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lanfeust6today at 3:32 PM1 replyview on HN

The corollary to times changing is that periodically what's old is new again. We can't have our cake and eat it too; if the gripe is that for-profit services become enshittified, then necessarily FOSS should be given a shot, but adding to that I'd say some of these platforms re-invent the wheel or add a coat of paint. What you can do with Discord you can already accomplish with a mix of IRC, vbulletin forums, email, Mastodon, and and others in decoupled fashion.

I take the point that a one-stop-shop is nice and probably viable leveraging this tech. At the same time, users already use a slew of different social media platforms that are usually redundant or overlap in some way. For most their mode of consumption is "the algorithm", endless feed of videos. Discord's core offering is not that, it's an orchestration of chat, video-chat, forums, notifications. It's a swiss-army knife.


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pmdrtoday at 5:12 PM

What we really need to get rid of is platforms. vBulletin sells you software. It's up to you what you choose to use it for. Platforms like Discord and Reddit need to have final say on a lot of things because they need investor/advertiser cash at some point. And by 'get rid of' I mean avoid using them in settings that would be severely impacted by a platform's decision. For example, I don't want to have to upload my ID just to ask a question on the DaisyUI discord server.

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