Well, stable for now. Give Discord another two decades to figure itself out and see what happens. When it hits the fan, there won't be a "Discord 2" right next door that everyone can migrate to by changing a URL.
I am patiently waiting for Discord to be sold to some corporation such as Microsoft so we can all move on to the next big thing. I wonder what it will be. Probably not Matrix, but definitely something.
I watched your old, old SM3.9 videos as a child. I'm sitting in an Etterna Discord channel right now wishing I had the wherewithal to write a 3rd party Rust client. What serendipity. Hope you're well.
I don't think it is the Microsoft part or that anything becomes evil merely by changing hands. Just that the network effect of chat clients or social media platforms in general is so finicky that changing hands might be enough to cause some splintering of people off to the next thing.
I feel like it is getting longer and longer between the next biggest social media, but there has been a lot of chat clients over the past 2 decades. I don't think many people have any company loyalty in this market. The main thing people care about is that the people they want to chat with are already there. If people start moving to something new for whatever reason then everyone else will likely follow.
You say that as if MS buying GitHub, and the Copilot training data stuff hasn't driven all sorts of people to alternatives like Gitlab or self-hosted solutions like forgejo.
I literally have no idea what forgejo is, I do not think most people have heard of it.
Gitlab's reported growth numbers are down year-over-year. Meanwhile GitHub reached its user growth target of 100M developers an entire year ahead of schedule.
I do not believe that any large portion of people are migrating to GitHub alternatives. Most people like / are excited by Copilot, not the other way around.
Meanwhile, IRC remains there, working, independent of big companies, and low enough resourced that you can host it without too much trouble on very modest hardware and bandwidth requirements.
