I’ve been told that everyone uses discord so I should jump on the bandwagon. I disagree!
Discord is a decent platform and it has some strengths. A real problem in software adoption is the “Network Effect.” It does not matter if you have the best tech if all your friends are using other things.
One of the attractive features to off-grid, decentralized mesh networks is the ability to have a say in the technology that we include in our lives. It is antithetical to that ideal to lock into proprietary vendor platforms and hope for the best. Recently discord threatened to enact “age verification” but quickly rescinded that idea when the community lashed out at them. While that is a nice win in the short-term it doesn’t actually solve the problem. They will try again at some point. Each attempt will come with better marketing, or perhaps government legislation, that helps to seal the deal.
Is age verification really that bad? Like many idealistic endeavors, age verification sounds great on the surface. We want to protect the kids and help ensure they have a bright future. Some corporations will offload the entire process to a third party vendor and then advertise they do not have the ability to use your sensitive information because they do not have access to it. Technically that is true! But do we trust the third party? Can that company keep your information private? How long until they get hacked and that information is leaked?
It isn’t just about the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that is included in the process. It is the bigger picture about controlling our own data and keeping the internet as free and decentralized as possible.
Our Zulip server has a whole section that guests can visit and browse without creating an account or logging in. No gatekeeping. Zulip is also an open source platform. We run it on our own hardware and have a community group license to use the software with no user restrictions. That means that it is essentially free for us to run the server and for you to use the service. We also get to use it on our own domain.
Overall Zulip has been a great piece of software to integrate into our community’s online presense. It helps us to manage and coordinate our mesh network and allows us the freedom to communicate without the rules of big tech. It is the way the old internet used to work and how we think the future internet should be built.
Let’s break out of the big tech bubble and build our social and communication networks with decentralized tools and take back the internet.