It is the same as what everyone did after the reddit fiasco i.e. protest, boycott, grudgingly use it while complaining and then finally accept the change.

May be this discord episode will have better outcome for the masses.

It seems like the answer is pretty obvious. That subset of the community stops using it and uses something else, and the others either follow them or don't.

You, if you're not in the first group, can continue to use both to communicate with everyone, but some of them lose the ability to communicate with each other.

The ideal outcome is for everyone to stop using the intolerable thing and switch to a tolerable thing. That's even what often happens over time, but not always immediately. Probably do anything you can to make it happen faster.

We start a new app. Opensource Discord, Self-hosted, federated. Serving that subsection that cares about privacy and security.

Discord is a good design, and should be replicated rapidly with mutations from competitors galore.

Remember when Tumbler banned porn? People migrated to other platforms like Reddit, and it died.

Musk being a Nazi made twitter lose big enough chunks of their community to start Bluesky. Not big enough to do any real damage to the platform, but it still provided critical mass to a fledgling app.

WhatsApp having a sketchy relationship with the US government boosted Signal.

Sooooo, what is a good discord replacement?

Most everyone will go down the path of least resistance. A few outliers will try to resist, get old and/or tired. A few of the few will reach acceptance, comprehend the serenity prayer. A few of the few of the few will reach enlightenment.

What you do depends on where you're at - statistically, you'll go down the path of least resistance which is totally, totally fine.

If this happened 15+ years ago, a huge chunk of the userbase likely would've migrated to alternatives, potentially resulting in Discord being replaced and falling into irrelevance.

Today, though, no chance that happens. The current generation literally grew up with it, same for most of the other established social media apps. The concept of alternatives largely does not exist for them. And besides, they were probably already sending pictures of themselves and other personal data to each other through the app, so it's not like Discord doesn't already have all of that.

Try to tell them it's a bad idea. And be ready to leave that community if nothing changes. That's pretty much the way of life for an internet vagrant. Maybe you hope the community migrates too. Maybe you try to remake the community. But those aren't in your control.

I left Facebook, left Reddit (never really had a Twitter). This won't be different.

People tried warning that moving all your discussion forums into a proprietary, closed, unsearchable platform was a bad idea. And it was. But nobody cared.

Shake your head and move on.

It's not like we haven't seen closed source applications become hostile to their users before. And it's not like we didn't warn people about it.

One of the starkest social desirability biases in tech is between federated and centralized platforms. Most people, in public, say they support distributed, federated systems, but when push comes to shove, they all use centralized platforms anyway.