Fuck discord. Another big for-profit platform that is swallowing big chunks of the internet. before discord there were lots of self-organized forums with their own communities and rules. Now I need to register with some big overlord and download their shitty app just to read what has before been just an URL away?
Nah. Right in the browser works great: discord.com/app
You’re going to keep running into a wall thinking of discord like a forum replacement; It’s designed to be an IRC replacement.
The invitation system intentionally creates some privacy so you can build a sense of enclosed community around them, and so you have some control over who sees what. Not having your conversations on full automatic blast to the public is a feature.
IRC works in the browser now thanks to IRCv3. Matrix is another option
The invitation system gives a false sense of privacy. There are bots that crawl publicly posted invites, public IRC channels, etc. Eventually people will understand that IRC and discord are public in the same way we understand usenet to have been public
Yeah, sadly it is the spambots which have killed off independent platforms more than anything else. It sounds like something which could easily give rise to conspiracy theories from people putting the spammers into the same mental baskets as the controlling companies. It isn't the expense of having to leave on a raspberry pi running a server.
