The recent (As of February 2026) happenings with Discord (and really the internet / technology in general, thanks to new laws in a number of countries) have once again spurred demand for alternatives to the Silicon Valley corporations that have loomed over us as we've gone about our business for the last couple of decades.  People once again throw up their hands and say "I'm not doing that!", only for the same cycle to play out on the part of the corporations.  Walk it back, pull out all their PR tricks, scale it back, delay implementation to kill any collective momentum, then implement it later once everyone's forgotten it's a problem and the fires have died down.  Here's a recent example from 2023, with Google's "Web Environment Integrity" spec proposal.

In the meantime, people all scrambled for a new platform.  When Twitter was bought up by the world's most pathetic loser who started using it to push conspiracy theory bullshit, people tried to move on.  First suggestions were Tumblr - we'd seen how that went already, so that was out.  Then Cohost, which died entirely shortly after.  Among a slew of other alternatives.  Then Mastodon.  Mastodon seemed like a good choice!  It's an open-source project, it's not centralized so you can't suddenly be wiped out by some despot beholden to a payment processor or app store, and it's free forever!

This, unfortunately, highlighted the issues with platforms such as this.  Everything in the last few sentences comes with a gigantic asterisk attached.  It's open source!  But that doesn't mean your proposals will be accepted, even if you can code.  It's a group of people like any other with their own goals in mind for the platform.  It's not centralized, and you can't be banned!  But if you're on someone else's server, they can still ban you, as with moderators on any forum.  You can host your own to get around this, but that asterisk may as well be the size of the entire page for how much effort that requires, and how unachievable that is at the moment for the average person.  Being decentralized also comes with a number of issues, like discovery and federation, both of which take effort on the part of each individual user to get working properly.  On top of this, the things people most use social media for simply don't exist.  You don't have a "feed" with an "algorithm" that effortlessly stuffs new Content down your throat whenever you're bored.  Metrics like favorites (likes) and reposts fail to track properly on most instances and versions of Mastodon.  You're only shown posts from instances your instance knows about and people you follow or your followers show you via reposts etc.  It's very limiting compared to a gigantic centralized platform like Twitter where everyone can see everyone else.  There is of course a gigantic public instance that 300k people use and is open for anyone to join, but if you don't want to be beholden to the rules of that instance, or want to communicate with a different group of people, you might end up picking a different one.

Up to now, I've recommended people get on small servers hosted by their techie friends if they have any, though this is unfortunately not something most are willing to put up with, either on the hosting side or the requesting side.  I do host my own mastodon instance, but it's not used frequently by any means.

Then came Bluesky, offering a (theoretically, at some point) open-source and self-hostable platform that does everything people want.  It has all the benefits of a giant centralized platform (convenient signup, ease of accessing content from different groups of people, farther audience reach) with (at least theoretically) the benefits of an open-source platform.  Thus far we've unfortunately just seen the same shit that happened on Twitter replay itself over again.  AI moderation, restrictions on NSFW content, deboosting / shadowbans, people getting deboosted or otherwise censored along rightist / establishment political lines, etc.

For better or worse, this platform has taken off, likely because of the ease of onboarding and the unceasing hostility from Xitter.  The current situation as of writing, though, still has most users posting both to Twitter and Bluesky, among other platforms (Furaffinity, e621 Itaku, Tumblr (for some), Mastodon, Newgrounds, Deviantart, etc etc etc).

The point of all this is to say that this is likely what's going to happen to Discord.  It's playing out very similarly to both how Tumblr and Twitter's falls from grace have, and we have all of the same failures and missteps to make again.

We're still in the quiet phase of the whole 'delay until people forget' scheme.  Waiting for people to stop caring and go back to normal so they can slip it in when nobody is paying attention and the news cycle won't get any clicks on headlines about it.  In the meantime, the urgency for an alternative platform is waning, and much like with Twitter, a new platform called Fluxer has made itself the up-and-comer and pushed out the most popular open-source options like Matrix by simply having more features that people actually want and doing what people want it to do, instead of experimenting and trying to be some wheel-reinventing Paradigm Shifting Chat Revolution that mirrors the leap from E-Mail to IRC but falls short and just ends up feeling weird.

Up to now, basically every time Discord has gone out of its way to annoy its users, the majority of them have been in the "just comply / it doesn't matter" camp, as the issues have primarily been to do with monetization or advertising, rather than directly giving Discord a photo ID, which seemingly most people do not care as much about.  The response to those asking "where can we go?" has so far been "Matrix" or nothing else.  Matrix is basically just open-source, federated (de-centralized) Discord.  Same comparison between Mastodon and Twitter; It's basically feature-complete, does everything Discord can do, but it does it just differently enough that most people will hate it with all of the hate they have left to give, and will not want to move over or invest their time into building a community on it.  There are also a number of concerns with the actual performance and security of Matrix, several of which the closure of FUTO's "Circles" Matrix client project outlines pretty eloquently.

The most recent push has brought with it a much louder response, and with that a much larger list of alternatives, which I've compiled some basic information about here, but the most notable of the bunch is Fluxer.  Like Bluesky, Fluxer isn't doing the Linux thing of being open-source to a fault.  It's not copying all of the weird trappings that open-source software seems to carry with it, not trying to attract weird computer freaks or privacy-conscious "alt-platform-ers" like so many others.  Their clear intent is to make an application that Regular Common People can use to do all of the things they'd expect to do on Discord.  It does, however, have a leg up on Bluesky in the sense that it is actually open source, will be self-hostable in the near future (if the devs are to be believed), and actually has a path to financial stability for the sake of maintaining the large public instance that the vast majority of users will end up living on, that doesn't involve huge investments from venture capital or other whale investors (which it's laready gotten at least $300,000 from).

That's the primary front other projects have so far failed on; finances.  Matrix is donation-supported.  Same with Mastodon.  These are all pet projects made by computer nerds in their free time (though Matrix does employ a number of people, somehow, despite financial troubles).  Given that our economic system is not yet one that would simply support services or resources necessary for people to live or be happy, any platform that wants to be successful beyond a proof-of-concept, that people have to figure out Linux and spend 30 hours troubleshooting just to get a slow piece of shit server running, will inevitably have to find some sort of income.  Donations are notoriously unreliable.  Fluxer's idea is to capitalize on whales with a more expensive $300 lifetime license for early buyers, and ongoing subscriptions basically matching Discord's Nitro plan 1:1, but with the benefit that people hosting their own server won't need to pay for the subscription in order to access all of the features.  It's encouraging self-hosting instead of punishing it.

If they can maintain non-compliance with the ID verification laws going into effect, I suspect Discord will bleed users until it goes the way of Skype before it.



On the more human side of this issue, are people who seem far too comfortable damning us all to corporate hell forever, and who have no interest in changing anything.  Sure, complaining about an ID requirement is a "small issue," maybe it doesn't affect you and you're fine just giving up and linking your real-life identity to all of the shit you say online.  That's not the point.  Most people are not okay with this.  Most people do not care if some corp says the identifying features of the ID are never sent.  Trying to prove they're telling the truth is a pointless endeavor that benefits only people who want to siphon money from you at best, and we've seen nothing but reasons not to trust them up to now.  People are upset because they implictly understand where this leads to.  It's not about Discord being "evil," it's about government overreach and digital surveillance.  It's about corporate incentives and incompetence.

Once companies can be made to comply with one super-invasive feature request, they can be made to comply with more and more until our digital ecosystem looks no different from our airports or borders.  People didn't fight that after 9/11 and the PATRIOT act, and now look where we are.  Once we are required to put ID in just to use a computer, as we are actively looking at with the California Digital Age Assurance Act and how it's impacting Windows and Linux, we're going to see massive increases in ID theft.  We've already seen data breaches with Discord's verification partners that exposed thousands of people, and far worse, far larger breaches in the recent past (2024) that have exposed many, many more.  It is the path that will bring about what people think China's Social Credit system does (even though it's not actually anything like that, and never was).  The US does this fairly often.  Our media point the finger at other countries for being Evil Security Police States and claim they have Cameras Everywhere and it's Literally 1984, when the countries are nothing like that, then they turn around and do exactly what they describe right here at home.  License plate readers.  Facial scanning.  A camera on every doorbell and street corner.

Corporate apologism on the part of the people hurts those who do it just as much as everyone else around them.  It's just another form of "Think of The Children!" or "It's For The Good of Everyone."  Yes, corporations employ regular people, obviously.  Yes, some of those people are referenced when it comes to implementing decisions like this.  The ones actually making the decisions like this, i.e. executives, are obviously going to utilize the people they've hired in order to fulfill their goals.  That's the entire point of our economic system.  Utilizing the fact that we are being forced at gunpoint (threat of job loss, subsequent homelessness or starvation, etc) to implement things that nobody wants, as a way to dull hatred for the very fact that this is happening is one of the worst own-goals possible.  Anyone saying this is only attempting to shift blame and shut down the conversation.  They are misinformed and misdirected.  People often make this argument from a place of "empathy" or "understanding," without realizing that they are giving their empathy not to the people being forced to comply with decisions they oppose, but to the uncaring corporate masters above them with their whips and chains.  I do not care that there are Real Human People involved in making this system - everyone knows that, it's completely irrelevant.  It's an argumentative trap to get you to shut up or to force you into arguing against the workers themselves, which completely derails the conversation from the original topic, as it has to this blog post.

The same goes for those arguing "it's not a big deal, who cares, just comply."  Sure, maybe it doesn't affect you, personally.  Good for you.  Where's all that empathy you were just lavishing on the wealthy elites now that your friends are being blocked from communicating with each other because of something they have no control over?  Or those you'll never meet because you've allowed the ruling class to turn more of your rights into privileges?  "Fuck you, got mine" is not something you'd ever tell someone out loud.  Why allow it dictate your behavior?

This sort of toxic mindset comes about, I think, because of American / Western politics.  We're sold the idea of a "left" and a "right" where the "left" is actually just a diet fascist conglomerate who exists to display token resistance to the "right," and the "right" is actually the farthest possible to the right you can go.  People who say the "right" is no good because they correctly identify that racism and genocide and imperialism etc are bad, but still align themselves with the "left" i.e. incumbent blue-ties fall into the trap of themselves becoming a chauvanist that hates their fellow man.  It's the mindset that breeds ideas like "LGB without the T," or the visceral opposition to any political activity except voting.  It's a collection of thought-terminating clichés exactly the same as those used by the farthest of the far-right, only instead of racism and class betrayal because "Them Things Is Stupid," it's racism and class betrayal "For The Good of Everyone."  It's the thought that you've been betrayed, not by the ones above you who have always had incentives to fuck you over, but by your neighbour.  Your friends.  Society.  It's a redirection of hatred from those making the decisions and making things worse for us onto people who might compromise the position you have in the "good graces" of your abusers by being so radical as to oppose policies that fucking kill people, instead of just throwing in the towel and complying.  If you would sacrifice an outgroup to the meat grinder to protect your ability to get fresh tropical fruit at any time of year, or your conception of gay marriage for whatever benefits that grants you, you have missed the actual enemy here, and have forsaken all of humanity for selfish interests.

It's disheartening that people still fall for this, but unsurprising given the 100-some years of red scare bullshit we've had to deal with in this country, among other indoctrination people are exposed to throughout their lives as an American citizen.

Alas, people cool off, dull the sharp edges on their stances, and forget as planned.  It's no longer "I'll never do that!", just "I'll find a way around it" or god forbid "It's not that big of a deal, we should just comply."  The entire point is to pollute the information surrounding the topic enough to manufacture consent or at least apathy.  Repeat the same comforting corporate nothings and what-ifs until people accept them as true instead of thinking critically or repeating the same retorts and long-winded explanations to the same short lies that keep being told.  "Only 10% of users will need to verify!  It won't affect you!  We have other ways!  You don't have to use your ID!  Your face isn't ever sent to us!".  They're just trying to get you to give up so they don't have to do something that hurts their bottom line.  That's ultimately what it comes down to.  Money and time.



Even if things are looking up at the moment, the immediate issue of the platform everyone is using (but not in control of) complying with invasive regulations isn't fixable without intermediary steps.  Incentives are misaligned.  People want things that are not realistic and have only been offered to the great detriment of all of humanity.  Many have been ground down so far that they don't have the effort to give just to sign up for some of these new platforms without a kick in the ass like the age verification scare, and even then, we've become too comfortable with the infinite storage allotted to us by our corporate overlords right within our Chat App, among other things that can never reasonably be provided by alternative platforms.

We could, of course, fix all of the overarching economic systems that will ensure none of this is an issue in the future, but that requires a lot of education and self-reflection on everyone's part before the working people as a whole are able to break out of this miasma we're swimming in and give up the idea that We'll All Be Rich One Day if we Just Comply With The Boss.  It's never been true, and this generation might just be in the right circumstances to realize it more broadly.

We will bring about an alternative to this hell.  A better future is possible.