I mostly lurk here, and I know we’ve had this discussion come up a number of times since Discord’s age verification changes were announced, but I figured this video offers value for the walkthrough and comparative analysis. Like me, the video authors aren’t seasoned self-hosters, and I’ve still got a lot to learn. Stoat and Fluxer both look appealing to me for my needs, but Stoat seemingly needs self-hosted servers to route through their master server (unless I’m missing something stupid) and I replicated the 404 for Fluxer’s self-hosting documentation seen in the video, so it’s looking like I’m leaning toward a Matrix server of some kind. Hopefully everyone looking for the Discord exit ramp is closer to finding it after this video.
What’s wrong with team speak? It was a good service circa 2006. And I don’t see how it is significantly less valuable to the “gaming” community. I know it isn’t as feature rich and discord has evolved a lot from its “gamer” origins. I see it used for all kinds of community’s as a catch all system. I guess that is good, but I don’t get much value from it being a centralized point of community building.
Discord is an evolutionary culdesac if we’re talking about its role as a forum killer. It’s terrible for long term information storage and retrieval compared to the more permanent, and search engine indexed, forums it replaced. It’s a never ending waterfall of chat messages that’s hard to search, so the same questions keep coming up again and again.
I tried asking a question on Blender Guru’s discord about his doughnut tutorial, on the channel specifically meant for questions about the doughnut tutorial, and it flew off the top of the screen like a barrel going over Niagara Falls, never to be seen again.