So I’ve started using Ublock Origin on my firefox on Ubuntu, and I noticed that it showed no blocked trackers on the webapp of discord. I’m well aware of the perils of using any service that doesnt support e2ee for private messaging and i hate discord for that and being corporate, But i was wondering how bad would it be for browsing communities on it given the supposed and seemingly “lack” of trackers detected for it.
While the network effect is a real thing and its quite hard for people to realize the need for migrating to a better project, projects like Revolt Chat set a good precedent on the fact that one can have a functioning, accessible public community without compromising browser privacy, given the open source and self-hostable nature of it (lack of federation though) and probable future e2ee for DMs. If nothing, matrix is always there.
The corporate existence is visible in the constant bombarding to buy nitro or gift nitro, even going as far as including the option in the message bar itself.
Revolt is an amazing project and has a lot of great energy behind it, but one must not forget the issue that is scale. Discord is absolutely humongous, serving millions of concurrent users with pretty good performance overall. I’d love to see Revolt reach such userbase, but realistically, two 2nd year CS students are unlikely to get there. For a platform to reach such volume there needs to be money, which is likely to come with strings attached. Though what you say is true – Revolt has strong open-source roots while Discord has always been a VC fueled company, so I’ll keep my hopes hehe
Regarding Nitro, I agree it is a bit too much, but I actually think a subscription of sorts with bigger upload limits, streaming quality and so on (the original point of Nitro) is a pretty nice model to sustain a platform since it helps cover the cost of all needed infrastructure. Of course, Discord Nitro has since gained a lot of extra fluff and nothing impedes Discord from both selling a subscription and our data (which they’re likely to do), but the premise is quite reasonable.
I would not disagree that a subscription model is viable for a live service.