> the mild effort to find an alternative solution?

Calling it a "mild effort" assumes skills that older generations took for granted but many young people seem to have been actively trained out of. We're past the era where I take for granted that aspiring programmers need to have the basics of a terminal or shell explained to them, into one where they might need an explanation for the basics of a file system and paths. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that hardly any of them could touch-type, either. (I wonder what the speed record is for cell phone text input...)

Yes, they can query a search engine (kind of) or, I guess nowadays, ask ChatGPT. But there's going to be more to setting up an alternative than that. And they need to have the idea that an alternative might exist. (After all, they're asking ChatGPT, not some alternative offering from a company that provides alternatives to Google services....)

> I don't understand why (mostly) young people put so much effort into remaining customers of a service that is actively hostile against them

The Network Effect.

That's it. Their friends are there so they're there.

Because being principled damages your social opportunities. Trust me. I resisted Instagram for years. When I finally gave in I instantly had access to more events, was able to connect with more people, felt less excluded. I realised all that I had missed out on.

I don't think asking people to abandon a platform works. We need to fight for open protocols.

You’re ignoring the obvious reason, aside from the network effect: there are no alternative solutions. Some people are building Discord alternatives but they are far from production-ready, often lacking critical features (e.g. Matrix not being able to delete rooms, or still having trouble with decrypting messages). It is simply the case at this point in time that Discord is factually the least bad option for many many use cases.

I don't control most of the discord communities I'm in. Some have been going a long time, and every platform migration sheds and shreds members. The 'mild effort' to move an old community to a new platform more often than not killed the community

Why do middle aged people still use Facebook marketplace rather than another platform? Because even if you put in the effort to use something different, you’ll be the only one there.

The effort to coordinate everyone to move at the same time is bordering on impossible.

Most people don’t really care that their privacy is violated, at least not any more than a superficial “oh well it’s obvious they’re doing that, but what can you do about it!”, no point switching platform if there’s no one there to talk to.

The network effect as seen in the other comments plays a big part, but also discord offers a useful service that really nobody else does well. there's a lot wrong with it but you can still create a community in a few clicks and you have text messages, photos, videos, gifs, voice chats, screenshare, a comprehensive permission/role system, tons of bots.. all for free and without needing to be too tech savvy, that's pretty damn cool.

Network effects apply but also there is no equivalent service that combines all of the salient functionality of discord.

No other chat platform has as many seamless features and such a big userbase. The friction of verifying the identity for a random person that doesn't care about privacy is not really a big deal compared to the downgrade that migrating to another platform would be.

When I was a kid, we'd host the pics we want to post on forums on geocities and rename the file extensions to .txt to get past its "no hotlinking images" policy. So it's not like much has changed.

There are a lot of barriers between kids and better solutions, one of which is that anything needs a domain and a server, and that means a credit card.

I think for a lot of people (me included) Discord isn't just a chat service like WhatsApp but more of a "home base" where you can hang out with all your friends, make new friends, share media, chat, play games together, stream games to each other, etc.

In the gaming sphere it's so universally used that all the friends you've ever made while gaming are on it, as well as all your chat history, and the entire history of whatever server you met them on. And if you want to make new friends, say to play a particular game, it's incredibly easy to find the official game server and start talking to people and forming lobbies with them.

My main friend group in particular has a server that we've had running since we were teenagers (all in our mid-20s now) which is a central place for all of the conversations we've ever had, all of the pictures we've ever sent each other, all the videos we've ever shared, and so on. That's something I search back through frequently looking for stuff we talked about years ago.

So I'm not saying it's impossible to move, but understand that it would require:

- Intentionally separating from the entire gaming sphere, making it so, so much harder to make new friends or talk to people. - Getting every single one of your friends that you play games with to agree to downloading and signing up for this new service (in my case that would be approx. a dozen people) - Accepting that this huge repository of history will be wiped out when moving to the new service (I suppose you could always log back in and scroll through it, but it's at least _harder_ to access, and is separated from all your new history)

On top of this, every time I've looked for capable alternatives to Discord I've come up empty-handed. Nothing else, as far as I can tell supports free servers, the ability to be in multiple servers, text chat divided into separate channels, optional threaded communication, voice chat joinable at any time with customizable audio setup (voice gate, push-to-talk, etc), game streaming from the voice chat at any time, and some "friend" system so that DMs and private calls can be made with each other. And even if I found one, then again I can't express enough that in the gaming sphere effectively _zero_ people use it or even know what it is.

Anyways, I'm not saying that nothing could make me abandon Discord, I'm just saying that doing so is a tremendous effort, and the result at the end will be a significantly worse online social life. So not a mild inconvienence.

Because they are used to follow limitations since the day they were born, and have all the time in the world

> remaining customers of a service that is actively hostile against them and that they do not like

And yet here we all are, still in an uproar every time GitHub goes down. Change is slow, we can't all leave GitHub in a day. Same with Discord users.

I'm more than ready to leave if push really comes to shove. Wouldn't be the first time.

From experience, I know if I leave that few of my friends will follow. So I understand the resistance.

I mean, it's called a social network

I am sure that is part of the appeal to the developing mind, the adversarial nature.

>remaining customers of a service that is actively hostile against them

because that's not how they view it. For most Gen Z users and younger their digital identity already is their identity and they have no problem verifying it because the idea of being anonymous on a social network defeats the purpose of being there in the first place.