Overcommunicate

In the beginning, I had email and it was pretty good. Then I got an ICQ account for instant messaging. That was a super fun and immediate way to chat with people, some of them far away. I never did much texting on my original cellular flip phone, but I did when I got a Treo smartphone. Then along came Twitter, which was like instant messaging but better. And then an iPhone, with iMessage and a Twitter app. Then Discord. And then Slack. And Microsoft Teams. Now the fediverse and Bluesky. I use them all, for different purposes, but a surprising number of my interlocutors are available to me on more than one platform.

In summary, I’ve had more ways to communicate with people than I’ve ever really needed. Yes, the immediacy of modern chat solutions is super convenient for many situations, but it’s often not mandatory. Good old fashioned email would be good enough for many of my communcation interactions. Bring back mailing lists!

I’ve been using Discord since 2017. I’ve joined and exited from a number of communities over the years. As a good user, I subscribed to their Nitro offering, looking to pay for what I use. Nitro isn’t particularly great, but I want to support the services I use. The old expression “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” is only semi-true, as I fully expect Discord to be monetizing my user data. Oh well.

But word comes now that Discord will be implementing video ads for mobile users. This isn’t what I want to experience when I pay for a service. I don’t want to give a company money only for them to get more money by shoving unsolicited ads at me. No thank you.

With the increase in federated solutions and smaller things networking together, I’ve been eyeballing Matrix, an “open network for secure, decentralised communication.” Open source, secure, and decentralized? These are relevant to my interests!

After just a couple hours of reading and fiddling, I was able to successfully deploy conduwuit onto fly.io. Low resource usage, low cost, low administrative burden - looks like a real winner.

To quote King George from Hamilton:

Awesome! Wow! Do you have clue what happens now?

Vanishingly few of the members of any communities in which I participate on Discord are going to migrate to Matrix. Exactly zero of my in-real-life friends are going to sign up to use this. I can’t even get my friends to use Signal for goodness sake!

What the hell am I doing?

I’ve always been the weirdo looking to run my own services, and participate in slightly fringe communities. But I’m really not interested in playing advocate to get my current communities moved over. I’m not super interested in spending the time to find new communities on Matrix, though I suppose I ought to at least give that a try. I’m also not interested in continuing to give money to Discord if they’re going to degrade the product for which I am paying.

Do I suck up the ads as inevitable, and maintain the connections I have on Discord? Do I walk away from those communities to preserve my principles? Do I just commit infocide and get offline completely, because I know this is just going to keep happening?

I don’t know.