Discord, Beeper, and "Fire Exits"

Technology
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I recently read a really good article on how all social media should have fire exits. Which made me think of Discord, how I (and many others) feel trapped there, and the fact Matrix does have bridges to Discord! For text and files, at the very least.

Unfortunately, the bridges require a level of technical knowledge that I and many others don’t have. One of the bridges out right reccomends just using a third-party app called Beeper if simply using the bridge was all you wanted to do.

Beeper claims to be an “all in one” chat app. Or at least “all of the well-known stuff in one”. Conceptually, I think this is a good and much needed idea. It forces fire exists into chat apps that otherwise don’t have them. However, Beeper has two big red flags for me:

  1. They mention having premium features, but don’t specify what they are on their website.
  2. They were recently bought by Automattic. As someone who has seen what their CEO has done to Tumblr, I do not have faith in this app’s future lol.

Still, I’m throwing this post into the wild because I wonder how realistic it is to make another Beeper. Or a Discord-Matrix bridge that’s much more reasonable for the average user to set up. A lot of people would like to leave Discord, and I think the only way to manage that at this point is to take some sledgehammers to their walls and make our own fire exits.

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I never got into discord so excuse my dumb questions.

Is it the “big” servers or the “small” servers for friend groups that keep people on Discord?

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Both. I’m in a big server due to an obligation, and otherwise in a handful of small personal servers with friends who don’t hang out much anywhere else. I can’t wait to get rid of the former, but I’m conflicted about the latter.

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Maybe I’m missing something about the linked post, but it seems to be arguing for the existence of alternative services so people can switch. In which case, I don’t know that alternatives to Discord are rare or non-existent. There’s a lot of different apps and sites that let people instant message each other and even create groups within them… no? I’m pretty sure that even projects imitating old AIM or MSN already let you do this!

The problem with all other services vs. Discord seems to be something also mentioned in that post: what other people are using. If your main reason for using Discord over any other service is that all your friends or communities are on there, the mere existence of alternatives probably won’t be enough.

Edit: To be clear, I’m not putting down your post or anything! I’m honestly confused by the idea that there’s a lack of alternatives to Discord.

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Oh yeah, there ARE plenty of alternatives to Discord. That’s not what I or the linked post are saying.

The post talks about what the author calls “fire exits”, the user’s ability to easily leave a social platform without consequences (in this case, without leaving behind any connections on that platform).

Mastodon has good fire exits; do you not like the rules of your server? You can just move, and take your followers + followed accounts with you with the click of a button. Even on seperate servers, your friends can still reach you. Heck, if you don’t like how Mastodon functions, you can use another service entirely such as Sharkey.

Email has decent fire exits. You can switch email providers, and all your friends can email you, but you have to manually tell each one what your new email address is. Still possible, just less convinent.

Discord has no fire exits (well, it does, but we’ll get to that). Sure, you CAN switch to a service like Signal or Matrix, but then you can’t talk to your friends on Discord. You can only use Discord to do that (or at least, that is the design). You’d have to convince your friends to leave Discord, who would have to convince their friends, and all of you would have to abandon any large communities you’re in, and none of that is going to happen. As Discord gets worse and worse, we’re all stuck in the (metaphorical) flaming building.

Of course, like my post says, people have made their own fire exits for Discord. Ways for you to talk to people on Discord without having to be on Discord, creating a bridge that would allow people to actually choose what chat app they want to use instead of being stuck with what everyone else uses. But they’re either Beeper (which I’ve already shared my issues with) or they require a lot of technical knowledge to set up. And this is what I want to see friendlier alternatives to: not nessisarily more Discord alternatives, but ways to link Discord to these alternatives so people can more easily move between them.

I hope none of this sounds rude or condescending ^^; was just trying to explain what I meant the best I could. Probably should have built on the blog post more instead of just linking it.

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Both, at least in my experience! I could live without the big servers tbh, but my friends are more hesitant to leave those communities behind. So, even if there’s a degree of separation, the large servers are ultimately still keeping me on Discord.

Everything’s sort of interconnected in one horrible mess of cables that somehow still works. Can’t tell where something begins and ends. Need a way to just pick the ball up and plop it elsewhere, if you’ll excuse my use of weird metaphors.

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Frankly I’ve got some misgivings about the “fire exit” metaphor because I associate it with how Cory Doctorow treats decentralization as an excuse from the money question. With that said, I can see how the idea is comparatively more applicable to things like instant messaging and chat room services, where you’re a lot more dependent on the cooperation and sign-on of other users in order to use the thing at all.

Anyway, to address your question:

I asked someone I know about this, and they said it should be doable, in theory. I have no idea how costly it would be, though.

For what it’s worth, the IWC chat is bridged between Discord, Slack, and IRC. I can’t really speak to the technical specifics on that, but the wiki says it’s accomplished via go-discord-irc.

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Oh intresting. I’m not sure how I feel about this money question, but that’s probably a far more complicated discussion for another thread lol. For what it’s worth, decentralization doesn’t have to be the only fire exit: both Tumblr and YouTube, at least for now, have very limited fire exits in the form of RSS feeds. If you’re fine with not posting or commenting and just want to follow, then RSS is good enough.

I do appreciate the answer to my question though! I’ll have to look more into your other links later, when I’m a little less sleepy, but they are very nice to have on hand as references.

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