Several years ago I had a Discord community with hundreds of users. This was an IRL community, so it was very difficult to abandon but I did anyway. Tried to get people to leave but they were unwilling. So I handed it off to another member and deleted my account. Now that admin has contacted me again and let me know everyone is ready to leave. I found Fluxer yesterday while poking around #Discord on Mastodon and I think we’re going to end up there.
Fluxer is still very early in development and they have plans for many advanced features in the roadmap but it’s very feature-rich today. Current monetization plan is freemium + Patreon-like monetization. I understand that may be a dealbreaker for some but there aren’t a ton of other great options, and everything is open source, and self-hostable, and if you do, you get all of the premium features for free, while still communicating with the main instance over federation (in roadmap). That still leaves it susceptible to Mattermost-style enshittification but honestly rolling back updates solves most of those style of problems.
It’s between commet on matrix or fluxer for me, self-hosted.
The e2ee of matrix is preferred but it’s still a bit too user unfriendly, and screenshare is not performant enough for gaming requiring self-hosting a livekit SFU.
Fluxer similarly uses livekit and will be self hostable and really is the most discord-like 1:1 replacement, but I agree both are alpha at best with commet somewhat ahead.
I’m looking forward to how things shake out. The only certainty is discord is dead for me.
Also you can download commet today and the alternative is promises.
The screen sharing for games is not bad, it depends what you’re used to. I’ve had some Discord headaches before 2022, but game sharing was always the main thing they had even when almost nothing else worked that well.
Also depends on your connection. The shittification throttling on non Nitro accounts tends to screw me over at home.