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.
It’s nearly exactly the same benefits as discord nitro had in 2020. Add a banner, send emojis from other servers, increased bio and upload size, 2x the communities, animated avatars, higher video quality.
Of course I would prefer for these things to be free, but I understand they want this to be profitable and as long as they aren’t going discord’s route of monetizing every area of the platform I do understand it.
I find it also helps the cost is the same as old Nitro was which is pretty affordable IMO.