this is a long one.

discord's special sauce is that damn near everyone has it. your friends? discord. your game group? discord. your favorite wiki? that's right, discord.

do you want a point-by-point takedown of why i think fluxer isn't going anywhere? too bad: here it is.

a. any time you migrate a community from one place to another, you lose people, often quite a few. do you know anyone excited about maintaining multiple chat apps? what are you going to do when inevitably someone does stay behind, or goes "this is too much work, i'm going back to the other app where everyone is". look at bluesky, a site where the competition is a literal nazi-run, CSAM-generating bot nightmare, and people still refuse to leave. now imagine that's not just random social people you follow, but your actual friends and colleagues. are you going to maintain two (or more! stoat, anyone?) apps?

b. fluxer's main thing seems to be "we're open source and you can host it yourself". cool. let's go check the system requirements and... "16 GB for a small active community". Do you know how much that costs? TCRF's server is an 8GB Linode and it runs us $60 PER MONTH. are you excited to spend that on something you can already get a perfectly useful version of, for free? (And that's a "small" active community! What if you have a thousand? What if you have TEN thosuand!?) Oh, and don't forget things like "DDoS protection"!

c. on "open source": does that mean actual open source? what will happen when someone inevitably forks it or adds a new feature? what if someone violates the "community guidelines" ("Communities can set stricter local rules, but cannot permit what these guidelines prohibit", i.e. "you can't trump our rules", which feels kinda weird for "open source host-it-yourself, we can't tell you what to do"). how will they handle divergences in versions? hell, what does "host it yourself" actually mean? the website isn't clear on this at all.

d. even if you do go through all of this, are you okay with having your chat history expire on you? they delete attachments automatically after various time periods (a few years for tiny attachments, two weeks for larger ones). in Discord pretty much anything you send is still there, for better or worse.

i'm hostile towards "switching off discord" because it's being done by people who don't get it, who are doing it because Discord Made A Decision They Dont Like, without considering what they're doing about it.

we had all of this shit with IRC. there's a reason nobody fucking uses IRC any more.