An era of the internet is ending, and we’re watching it happen practically in real time. Twitter has been on a steep and seemingly inexorable decline for, well, years, but especially since Elon Musk bought the company last fall and made a mess of the place. Reddit has spent the last couple of months self-immolating in similar ways, alienating its developers and users and hoping it can survive by sticking its head in the sand until the battle’s over. (I thought for a while that Reddit would eventually be the last good place left, but… nope.) TikTok remains ascendent — and looks ever more likely to be banned in some meaningful way. Instagram has turned into an entertainment platform; nobody’s on Facebook anymore…
Sure, Discord chats are great, particularly for smaller communities/IRL friends. But as an alternative to subreddits or classic forums they’re absolute rubbish. Lemmy seems to be the only real game in that town for now.
And discord is slowly moving towards a similar level of corporate takeover and shifting it to “keep up” with every competitor app they can imagine. So I don’t even know how long that one will last.