Fluxer.app is an option too, with mobile apps coming planned this summer. But its only in beta still.

:+1: here.

I used to be a huge Discord fanboy; I run a medium-size server, I've dragged all my real-life friends into the platform, and there is, in some ways, not a lot of other great options for group-oriented chat.

But in the last year or two, I've really started to sour on it.

And when I saw that it's a hard requirement for participating in Hardcover in a sustained/deep way (something that sounds amazing and desirable to me, surely; I was a FourSquare superuser back in the day, I love this sort of collaborative crowdsourcing-accuracy / communitybuilding stuff!), it definitely skeeved me out a bit.

I want to present three of my concerns, and I'll try to scope them specifically to how they affect Hardcover. (FWIW - I don't expect to personally have a lot of influence here; I'm mostly posting since Emma specifically asked for more details, above.)

1. The biggest concern is access. Especially given that actual site features are locked behind an active Discord account, and the ability to access Discord, this is easily the biggest. There are an absolute ocean of incidences and reports where people have completely and permanently lost access to their communities, their friend-groups, servers they moderate, or (as is of most personal interest to me), access to collaborate on OSS software they contribute to - with no recourse to appeal. These bans are very often (I'm talking, not a fluke, easily weekly threads) supposedly happening with no base, and mostly appear to be dispatched by LLM-backed analysis models.

   Just to tie this to a concrete example, if you don't follow all this: there was a scam(?)/bait/troll a little while back, where somebody would ask a mildly-nonsense question in a direct-message, like "how many years ago did GamerGate happen"; then, after you'd eye-brow raised, replied with "uh idk 11ish", and moved on with your life, the troll would edit their message to say "how old are you?", and hit the report on your button. Their automated 'analysis' systems would kick in, read only the current content of the messages, and then permanently ban your account and delete your conversation history. This happened to many people, including multiple of my personal friends. (I believe this particular exploit is patched, but it demonstrates how Discord, as an organization, is allocating resources and handling moderation/access.)

   Further, the official stance, as indicated by Discord support-staff when they do bother to reply, is that 'ban/suspension evasion' is a lifetime platform ban regardless of whether the original suspension was valid. If you don't want to wait the .... forever(?)-probably, or maybe six months, without access to your communities (I mean that word literally; access to the actual humans you care about or the actual projects you actively commit code to, which happen to unfortunately only exist on Discord in our current day and age), and you create a second account so you can at least temporarily contribute, or even check in and let everyone know what happened ... from Discord's perspective, that's genuine grounds to permaban your original account for a new reason, and loses you any chance of actually getting that appeal.

   tl;dr, Discord is an access nightmare for something like this, where you're trying to build a community, and trying to gate access to specific interactions and tools.

2. Slightly less imperative, but actually still especially relevant to Hardcover vs. other Discord users - Discord (and Slack, and etc) as a communication-platform is famously 'siloing' of data. Everything that happens on Discord is invisible to Google/Kagi/whatever. It's (again famously) difficult to navigate and search; and it ends up serving as the repository for a ton of organizational knowledge, the One Source Of Truth for important discussions and decisions. This sucks both for the organization and for the community-at-large; that walled-garden, siloed approach to information is exactly opposite to what Hardcover seems to stand for? (And it's definitely a net harm for the Internet as a whole.)

3. Finally, privacy concerns. I'm sure you've seen the recent newses (plural. is that a word? newsi? newsages.) about Discord repeatedly violating users' trust - users as a whole, not just "a few" disgruntled folks (did I say a few? oh, that's right, I only stopped adding new links after the twentieth link with 1,000+ upvotes, up above; and even then only because I got tired of copy-pasting; I guess "a few" is the wrong phrase.) The EFF has spoken out on this (whom I'd trust implicitly on the topic), as well as The Free Software Foundation. Further, it's not just 'bad blood, because they fucked up once'; they tried something else, then went back to doing the first thing that already got them shredded in the news and had it go badly for us in the same way (writeup by Proton, again, a trustworthy commentator on this topic.)

The final point here is simply a gestalt of those: Discord has shown itself to have a particular organizational shape, and set of goals, that I feel are genuinely a poor fit for Hardcover. Not just ethically, but functionally, moving forward. They will continue to underresource their moderation/support teams; they will continue to build and push features that silo data and keep users on-platform; they will continue to treat the balance of "user-privacy-against-regulatory-constraints" as an easy-win, who-gives-a-crap-about-the-users, we'll-just-find-the-lowest-bidder problem domain instead of the high-priority concern it should be.

I don't think that's an unreasonable way to run a business; I don't think that's evil. I do think I wouldn't trust that track-record with a ten-foot-pole, especially when I'm trying to collaborate with other openness-minded, sharing-hearted, community-builders.

Final notes, because I'm sympathetic to small teams, and communities of this shape (paid, quality software; community collaboration; open resources and APIs ...); and I've done a lot of the research on this thanks to desperately hoping to move my own communities away from this platform, slowly, nowadays:

• There really isn't a fantastic, wholesale alternative. Everything I've seen has significant downsides. Major contenders with actual staying-power tend to be Zulip, Discourse, and Matrix; but each is a fairly significant user-experience switchup from Discord vibes.

• Under prior art, I'll file: Mastodon, the org, is in the middle of migrating from Discord to Zulip; Matt Cengia did a great writeup of the options at the time, but it's getting to be a little aged, now; in a similar "oldied but a goodie" vein; the GNOME folks did a deep-dive into the topic (not from a Discord-specific perspective.) Farthest back, the Clojure community moving off of Slack for similar reasons again investigated the options fairly thoroughly from a community-moderation standpoint. Finally and far more recently, if you're YouTube-brained, Linus Tech Tips reviewed some of the options themselves.

• Before writing this all up, I was leaning pro-Matrix-as-a-replacement, having used it a bit, and seeing how it's both fairly mature and structurally familiar to Discord communities; but I saw enough "we tried Matrix after leaving Discord/Slack and hated it" posts from real-world communities, and enough pro-Zulip retrospectives, that I'm actually maybe leaning towards Zulip as my personal hobbyhorse? Unsure.

• Finally, one of the best options (not an alternative, but a tool) is bridging, for something like Hardcover that has an established presence on Discord. That allows ownership of the community, searching/public access/archival, and alternative-access-routes for Discord-suspendees ... without forcing all the existing users to necessarily leave the UI they're familiar with. Take a look at Matrix's own documentation here, but there's also resources for other platforms that aren't dependent on the Matrix protocol.

Hi! I'd encourage you to provide a description on why this is important to you, and/or what alternatives/third-party solutions you would like us to use instead.