418teapot , 5 months ago

Good for you, you have a short list of requirements out of a chat service and discord perfectly fills your niche. But different people have different requirements for chat, and they don’t align. And network effects force people who have differing requirements to use the service with the most users which sucks.

For instance here are things that I require from any chat service that I use that discord completely falls flat at:

• Ability to run it on my linux machine without using an electron client (npm is a huge mess of supply chain attacks and I refuse to run any software that is likely to contain dependencies from it)
• Ability to run it on my AOSP phone which does not have any google play services installed
• Ability to write software to back up messages without fear of a company changing their API and breaking my backup system