Thank you for giving me more time to figure out alternatives
I just found out about Fluxer today. I might tinker around and see if it’s any good.
It definitely seems like the best competitor popping up. Familiar UI, nearly all essential features already functional, open source and self-hostable. I will say it feels like it came out of nowhere and having paid options out the gate feels a bit sketchy so I’m not completely placing any bets on it, but after trying it out for a bit I’ve been liking it far more than any other alternative.
Matrix is more mature and established but very clunky, confusing for casual users, and most clients are terrible. Stoat feels extremely dated and buggy, and it feels exactly the same as when I first tried it a year ago before the name change. Alternatives are few and far between and nothing really excels just yet, but Fluxer feels the most promising.
If a program trying to replace discord doesn’t ask for money it’s a scam. You can’t do something at that scale and not have subs or paid options.
There’s fucking nothing free in life and I’m fucking tired of people expecting and demanding everything be free. That’s how we fucking got to this point in the first place. Companies turning to ads, data gathering and other things to generate revenue. Because the number of paid users is a drop in the bucket.
Either you pony up and put money on the table. Or YOU are the fucking product and will be sold off as parts to support the stuff you use.
Bandwidth, labor, hardware all costs money. Even self hosting still costs labor.
AND FUCK AI.
Isn’t fluxer partially LLM-coded according to the dev?
Don’t forget that Persona, the Peter Theil backed company, was found by whitehats to contain a us government backend for them to run facial recognition against government watchlists and scanned your chat history to determine your age and also reported any “suspicious activity” to the government.
The time to delete this privacy cancer is now.
The only acceptable option: don’t fucking bother.
I’m just gonna not do that regardless. I don’t use it enough to give in to that shit. They’re not the damn government and had a breach like months ago. Fuckin donkey brain shit.
My suggestion to discord:
Require age input when making a user
Then if the child wants an account, a parent has to make one and create their profile and choose what they can and cannot do. Sort of like parental controls for video game consoles, smart phones etc
No age verification required. No ID etc
That way i can check a box that disallows my kid to join any server, or he has to request access which i have to confirm etc
Same can be done for friends requests and PMs etc
To play devil’s advocate real quick, that system has no teeth in actually stopping kids from signing up to services. I remember lying about my birthday for Neopets to register an account - and later I couldn’t remember what I said it was originally. So if we assume that services should be responsible for keeping kids out of adult spaces, then some form of verification is necessary.
In reality, I don’t think I agree with that assumption. I lean toward things being free and open - including potentially letting kids access adult spaces. There are certainly dangers in that but I don’t think that segregation and surveillance are the best way to address those dangers. If anything, segregating kids into “for kids” parts of the internet puts them at much more risk of abuse because the abusers can go there to find a target-rich environment with few adult onlookers to expose them.
