Several years ago I had a Discord community with hundreds of users. This was an IRL community, so it was very difficult to abandon but I did anyway. Tried to get people to leave but they were unwilling. So I handed it off to another member and deleted my account. Now that admin has contacted me again and let me know everyone is ready to leave. I found Fluxer yesterday while poking around #Discord on Mastodon and I think we’re going to end up there.
Fluxer is still very early in development and they have plans for many advanced features in the roadmap but it’s very feature-rich today. Current monetization plan is freemium + Patreon-like monetization. I understand that may be a dealbreaker for some but there aren’t a ton of other great options, and everything is open source, and self-hostable, and if you do, you get all of the premium features for free, while still communicating with the main instance over federation (in roadmap). That still leaves it susceptible to Mattermost-style enshittification but honestly rolling back updates solves most of those style of problems.
As long as they’re federated, does it matter if there’s multiple different softwares? Wouldn’t they be able to communicate with each other, so it’s not like each would be in its own silo?
Or can matrix only talk with matrix, IRC with IRC, XMPP with XMPP, etc?
As long as it doesn’t result in silos, I think having multiple choices is a good thing. It gives you options, and can grow in multiple directions to suit different needs. Plus there’s redundancy so no single point of failure. Part of what’s good about open source is that anyone can fork it, right?
perhaps, but you still get feature fragmentation… things like custom emojis, stickers, what video codecs to support (heck i reckon they’d probably focus on chat first and video would only be available within the same app until some organisation effort happened), etc
you can see that a little bit on lemmy with the difference in how blocks work on lemmy vs piefed… piefed blocks on lemmy look like a shadow ban because lemmy doesn’t support the error style piefed uses… i think that’d it anyway
point being: just because software can exchange data and have the same problem domain and even in many cases use the same basic terminology, there can still be plenty of more advanced features that aren’t interoperable
re matrix, it can talk to anything… kinda… the matrix protocol has the idea of “bridges” built into it, so they should be able to translate between your client talking to the server via matrix protocol, and other things like XMPP, IRC, etc (at least in theory)
A lot of these aren’t at all.
Not a word, my dude, the same way happies isn’t a word.
“happy” isn’t a noun, so no one would try to make it plural.
“Software” is a noun, but the plural version is often the same, i.e. “installed a lot of software.”
But since I was discussing “multiple different” instances of software, it made sense to treat each one as a discrete “software,” thus I used “softwares” to communicate “multiple different discrete instances of software.”
Just like how “people” is plural for “persons” but “peoples” means “multiple groups of people.”