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.



perhaps, but you still get feature fragmentation… things like custom emojis, stickers, what video codecs to support (heck i reckon they’d probably focus on chat first and video would only be available within the same app until some organisation effort happened), etc
you can see that a little bit on lemmy with the difference in how blocks work on lemmy vs piefed… piefed blocks on lemmy look like a shadow ban because lemmy doesn’t support the error style piefed uses… i think that’d it anyway
point being: just because software can exchange data and have the same problem domain and even in many cases use the same basic terminology, there can still be plenty of more advanced features that aren’t interoperable
re matrix, it can talk to anything… kinda… the matrix protocol has the idea of “bridges” built into it, so they should be able to translate between your client talking to the server via matrix protocol, and other things like XMPP, IRC, etc (at least in theory)