XMPP and Deltachat are two excellent decentralized, self-hostable, federated, encrypted communication platforms. Deltachat is limited more to text (though it can send videos or audio files that can be played in the app like snapchat), but with XMPP, we could use the Movim Client.
Movim can do group video calls, screen sharing, differing permissions in groups, and even user blogs! And I believe the devs are working on adding discord-like channels with multiple groups under a single community. It’s currently our best option to shift to, and due to being FLOSS, will only ever improve (we’ll never need to worry about investment capital enshittification), so it’s not just kicking the can down the road, it’s a long-term, almost permanent solution.
Movim looks very promising and I haven’t heard of it before, thanks for highlighting it. My group has been working to stand up a few Prosody (XMPP) servers but as far as client side the best we could identify was Gajim. This looks better.
We host an XMPP and Movim front-end that’s accessible to all Slrpnk members using their lemmy login (it queries the same database), if you’d like to try it out before recommending it to your group. It’s mentioned in our sidebar and in the monthly Meta posts (I guess that shows we might not be doing a terribly good job advertising it if you’re not familiar with it 😅)
And I believe the devs are working on adding discord-like channels with multiple groups under a single community.
If you have a link to a discussion or issue where they’re tracking this, I’d love to follow it.
They’ll also need to figure out how to let rooms have more than 1000 people, which is currently the limit on Movim (and it might be an XMPP limitation). Right now, Matrix seems like the only option for a Discord migration, but I hope that changes soon.
I might move my Discord community to Matrix, but I’d want a full 100% clone of the server’s history. Seems like that’s almost possible?
Discord scrapers like DiscordChatExporter can dump a whole channel to JSON (although I don’t see a lot of scraper options that let you pause/resume/retry an export… looking for suggestions if people have any).
And the Mautrix Discord bridge already makes it look like real users sent bridged messages. I think with a little customization, the Mautrix bridge could be modified to import an enormous JSON file to fully mirror an entire Discord server, instead of just grabbing messages in real time. It’s already got the functions there to “send a message as xyz user.”
Matrix or not, “take your Discord dump and clone it somewhere federated” would be huge for migrations like this. I really hope someone works on that soon 🙏
If you have a link to a discussion or issue where they’re tracking this, I’d love to follow it.
They’ve mentioned needing to accelerate the development of it on their Mastodon account in light of the Discord blunder, such as here, and they just had a user poll there that resulted in Discord-like grouped channels/spaces being the most requested.
I didn’t have a problem doing it. It took a while but it was fine. Some of the channels needed a little help, but it was just a matter of reconnecting them. Our server has been around for years too. Going to do an extra backup, but it was fine.
Yes, somewhere in the set up you need to set the import limit to -1 iirc then message the bot to import the whole thing, then once a message gets sent in each channel it populates.
Piggybacking off this:
XMPP and Deltachat are two excellent decentralized, self-hostable, federated, encrypted communication platforms. Deltachat is limited more to text (though it can send videos or audio files that can be played in the app like snapchat), but with XMPP, we could use the Movim Client.
Movim can do group video calls, screen sharing, differing permissions in groups, and even user blogs! And I believe the devs are working on adding discord-like channels with multiple groups under a single community. It’s currently our best option to shift to, and due to being FLOSS, will only ever improve (we’ll never need to worry about investment capital enshittification), so it’s not just kicking the can down the road, it’s a long-term, almost permanent solution.
Movim looks very promising and I haven’t heard of it before, thanks for highlighting it. My group has been working to stand up a few Prosody (XMPP) servers but as far as client side the best we could identify was Gajim. This looks better.
We host an XMPP and Movim front-end that’s accessible to all Slrpnk members using their lemmy login (it queries the same database), if you’d like to try it out before recommending it to your group. It’s mentioned in our sidebar and in the monthly Meta posts (I guess that shows we might not be doing a terribly good job advertising it if you’re not familiar with it 😅)
If you have a link to a discussion or issue where they’re tracking this, I’d love to follow it.
They’ll also need to figure out how to let rooms have more than 1000 people, which is currently the limit on Movim (and it might be an XMPP limitation). Right now, Matrix seems like the only option for a Discord migration, but I hope that changes soon.
I might move my Discord community to Matrix, but I’d want a full 100% clone of the server’s history. Seems like that’s almost possible?
Discord scrapers like DiscordChatExporter can dump a whole channel to JSON (although I don’t see a lot of scraper options that let you pause/resume/retry an export… looking for suggestions if people have any).
And the Mautrix Discord bridge already makes it look like real users sent bridged messages. I think with a little customization, the Mautrix bridge could be modified to import an enormous JSON file to fully mirror an entire Discord server, instead of just grabbing messages in real time. It’s already got the functions there to “send a message as xyz user.”
Matrix or not, “take your Discord dump and clone it somewhere federated” would be huge for migrations like this. I really hope someone works on that soon 🙏
They’ve mentioned needing to accelerate the development of it on their Mastodon account in light of the Discord blunder, such as here, and they just had a user poll there that resulted in Discord-like grouped channels/spaces being the most requested.
Thank you!! Really looking forward to this, Movim is already pretty nice.
No prob! I’m excited for it too ^^
I just imported a server with bridge.
Every messages in your server’s entire history, or just the channel layout?
I know the Mautrix bridge can create the channels for you, but their backfill feature was not designed for full archival, it can’t really do that.
I didn’t have a problem doing it. It took a while but it was fine. Some of the channels needed a little help, but it was just a matter of reconnecting them. Our server has been around for years too. Going to do an extra backup, but it was fine.
So it was all of your messages?
Can you explain what bridge you used and how you got the whole history moved over?
The bridge is the same one mentioned in the other link!
Yes, somewhere in the set up you need to set the import limit to -1 iirc then message the bot to import the whole thing, then once a message gets sent in each channel it populates.