A few design decisions for a new chat platform
Discord has recently made a controversial decision that could be the start of long-term decline. The situation has people looking at alternatives. However, a lot of the alternatives I feel bark up the wrong tree, or are good for certain niches, but not others (i.e. I like Zulip for focused technical communities, but it’s a bad fit for social clubs). In this post, I’ll try to outline things I feel a lot of alternatives get wrong (or ideally, get right). There’s a lot of navel gazing and bikeshedding about this topic, so I’ll stick with what I think are my most notable takes. Federation is a misfeature for hosted platforms When it comes to decentralization, federation is a huge buzzword and selling point. It seems like in theory a good middle ground of peer-to-peer and entirely…
