Splinterlands: Heavy dependence on Discord is dangerous

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As I'm writing these lines, the Discord API seems to have some serious issues and is not reachable for me. I have been wanting to write this blog post for a while already but this situation finally gives me a proper excuse to address the heavy dependence of Splinterlands on Discord and why this is a bad idea:

First of all, Discord is a proprietary piece of software. I could reiterate now why it might not be a good idea to rely on proprietary systems but the famous Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation did that already here.

Completely decentralized, free and open-source solutions, such as Matrix, already exist. Using such an alternative would have completely avoided this downtime we are experiencing right now.

I would like to use this post to start a discussion with the @splinterlands community: What are your thoughts about switching to an alternative to Discord? I know that it would be a huge challenge as all official channels heavily depend on Discord right now but in my opinion, it would be a good idea to start a slow but steady migration to an alternative solution, which would make sense from a technological perspective and would fit much better for an open-source game, that @splinterlands already is.

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I'm very biased here, i don't like discord and i started to use it just to follow splinterlands related communities. A switch to whatever finds me ready.

But as you said, it's a very hard step for the existing communities. Nonetheless i believe, that with the expansion of the player base such migration will occour anyway, it's just a matter of driving new people to a better option.

I'm not aware of matrix and i'm going to give it a look asap.

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Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, I'm not a full-time player. Otherwise I would have simply opened a channel on Matrix myself. However, it's a huge task to moderate a large community and I simply don't have the time for that. :-(

Btw: My handle on Matrix is @hagbard:matrix.org if you're looking for people to chat with.

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