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- Hacker News
- Are clients and server FOSS? If so, advertise that. Personally, I’m not interested in another platform that isn’t.by s0ss
- Why do companies like this continue to promise "No Ads Ever"? How do they plan enough money to support their service? Video sharing is incredibly expensive, even Discord is unlikely profitable between their advertising campaigns and server boosting revenue.
It's not self-hosted, they are going to have to make money at some point to support the effort.
by muwtyhg - Yeah ok.
2025 to 2026 full of slop signals, LLC reg number from April 2026 to the same address in multiple reports as ultra scammy:
https://malwaretips.com/blogs/30-n-gould-st-sheridan-wy-scam...
https://www.thesheridanpress.com/news/local/another-scam-rec...
https://www.wyomingnews.com/news/local_news/scammers-use-reg...
Lot of other red flags for me but those are even more vibe-based than everything about this.
by jimmygrapes - yeah 30 N Gould is a registered agent. We registered a US entity mainly for stripe + dmca since users upload stuff which content tons of restriced contents. it was the cheapest way to do it without a US office.by acley
- I'm just ready for something new, personally. I don't really like Discord's vibe of paying for avatar skins? Gross. And paying for custom emojis? Super gross. Yuck.by bellowsgulch
- We have been online for more than 1.5 years. Back when we started, we didn't see Discord alternatives popping up left and right, so we created our own. Nowadays, there are like 10 of them popping up every single day, most of those are below par and completely usable. If you like to try out a new one you can give us a try no stress haha byeby acley
- Sorry, where is the source code? For any trust to be built OS should be a prime feature at this point in the game.by Varelion
- Cool. I would like to try it, but it will probably take a considerable amount of time to convince my circle of friends to migrate to this platform en masse.
Is there a catalog of public, Echoed-based groups / communities that anyone can freely join? I'd like to explore the platform's full range of features before trying to persuade others to make the switch.
by altilunium - Is this P2P, or hosted on proprietary servers? How is it funded? I don't like ads and I like free things, but "no ads, free forever" doesn't make me confident in its long term stability.by hatthew
- Is there anyone there I want to talk to? You need to demonstrate that before I create a login, otherwise there is too much friction for me.
The iOS storefront is also far behind your website in quality and attention to detail.
Edit: please accept this in the spirit of some quick feedback from one maker to another
by bitmasher9 - How on earth do you expect them to show you whether there's anyone there you want to talk to?by apetresc
- What a weird and entitled position. This is a product for people who create or manage communities, not people who demand to be shown there is already a community thereby kennywinker
- https://fluxer.app seems to be the best alternative so far, by a mile. Gained a bunch of users during some controversy too.by Cider9986
- Haven is pretty rad. https://github.com/ancsemi/Havenby riddley
- Someone else here also mentioned Chatto [0] which seems far easier to self-host than Fluxer, though both appear to be quite similar to Discord in overall functionality. I've played with Chatto a bit and it seems surprisingly solid overall thus far.by blooalien
- Please please please someone take over discord and their use base. Their nitro and ads is the most toxic nonsense stuff I have ever had the displeasure to work with.
I am in a niche market with both new gen workers and customers and discord is a really important medium to engage and connect with them. My soul dies every time I am there dealing with all sorts of psychological traps and baits to more spending coupled with the incessant advertising.
I don't even care anymore who wins that market, just get me out of it.
by hmokiguess - > Please please please someone take over discord and their use base
This is one area where I can not muster the optimism to think that would improve the situation. You need someone else to somehow unseat them somehow.. they’re entrenched in this space so deeply though.
by nickthegreek - I have never seen true need to get Nitro. Missing on some things but if someone wants to pay for it let them.
Big question is how else would they make money? Monetise hosting "servers" directly? Would they have even gotten community if they did that?
by Ekaros - Charging for perks and user self-expression seems a lot healthier than what we see in app stores and websites.
This is all pre-IPO, it's sure to get worse; hopefully one of the Discord alternatives will have caught on by then.
The big line they've crossed is collecting identification; much thanks to HN for linking to the bypass that worked for a day.
by axus - There is so little advertising on discord that I find it hilarious you are so upset about a few notifications here and there about nitro and other aesthetic perks which are basically entirely optionalby adzm
- Why do all the Discord alternative apps try to 1:1 clone Discord's UI? Half of my dislike of Discord stems from its UI.by LorenDB
- Because it reduces the switching cost because users don't have to learn a new interface. Discord has shown that its UI is at least capable of being used by hundreds of millions of users so it is not a bad starting point.by charcircuit
- I'm always surprised to hear people hate Discord's UI. I think it's fine.
The only thing I was probably change is adding the ability to bookmark specific channels so I can switch to them in a single click no matter what channel I'm currently looking at.
by Sohcahtoa82 - I guess because there's people like me that like the UI (aside from all the Nitro bloat at least)
- So much this. Discord UI was for simple voice and text chat. Over time it's had so many other things shoe horned in its now a royal kludge.by tekchip
- Have you tried Chatto[0]? Seems to be an open-source Slack and Discord alternative with a nice UI.
- While it's great to have alternatives, I suspect a lot us are really only interested in forkable open alternatives (like Matrix / Element), as most concerns about Discord are tied with it being a private company.
As far as I can tell, Echoed is also closed the same way Discord is?
by soundworlds - Front page says 150MB RAM, About page says 90MB.
Whole site is full of LLM-isms (em-dashes, stilted 'X. Y. Z. <Summary>.' constructions).
It's so boring. It says "We put one prompt worth of effort into our landing page". Just like all the others.
"No ads · No tracking · No ID verification · Free forever" - why would anyone believe this for a closed source application that, presumably, you want to monetize? Servers and developers aren't free, unless it's open source and/or self hosted.
by dymk - Yeah, the RAM numbers are off, those are from different builds, and we never synced them. my bad, fixing today. And it's two of us and the landing page got like a day of attention because everything else felt more urgent. not really a defense, just what happened. Same reason it's nowhere near as rich as Discord's site.
"free forever" — it's already been free 1.5 years, we were Zorium before the rebrand. If we do add a paid plan later the stuff that's free now stays free, new stuff gets charged for. we also build business software, so we've got spare server capacity, runs fine on it.
Thanks for the feedback tho :)
by acley - Exactly. I am simply done using any service whose source code I cannot audit myself.by Varelion