Many very small services will just not bother with compliance. And the risk of enforcement on them might be low.

If you use a federated alternative, you can switch to a server that doesn’t bother with compliance without losing your contacts.

Many of the laws don’t specify how the age check should be done. There are more privacy-friendly ways to comply, like running a server for your friends or family and already knowing they’re over 18.

I agree with you, and I think there’s a tension between the technical solution (meeting users where they are) and political solution (persuading the users to come to our way of thinking).

The technical solution is an unequal fight. We have to provide a familiar and equally good experience - integrating everything into these easy-to-use everything apps, on a shoestring budget compared to the proprietary apps. And, without the “education”, users will converge on particular instances because that’s what’s most convenient, giving a lot of power to particular players in the network.

If we can persuade people to prioritise freedom over convenience, then we end up with a much more resilient userbase who will go help with the existing networks.

I don’t know how we can make people care, though. The free software movement has been trying for 40 years to make regular users care, but the message only really lands with developers. There’s certainly more interest in taking down big tech nowadays, but convenience still seems to come first.

Searching for a single Discord alternative may be asking the wrong question however. Discord itself is an extensive bundle of functions smashed together: real-time chat, persistent forums and documentation, voice chats, events and even games. Rather than replicating that bundle in a single app, the open social web may be converging on a different model entirely, where specialised services handle specific functions while sharing identity and social connections across protocol boundaries. These individual services themselves do not have to share the same protocol underneath, and may actually work better if they don’t, with each protocol handling the part it is best designed for.

This is the most interesting part to me. Can users be persuaded to have different expectations from the proprietary apps they’re used to?

Whenever these sudden migrations happen, the alternatives that win seem to be the ones that look and behave as similarly to the proprietary app as possible, as the people switching don’t care about decentralisation, and are much more sensitive to any changes in experience.

I think we need to create separate experiences, backed by the same protocol, for people who care about decentralisation and freedom (and discover the fediverse naturally, outside of these big migrations), and those that show up during the big migrations.

For the first group, we want software that’s easy to self-host, customisable, spreads users between instances, ultimately empowers them to have the exact experience they want. For the second group, we should just copy the exact experience of the proprietary networks as much as the protocol allows.

Of course, the risk is that we get even larger influxes of people who never had to learn the community norms. Is that worth it? - I’m not sure.

It looks like The Thing found a Blåhaj to me!

Zulip has a big jump, but worth pointing out that this is part of a wider trend, and other software has seen bigger jumps.

The export function doesn’t include the legend, so the order from top to bottom by the final day of the graph is:

• Matrix
• Signal
• XMPP
• Zulip
• Stoat
• Rocket.Chat
• Mattermost
• Discourse

Thanks for introducing me to this tool. I hadn’t come across it before and it’s pretty nifty!

The client looks good. Having an SDK to bridge between the XMPP world and UI world makes sense to me. It’s a direction many projects are going in.

I’m frustrated that they require a CLA that allows them to relicense the project. I don’t want to contribute to a project where one player gets more power compared to everyone else. As far as I know, no other developers in the XMPP world have the same dynamic.

I use mythic beasts. They are not the very cheapest, but they offer predictable pricing and just charge a fixed increase compared to the price they pay their supplier. You can trust that they won’t mess around with the renewal price or arbitrary extra fees.

For my .org domains I pay ~£15 per year, but if you don’t care about the tld, you can get some for ~£6 per year (the costs on the website exclude VAT, but if you buy multiple years at a time, the amortised cost including VAT ~= the price excluding VAT).

I personally prefer browsing the web with JavaScript disabled, and using search engines like Marginalia to find simple websites. I don’t see a big difference in experience between browsing these websites in lynx or edbrowse, vs using Gemini.

I get the appeal of having everyone on the network share the same culture and values, but I prefer to just find the people doing that in the wider network of the web.

Still, I’m happy it exists and that people enjoy using it. To each their own!

I never stop being amazed by running snac on the server, with toot and tuba as clients, and seeing everything work seamlessly with everything else. None of this software ever expected to interact with the others - and it all works!

I should have the same feeling about email, the web, XMPP etc, but I’m just so used to those that it isn’t awe-inspiring to me anymore.

I get you. I can never think of anything that would be interesting to post or ask in the more discussion-oriented communities, let alone choose a specific one to post in. I definitely find comments easier, as well as posting to more niche communities. I feel the scope is usually better defined there.

Would you say it’s about not knowing if your post would be accepted in the community, or just finding the best place for it? If it’s the latter, AskLemmy could be good for general questions, or failing that, any of the casual chat communities such as !chat@beehaw.org.

As long as your post meets the rules of the community/instance, I feel it’s better to post somewhere than not at all - people can always crosspost it elsewhere if they like.