others out there have more device types, like ultraweight watches, security devices, monitors, radios and much more. Each one of these have different tradeoffs, and tuning the kernel and OS for each use case makes it a lot better usually. Personally I use NixOS for everything except my desktop (CachyOS right now!), and it makes it really trivial to create profiles based on the same configuration, deployed to all devices, and today they're are tuned for exactly their purpose, as Linus intended :)
I had not heard of labwc before, super cool that it's compatible with openbox themes! Openbox was one of the first "cool wm" I think I used back in the day, probably like 15 years ago now when it supplanted Fluxbox as the dominant *box.
Is there an option to stay permanently in floating mode, and allow manual placement? I'm stuck on AwesomeWM using just floating windows with easy keybindings for moving them around/resizing, etc. and am looking to jump from X11 to Wayland
I prefer it still because it makes sense for every window to be maximized at startup. Also one layout that still makes sense is 1 window taking up 100% of the horizontal space and 95% of the vertical save for a small strip for a terminal.
I have
- Meta + Z: Activate/iterate through terminal windows
- Meta + W: Activate/iterate through browser windows
And when on a laptop I maybe do a split view 2-3 times a day for a short term. 95% of the time it's full sized windows which I switch between using keyboard shortcuts.
Why does this feel like an ad? I've seen pangram mentioned a few times now, always with that tagline. It feels like a marketing department skulking around comments.
The other pangram mention elsewhere in this comment section is also me -- I'm totally unaffiliated with them, just a fan of their tool
I specify the accuracy and false positive rate because otherwise skeptics in comment sections might otherwise think it's one of the plethora of other AI detection tools that don't really work
FWIW I work on AI and I also trust Pangram quite a lot (though exclusively on long-form text spanning at least 4 or more paragraphs). I'm pretty sure the book is heavily AI written.
Absolutely. I was just reminiscing about a '97 game called "Claw". The studio that made it shut down earlier this year and I wish I could make a sort-of remake of it, but you legally can't. It's not even clear who owns the rights to it anymore.
I mean it's 2D platformer, you should be able to reverse engineer the engine and reuse the assets. I mean the have bit perfect decompiles of N64 games to C now. It's doable.
Uhhuh. I think anyone in the tech field can immediately tell where this is going, and I'm not at all excited for it.
1. They silently make it online only. Currently you need to make an account and be online on activation, so they're already one step closer to getting there.
2. They silently ditch the concept of buying and owning Affinity software, but that's okay because it's ~totally free~!
3. As soon as they lock in enough users from how nice and friendly they are, pull the rug. At some point they'll suddenly start locking features behind the pro subscription.
The biggest problem is probably work-related apps not working. Adobe products, MS Office, and certain niches like the music industry just aren't supported on Linux.
Many ultra-popular games don't work due to anticheat, but some do. Dota 2, Counter-strike, Marvel Rivals, Overwatch 2, among others work perfectly fine. We've also reached a point where virtually every offline game will work too.
I absolutely love SRB2K but I think they overcooked Ring Racers. It's bloated with so many mechanics that the tutorial for how to play the game is literally almost an hour long. The controls are also harsher than the previous game, especially when it comes to slopes.
Version 2.4 which is almost out doubles down on it being a high skill racing game with even more mechanics... Gaining "amps" when dealing damage, going into overdrive, "ring bail" which is dropping all your coins for a boost and can cancel spinning out, "neutral drift" where you lose less speed when drifting without steering...
I don't know what's going on at this point. I just want to hold forward and drift.
To me, Ring Racers feels like some bizarro version of a "what if we made a kart racer that plays like what normies think a fighting game plays like" future (complimentary, not derogatory). It's fascinating to get a glimpse. It's like those weird extinct animals who take over a tiny ecological niche but wouldn't survive in a more diverse climate, like channichthyidae or galapogos finches.
The result isn't quite a kart racer and isn't quite a fighting game, it's...some mix in between, where the difference between coming in first and being in fourth requires knowing that (say) directional influence is reversed while you're teching banana peel spinouts, or how your boost frames are preserved if you cancel your sliptide wavedash around a tight corner, etc etc. The skill ceiling is ridiculously high. For online play, so is the skill floor.
In all honesty I don't think it quite "works" for mass consumption...but it's not meant to! This corner of design space is built by those who love the genre they've made, so to hell with mass consumability anyway. I personally find the experiment fascinating and rewarding to learn. Certainly do check it out.
I don't have a horse in which decentralized protocol wins, but while ATProtocol sounds great on paper I'm still inching closer to liking ActivityPub more. I'm pretty active on Lemmy[1] which is quite active and fun to browse
1. 99.99% (literally) of AT users are on Bluesky, which is helmed by a for-profit corporation. The argument is that they don't control the protocol but considering it is THE dominating instance of that protocol, what's stopping them from strong-arming the protocol and changing how it works to benefit them? Better yet, what's stopping them from doing a rugpull and closing off their open service? What if bluesky decides 5 years from now that you aren't allowed to move your account? This isn't some hypothetical scenario, this already happened before. A lot of social medias started off with fairly open features and APIs and slowly choked them out for profit.
2. Users don't really care about protocol, they care about momentum and userbase. Piefed/Lemmy/Mbin are all popular-ish Reddit alternatives using AP. It was already a struggle to reach a point where posts could get over a hundred comments a day, how are you going to convince people to move to another platform again? I'm worried this will just end in splintering an already niche community and cause people to just give up and go back to using popular platforms.
Being able to move accounts is a very neat feature but it's not a reason enough to move. You can already export your settings and make an account on another instance in 20 seconds then import your settings again, which would bring back your subscriptions and blocks and all you set up from account 1. To me it's not a huge deal.
> considering it is THE dominating instance of that protocol,
Instances don't work like they do on mastodon. There's not really a "dominating instance" in the same way. Heck, even within Bluesky's infra, there are multiple PDSes. Basically, stuff is layered in a different way (which the article shows the details of) and so talking about the structure of things ends up working differently.
> what's stopping them from strong-arming the protocol and changing how it works to benefit them?
This is absolutely a real concern. I believe they have shown themselves to be good stewards, and they also recognize this concern. As the ecosystem grows, this will be fixed.
> Better yet, what's stopping them from doing a rugpull and closing off their open service? What if bluesky decides 5 years from now that you aren't allowed to move your account?
This is built into the protocol! You can back up your CAR file and move it to another host without the approval of your current host.
> You can already export your settings and make an account on another instance
This doesn't work on masto to the same degree as atproto. You lose a lot of stuff when you move on masto, but it's 100% transparent on atproto.
I don't think being able to migrate your account addresses the rugpull concern. The rugpull scenario is that one day, in five years or so, bsky.app drops all AT Protocol support and transforms into a Twitter-like centralized social media website. The problem isn't that the account will stop "existing" but that Bluesky users will stop seeing it. The average non-techie Bluesky user who doesn't know about the AT Protocol won't even notice the change, except that, from their perspective, a tiny percentage of nerdy users have stopped posting. For you, "migrating" your account away is effectively just deleting it from the now-centralized Bluesky and willfully decreasing your audience by 100-fold or more.
The problem is a social not a technical one. It doesn't matter how good AT Protocol is at account migration. The vast majority of AT Protocol users think of themselves as Bluesky users and don't even know what the AT Protocol is. If the official Bluesky clients move away from the AT Protocol, the majority of users are moving with Bluesky.
For all the UX concerns people have with Mastodon/ActivityPub, at least they make it obvious that different users are hosted on different instances, and no one instance has more to gain than it does to lose by defederating.
This I a valid point. But what‘s promising is: If this should happen, someone could easily decide to start Bluesky2 (maybe find a better name) and start at exactly the same point where rogue Bluesky left off ATProto.
Think about the Twitter exodus to Mastodon and Bluesky. Now imagine the same thing happening, but with one player saying: Come here, we have all the profiles, posts, feeds and likes and can promise, your data is still yours, when we decide to go rogue (maybe think about this marketing message again).
It is true that there are both social and technical components. You cannot force someone to use an app they don’t want to, so there’s no real solution to the social problem you pose. However, this isn’t any better in Mastodon. If you instance decides to swap the software to no longer federate, you’re stuck.
Regular backups help in this case, you can move all of your data to a new host if you have a recent backup somewhere and your rotation key. Not really approachable for the average user today but there are people working to make this easier.
I read your reply as the scenario from GP is unlikely to happen in practice or has low impact. To me it seems you need to make frequent backups of "your" data to have a copy of it.
Can i run multiple PDSes with my own single identity to not give one provider exclusive power over access to "my" data?
Ideally, a client app would make these backups for you automatically. I hope Bluesky official client will add automatic backups (in addition to the existing manual export flow that already exists). It's not hard to set it up as a GitHub action today if you're technical but making it accessible to non-technical users seems important.
>Can i run multiple PDSes with my own single identity to not give one provider exclusive power over access to "my" data?
Not really since there has to be a source of truth where the writes happen. I guess you could manually replicate changes between multiple servers but there still has to be one that applications know to talk to. I'm not sure what problem it would solve. This seems similar to "can I have multiple deployments of my site" — you sure can, but you might as well deploy it elsewhere when you actually plan to point to it.
I personally believe that the chance of Bluesky PBC suddenly swapping all of their software to no longer be built on atproto to be a very low chance, yes.
There’s middle grounds here; for example, due to some recent moderation decisions, some users have decided to move away from Bluesky PBC-run PDSes and to self hosting. Those users did not need to proactively backup to move. The proactive backup cases are things like “Bluesky PBC’s servers disappear suddenly” or “they ban your account.”
I don’t think you can run multiple PDSes, but since it’s quick to move the canonical version, I don’t see that as a huge drawback personally. In the same way you’d fallback to the secondary if the primary turns out badly, you’d set up a new PDS and point your identity at it.
>I believe they have shown themselves to be good stewards
How have they shown theyselves to good stewards? Its barely been popular and no where near the point where they can start enshitifying it. All the PBC talk is empty and they still maintain complete control.
What irks me is that in the end of the day if you go to Bluesky it's all American politics and if you go to literally any mastodon instance it's all American politics.
Maybe it's because I don't like monster of the week political drama, but I still don't see a reason to use them instead of Tumblr, Pinterest, or even TikTok.
This is very true, and it's a large part of why I never use microblogging at all, it's impossible to just find posts that fit what you want to see.
That's why I mostly use Lemmy/Piefed because everything is neatly organized into communities that you can subscribe to. I mostly browse tech & gaming communities and my feed is very chill.
> That's why I mostly use Lemmy/Piefed because everything is neatly organized into communities that you can subscribe to. I mostly browse tech & gaming communities and my feed is very chill.
I wish that were also my experience with Lemmy. Even the communities and posts not focused on American politics are often about American politics. Discussion quickly devolves into some pretty extreme (and often violent) leftwing American political rhetoric. I understand Piefed can block whole instances, so maybe I should try that before I give up.
> if you go to literally any mastodon instance it's all American politics.
It really depends on who you follow. Almost all the talk I see is tagged with #uspol so I could easily filter it out, but even without it, it's not the dominating topic.
I feel like I get ${local_country} politics* because I follow people from ${local_country} and most the other people I follow who do post about US politics tend to spoiler their posts with USPOL, so I can just scroll past if I'm not feeling it.
* Usually spoilered with "${local_country_code}POL"
I know that Mastodon is not the same as ActivityPub, but I don't know how can it be treated seriously if it allows disappearing replies. Whatever we write will disappear after some time. Sometimes. Because sometimes not. Maybe it's an implementation problem, I don't know, but it was one of my two reasons for my exit from Mastodon.
It's literally a feature - individual users can set post auto-deletion on their instance. Because a government could suddenly start firing people from their jobs for some shitpost they made a decade ago.
But you have the fact that this is the Internet, and somebody will have archived your post no matter what you or your host instance does. So you can rest assured that whatever you wrote on Mastodon is out there somewhere...
I think it’s ultimately up to your instance whether it keeps your posts indefinitely or not. I think most do, but others might delete posts after a period of time, in which case they should mention this to their users (on their ‘About’ page, for example). Personally, I can’t say I’ve encountered this problem, but then again I’ve mostly used Pleroma (which is a different program implementing the ActivityPub protocol, like Mastodon).
Donate is the key term here. If you want there to be alternatives to everything that's getting worse, you need to make those alternatives sustainable - even if they're not there yet. You can donate to alternative Android ROMs, efforts to make Linux on mobile usable, and support companies that actually care about users like Fairphone. They all need money to live.
Sweet talk and online activism is great, but the TLDR is always open-source developers need money to work.
* Sonny 2 (really in-depth turn based RPG)
* Fancy Pants Adventures 1-3 (2D platformer)
* Larry and the Gnomes (Beat 'em up)
* Interactive Buddy 2 (Fun simulator toy)
* Final Ninja Zero (2D platformer)
* Bubble Tanks 2 (Twinstick shooter)
These really take me back...