The lesson of Pay-To-Surf will keep being taught by reality until it gets taught in business school.

Don't forget to tip your instance admins!

Peter Sellis can take those Orbs and shove them up his Ass I don’t want this shit!

Online software development life cycle in a nutshell:

Startup - Geeks are in charge and you're creating a cool communications platform.
Mature - Accountants are in charge and you're gamifying ad clicks.

Realistically tho, until participation becomes mandatory you can ignore quests and orbs and just keep doing what you're doing.

Well that fucking sucks.

Nah, switching takes time. Better start now.

What a funny coincidence that I've heard about this discord alternative in a post just a couple before this one in feed.

They were on IRC before and on a number of other chats systems before that.
They will move as soon as something better will come out, for various definitions of better

"please ponder your verification orb"

americans LOVE enshittifications.

discord orbs

If you're after text, there are a number of options. If you're after group voice, there are a number of options. You could mix and match both, but "where everyone else is" will also likely be a factor in that kind of decision.

If you want both together, then there's probably just Element (Matrix + voice)? Not sure of other options that aren't centralised, where you're the product, or otherwise at obvious risk of enshittifying. (And Element has the smell of the latter to me, but that's another topic).

I've prepared for Discord's inevitable "final straw" moment by setting up a Matrix room and maintaining a self-hosted Mumble server in Docker for my gaming buddies. It's worked when Discord has been down, so I know it works. Yet to convince them to test Element...