THE BIG ONE

Total website redesign.
Multiple new blog posts.
Routine updates on several pages.
Too much to list, even if I remembered it all.
Remind me not to put this git repo on any portfolios.

1 files changed, 24 insertions, 20 deletions

diff --git a/blog/posts/discord/index.md b/blog/posts/discord/index.md
index 8f1f43e..5b88a92 100644
--- a/blog/posts/discord/index.md
+++ b/blog/posts/discord/index.md
@@ -4,11 +4,11 @@ So Discord's been on their bullshit again (as if they were ever off of it). This
 
 I was originally going to center this article around the pros and cons of different alternatives to Discord, and I do still want to touch on that, but I think it's important to express my reasoning in detail here; it will be easier to avoid another situation like the one we have now with Discord if we know what's actually wrong with it on a more fundamental level than which administrative decisions of theirs are bad. How do we ensure wherever we go next won't pull the exact same crap?
 
-## So why is Discord bad?
+# So why is Discord bad?
 
 Let's be honest with ourselves up front: In many ways, Discord, as a service, fucking owns. It has a ton of fun features not found really anywhere else and the quality of its voice, video, and live streaming functions are tough to beat. However, these advantages come at the cost of Discord's most significant fundamental problem: It's a proprietary, centralized, VC-funded platform. It gets the funding it needs to be so awesome from investors who expect a return on their investments, and it is legally obligated to put creating that return above all other priorities.
 
-### Enshittification - The Capitalism Problem
+## Enshittification - The Capitalism Problem
 
 It's possible, even probable, that Discord started out with the simple, noble goal of being the best Chat for Gamers™, creating an alternative to the problems present with its predecessors Skype and Teamspeak, and whatever chat functionality your favourite games had. At this, it succeeded spectacularly, for a time. However, the entire model of the VC-funded startup is fundamentally unsustainable.
 
@@ -31,7 +31,7 @@ Reddit did not need to do this. Reddit was doing fine. This was purely a cash-gr
 
 I'm not saying they will, but Discord could absolutely do the same thing, and it wouldn't surprise me if it came to that. Imagine if Discord bot developers needed to pay API fees like that. There'd certainly be a lot fewer Discord bots, and probably a lot more paywalled ones among the remainder. Discord absolutely needs to become profitable in order to be sustainable, and it will do whatever it needs to to that end or die. Even then, it can't just break even; capitalism demands endless growth. Discord will keep getting worse as long as there's money in it. It's inevitable. It's required.
 
-### Centralization
+## Centralization
 
 Discord is a centralized platform and always will be, no matter how strong the reality distortion field it puts up by allowing the creation of isolated social spaces and calling them "servers". Every Discord "server" runs on Discord's servers, and they have total control over each one at the end of the day.
 
@@ -43,7 +43,7 @@ This ties pretty closely into the whole VC-funded thing - Discord, the platform,
 
 That's really the core of the issue here: being centralized means that Discord can easily suffer the same fate as Twitter. Some incompetent nutcase with more money than the entire planet's collective pool of sense could buy it out and destroy it, or the current owners could just make some boneheaded decision and do the same. A decentralized platform, running on a common open protocol, is much less vulnerable to the antics of the Elon Musks and u/spez's of the world.
 
-### The Privacy Problem
+## The Privacy Problem
 
 This issue isn't really inherently connected to the others - a lack of good privacy doesn't fundamentally doom a platform like the other two points - but I'm treating it as a third major issue because I feel it's extremely important and warrants consideration.
 
@@ -69,17 +69,17 @@ Juicy stuff. You should really give that a read - you might not like what you fi
 
 Before we move on, I'll just drop this tasty little <a href="https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord">link</a> to further reading. It's a real page-turner.
 
-## Cool, so how do we fix it?
+# Cool, so how do we fix it?
 
 We don't. Discord was doomed from the outset in any attempts to be sustainable or trustworthy. We are going to need to find an alternative to Discord eventually. So what should that alternative look like? I'll discuss specifics later - I'd like to start by establishing the general principles I feel a messaging system should conform to in order to avoid Discord's major problems. The TL;DR is it needs to not be any of the things I've described thus far about Discord, but I'll go into more detail about what that actually looks like.
 
-### Follow the money
+## Follow the money
 
 A sustainable chat system *absolutely cannot* be for-profit. If it is in any way driven by profit, the decay and eventual death of the service is inevitable. That doesn't mean it has to be entirely staffed by unpaid volunteers or anything, but it would need to be a non-profit foundation of some kind, just trying to break even with no incentive for infinite growth or any other corrupting financial influence. You'll notice this as a theme across most online services that don't already show signs of advanced corporate necrosis.
 
 I'm not even saying it can't have some kind of Nitro-esque paid tier. I don't hold it against, say, Protonmail - in fact, I pay for that one - but the money can't be the end goal. A sustainable non-profit model might be largely donation-based like Wikipedia, or maybe it could have a totally free product for individual users and break even selling support to enterprise customers like some Linux distributions. It's not currently breaking even yet according to its Wikipedia article, but I'll be interested to see if and how Signal reaches a sustainable state. Maybe future players could take notes from them.
 
-### Cut out the middle man
+## Cut out the middle man
 
 Better yet, structure your system such that it doesn't even need a corporation at the center - in other words, a decentralized system. I'm not talking about the blockchain; we can do this the old-fashioned way, with tech that isn't ponzi-scheme-by-design. In fact, we're already doing this, and it already has more monthly active users than any messenger app ever created: email.
 
@@ -93,7 +93,9 @@ So when two people communicate via email, the sender sends the message to their
 
 And here's the obligatory visual aid - essentially, when you send an email, it takes the shortest path along a network that looks like this; every server is connected to every other, and every user is connected to one server:
 
-![A graph showing three large nodes connected to each other, each with multiple smaller nodes branching off of them. Each large node is an email server, such as outlook.com or gmail.com, and each small node is an email account, such as jim@outlook.com or bob@gmail.com.](federation.png)
+<figure class="media">
+  <img src="federation.png" alt="A graph showing three large nodes connected to each other, each with multiple smaller nodes branching off of them. Each large node is an email server, such as outlook.com or gmail.com, and each small node is an email account, such as jim@outlook.com or bob@gmail.com.">
+</figure>
 
 Hopefully that helped. Back to the point, all federated services work pretty much exactly like this. If you've ever had someone try to explain the Fediverse (sometimes incorrectly called Mastodon) to you by comparing it to email, this is what they meant. But this isn't limited to email and microblogging; this type of system can theoretically apply to anything. Again, building an MMO this way would be challenging, but federated messaging protocols similar in concept to Discord do exist.
 
@@ -101,7 +103,7 @@ The benefit of this kind of system stems from the fact that it's not under the c
 
 The network is inherently much more stable and resilient in general than a centralized service, as there's nobody who would take the entire network down with them if the company went under or got sued or had a bomb dropped on their datacenter. Sure, a huge number of people would lose their email accounts if Gmail disappeared tomorrow, but critically, not the entire network. Email wouldn't go away, and those displaced users could go to Outlook or Protonmail or set up their own instance and keep communicating over the same network. The same applies to any other federated protocol. Imagine if your Discord account and guilds weren't controlled by Discord, but instead ran on a machine you controlled and was in no way answerable to Discord Inc, but you could still talk to your buddies on Discord proper. It's like that.
 
-### Incognito mode
+## Incognito mode
 
 Contrary to the title of the previous section, a federated approach does technically add more middlemen. We've gone from one unaccountable central authority able to read everyone's messages to several unaccountable parties each able to read the messages of everyone they serve. Not much of an improvement, privacy-wise, unless you trust both your provider and the providers of everyone you're talking to implicitly. Actual privacy requires end-to-end encryption.
 
@@ -109,13 +111,15 @@ End-to-end encryption means the message is encrypted before leaving the sender's
 
 There are still problems here, for example end-to-end encrypted messaging still requires the server to know who you're talking to, but there are workarounds for these as well. However, E2EE should be the absolute bare minimum, in my opinion.
 
-## So what are our options then?
+# So what are our options then?
+
+<p class="notice"><strong>[Update 2026-02-14]</strong> Since writing this part, I've released an <a href="/blog/posts/discord2/">updated list</a> of recommendations with a set of priorities that skews less "find an ideologically pure replacement" and more "find something that actually mostly works as a drop-in replacement for Discord and can be switched to Right Now". The following section has been left in for posterity.</p>
 
 Here's the part where I discuss actual alternatives to Discord. I'll say now that this will not be a comprehensive overview of every possible option - recommending chat apps that don't meet these standards would kinda defeat the point, and I'm also not omniscient. There are going to be other options that I haven't covered here, and hopefully I've given you the tools to determine which ones are good.
 
 Every program I list here will, at a minimum, support true end-to-end encryption in some capacity and not be run by a for-profit company. They're also all open-source.
 
-### <a href="https://xmpp.org/">XMPP</a>
+## <a href="https://xmpp.org/">XMPP</a>
 
 XMPP is about as close as we've got to "email but for instant messaging". It's a federated, open protocol which, having been formally standardized in 1999, is truly ancient in internet years. My understanding is that it actually used to be more widely used, but Google effectively killed it off in popular usage by subsuming its userbase into Google Talk and then promptly turning off federation and killing Google Talk. That doesn't mean it's gone, though. People still use XMPP to talk to each other, running on servers hosted by themselves or their friends.
 
@@ -128,7 +132,7 @@ XMPP is, at its core, designed for simple text-based messaging and presence. Whi
 - While integration with WebRTC voice chat is supported, it's not universal, and some people prefer to use a separate voice chat system, such as Mumble, in conjunction with XMPP text chat.
 - You'll have to find a provider and choose a client program to connect with. Fortunately, there's plenty of options, and the official XMPP website lists some of each.
 
-### <a href="https://matrix.org/">Matrix</a>
+## <a href="https://matrix.org/">Matrix</a>
 
 Matrix is the other major federated instant messaging protocol. It was standardized in 2014 and is built around making end-to-end encryption easy. On top of that, it has more features. File sharing is included by default and support for nice-to-have features like emoji reactions (and maybe custom emojis??) and Discord-style replies is widespread. There's also a large suite of bridges to other services, including Discord. Like with XMPP, voice chat integration is possible, but not universal, and some prefer to use Mumble or similar.
 
@@ -137,11 +141,11 @@ Matrix is the other major federated instant messaging protocol. It was standardi
 - Built around end-to-end encryption, though you can disable it, and you will need to for integrations like bots and bridges.
 - As with XMPP, you'll need to find a provider and a client program. The website lists quite a few clients, and you can find a list of servers <a href="https://joinmatrix.org/servers/">here</a>.
 
-### <a href="https://www.mumble.info/">Mumble</a> and <a href="https://jitsi.org/">Jitsi</a>
+## <a href="https://www.mumble.info/">Mumble</a> and <a href="https://jitsi.org/">Jitsi</a>
 
 Mumble and Jitsi are self-hostable voice chat and videoconferencing applications, respectively. They're not messaging systems, but I feel they bear mentioning here because they're both popular for use in conjunction with text chat systems, and since nothing else here currently supports screensharing.
 
-### <a href="https://revolt.chat">Revolt</a>
+## <a href="https://revolt.chat">Revolt</a>
 
 We've about run out of open protocols (which is probably a good thing), so now on to the centralized services, starting with Revolt. Revolt is basically trying to be open-source Discord. It's currently in alpha, but the user experience is very similar and it already has some of the fun stuff.
 
@@ -155,7 +159,7 @@ From what I could find Revolt isn't currently controlled by any kind of legal en
 - No encryption, but E2EE for DMs is being worked on.
 - Has features like custom emojis, replies, public guilds and a friends list.
 
-### <a href="https://signal.org/">Signal</a>
+## <a href="https://signal.org/">Signal</a>
 
 I've now run out of Discord-likes - which is to say, programs that support the sort of multi-channel group chat thing Discord has going on. This and the next one function more in the vein of a Whatsapp clone, though I feel they still bear mentioning in the event that's all you need.
 
@@ -168,7 +172,7 @@ Signal is kind of *the* private messaging app. It's fundamentally built around e
 - Requires a phone number, but only a phone number.
 - You can set a username, so you don't need to share your phone number.
 
-### <a href="https://getsession.org/">Session</a>
+## <a href="https://getsession.org/">Session</a>
 
 I lied, Session isn't centralized. But it's not decentralized in the same way as the federated protocols up there, either. Session runs over an anonymizing onion routing network, Tor-style, meaning not only can your messages not be read by the server, those servers also don't know both the sender and the destination at the same time. Essentially, it's designed to maximize privacy and anonymity at all costs. But wouldn't you know it, that comes at a cost in terms of features and user experience.
 
@@ -180,17 +184,17 @@ Session does also use cryptocurrency. Setting a custom display name and running
 - No extra features.
 - Setting a display name requires a crypto transaction, but sending messages does not.
 
-## Conclusion
+# Conclusion
 
 That's about all I've got. I hope I've impressed upon you the importance of Discord's core problems, and introduced you to at least one alternative that works for you. I have my preferences, but I'm comfortable recommending all of these over Discord, otherwise I wouldn't have listed them.
 
-[Update 2023-09-09] I no longer recommend Matrix over XMPP for reasons explained well <a href="https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07">here</a>. I knew there was a little jank but I had no idea the rot ran this deep. Fortunately, nobody's listened to me yet so I can switch over to XMPP without much issue, which I intend to do.
+**[Update 2023-09-09]** I no longer recommend Matrix over XMPP for reasons explained well <a href="https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07">here</a>. I knew there was a little jank but I had no idea the rot ran this deep. Fortunately, nobody's listened to me yet so I can switch over to XMPP without much issue, which I intend to do.
 
-[Update 2024-04-27] I have removed Telegram from the recommendations list outright due to <a href="https://isopod.zone/notes/9sjy5r4ocq">just, straight up nazism</a>, and in a post announcing cryptocurrency features no less. Jesus H. Christ.
+**[Update 2024-04-27]** I have removed Telegram from the recommendations list outright due to <a href="https://isopod.zone/notes/9sjy5r4ocq">just, straight up nazism</a>, and in a post announcing cryptocurrency features no less. Jesus H. Christ.
 
 If there's one thing I want you to take away from this article, it's this: Don't fall for the marketing and don't let yourself be wooed by extraneous gimmicks. Be discerning about which fancy-sounding features you actually need. If you want to have a chance of escaping the vicious corporate cycle of enshittification, both with chat platforms and with everything else, make sure the ones you use have a strong foundation of sustainability and trustworthiness, beyond whatever marketing drivel is on the front page of their website. Hopefully I've given you at least some tools to determine for yourself which ones do.
 
-## Further Reading
+# Further Reading
 
 - <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys">Enshittification</a>
 - <a href="https://tosdr.org/en/service/536">A simplified breakdown of Discord's TOS (ToS;DR)</a>