Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing

It's already been getting pretty unbearable over the last few years anyway, but I'm probably being a grumpy bitch.

A friend of mine had Nitro silently activated on her account. No payment method attached, no transactions, just Nitro. They emailed support who replied with "Oh it's our new promotion! You get to try it for free, no need to pay or add your card. We'll ask for your money once it's done."

Which is absolute batshit evil drug dealer energy. I bet they rolled that promo out while the CFPB's corpse was still warm.

It's obviously not great for the type of community that's about knowledge sharing and learning, and it does suck that a lot of communities went there.

But it's a great platform for simple social servers that are just about communicating. It's super easy to sign up and set up a server. A lot of it just works well for chat.

Them going public probably puts a timer on the service though, so if it happens Discord probably just will get worse.

Yeah me neither. Easy to lose access by mod or discord bans, poor search and export capabilities… crazy option.

Mumble, or maybe TeamSpeak 6 (they skipped 4, had 5 in beta, which now is 6 in beta, oh well).

Depends on what you want. We've been using a TeamSpeak (3) server I'm hosting for years, it works as well as ever (they added a couple of QoL features to the TeamSpeak 3 client during the pandemic as well).

TeamSpeak 6 supports persistent chat via the Matrix protocol and you can register to any server and use that to login to any server using federation (as it uses Matrix under the hood). They now added screen sharing so you got the features covered that most users would want. They unfortunately didn't release self-hostable TS6 server yet (but they say they're working on it) so you can either use an experimental TS5 server (uses Matrix but doesn't support screen sharing) or TS3 server, which doesn't support any of the new stuff. The TS6 client is backwards compatible though.

I just don't think they actually know where they want to go with it yet. They seem to be advertising the whole decentralized thing as that's clearly a differentiating factor from Discord, but on the other hand they didn't exactly prioritize putting out easy-to-setup server software yet. The TS6 client pretty much fully supports TS3 servers including administration, but as far as I know TS6 servers are quite a bit different. There's also "communities" that work with TS6 servers in some way. So it's all a bit of a messy mix between legacy support and their attempt at creating a decentralized Discord.

I hope they get it together and release TS6 server software, find a good way to monetize their efforts and get people to use it.

Some people will say that you could just use Matrix directly instead, but if they manage to make TS6 easy to use and understand, allow easy creation of a server (as a service) and also allow full-featured self-hosting it could turn out well. Plus they have the brand recognition, at least with folks that aren't that young anymore. This might help with adoption. Sure, it's proprietary still, but it's decentralized and uses open protocols (Matrix). You can apparently already join TeamSpeak community chats from your own Matrix server, so they aren't artificially blocking "vanilla" Matrix servers from federating.

Revolt is the closest thing

Matrix (Element or other clients) seems to be the most popular one.