Pack, how do we feel about alternatives for Discord. Discord has been progressively worse lately, and the topic of alternatives has been quite lively.
We did some research here and there, but currently, our eyes are on one called Fluxer. It's an open-source, near 1:1 clone of Discord with the potential for self-hosted instances. In less than 2 hours, I was able to copy the SCG discord to it, as well as setup a bridge for Poe to go back and forth as a test.
I am looking for feedback from anyone interested in sharing on what we should consider supporting! Mind you, the plan right now isn't to abandon discord, but to offer a bridge for those looking to leave it so they can remain in contact.
I should go with the approach of trying to cover as many cases as possible, but it'd be far less stress on me and the other admins to wrangle things to 1 or 2 options.
I feel all of the options I've glanced at, or heard about, are various stages of questionable; Fluxer in specifics looks very "what if mastodon but discord" and I didn't see any real way on how it plans on going forward with handling age verification bs -- based on how they assessed Mississippi's law, I expect there will be "fun" if it turns out that more states pull as heavy-handed verification as Mississippi did (or if any of the 13 states already called out in Fluxer's blog posts for their laws get more restrictive interpretations) because that'd sunder more users from interacting with us at all.
Also, it still hasn't had a 1.0 release yet, so it's very much a beta platform doing beta platform/client things... and they're trying to push people to using their testing client, it looks like, for reporting bugs -- the v2 announcement in June calls out using git for bug reporting and there's a pinned "issue" on git made the next month by the head going "no no, use our Canary client and report bugs there", which makes me go -.- because why tell everyone "hey, we have a git, report bugs there!" if you're going to shortly after tell everyone to use a testing client to report bugs through instead...
Basically, fluxer's not "released" yet, it smells of trying to be the mastodon (or what bluesky wanted their thing to be -- an api and client you could use but not a platform itself) to Discord's twitter, and I'm squinty at it because it's gonna run into all the same problems discord's had and is gonna likely run into the same "starts getting advertisers and promotions and more pay-exclusive features and possibly running to 'going public' if the back end's funding doesn't stay enough to cover costs" like every other company trying to replace a garbage current thing runs into. Discord replaced Skype and when it got to Skype levels of user access ran into all the problems that lead to Skype being bought up and torn apart for pieces by Microsoft, except Discord's not found a big company (or gone public itself yet) to keep it afloat/tear it apart for pieces.