Mastodawn

So You Want To Write An Open Source Discord Replacement

Things you don’t need:
- federation/distributed systems
- multiparty end-to-end encryption
- an entirely new operating system kernel specially designed to—

Things you DO need:
- a user interface that is Normal
- the ability to use languages other than English and writing systems other than Latin
- higher standards of user experience than how irc actually works in the real world
- any fucking clue how Discord works and why people use it

I have muted replies to this post due to the usual reasons

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abadidea Feb 12

note that I didn’t even touch on audio/video calls and screen sharing, which are HEAVILY used features of discord, but we can start with “a solid chatroom experience” as the minimum viable replacement; if you can’t get that part right, discussing the rest with a straight face is clownshoes

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Christopher Snowhill

@0xabad1dea I was told that I should not want all of these things in a single app, because it could mean a single point of failure for a whole community or a given selection of users. So I should instead want all of my contacts and services spread out amongst a huge selection of different things, any number of which can fail at any given time, but what are the chances that all of them fail all at once?