• betahack@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    what are the best alternatives for non-tech folks to join and use?.. because that’s who I am going to have to convince

    • waggz@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      i haven’t seen anyone talking about it but i started testing out root app and i think it could easily drop in replace my friends discord. you can even import a discord server template with all your channels and roles.

    • stressballs@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      Spacebar.chat is a really easy one to join that I found. And it’s really a straight clone of Discord but without all the crap. It’s decentralized so you can self host or join and instance and start your own “server” on there.

      You don’t have to understand any of that to use. It just works and looks like Discord.

    • baatliwala@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Discord became big because of the seamless audio / video / screen sharing. Forums are not even in the same stratosphere.

      • amateurcrastinator@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        i know, but for casual conversations and banter and a place where to store some knowledge about some topics forums were awesome.

        • baatliwala@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Forums work for knowledge storage, but for casual banter real time conversations trump everything

          • sakuraba@lemmy.ml
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            5 months ago

            yeah, forums are cool but I remember changing to another medium like MSN Messenger to do real time conversations

    • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      It was so great, people ditched it immediately the second any alternative arrived.

      • amateurcrastinator@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        maybe you are right. i think people just forgot about it because of all the noise and because all these new platforms force bad habits. just imagine if those platforms didn’t exist where would openai and anthropic be without all that stackexchange/stackoverflow data scraping.

        • Creegz@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Discord is a communications platform with tacked on features that resemble forums mostly as a means of organization. It’s not a KB or repository under any circumstances outside of misuse, so why would it have to be good at being searched/indexed?

          • carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works
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            5 months ago

            Because not everything is a bug. People frequently want help and having a searchable place for past discussions it is helpful. Also this was in response to people complaining about forums and implying what came after is better so misuse is very much relevant here. Every modding community and a lot of other dev groups use discord for everything and it is from experience a trainwreck.

          • carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works
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            5 months ago

            Most decent forums were publicly readable online and thus got indexed by actually decent search engines unlike discord. Hence “search indexable”

            I’m not sure why people think that discord search is some kind of gotcha. Its shit.

            • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              Not denying that it’s shit, I don’t know anyone who’s actually happy with it. But old forums also weren’t built nicely.
              You say search indexable as if it’s a panacea, but you find whatever you want to find with your search engine, click the link, and it is:

              • moved somewhere
              • renamed, so now the link is dead
              • was actually a part of badly implemented endless scroll so it now points to nothing
              • was edited to remove crucial information
              • was put in private and now you need to have 25 karma across three boards to open it
              • someone got butthurt so it’s now defaced
              • all of the above and more.

              So you know that the info was there at some point, but you can’t access it.

              The whole of IT is different levels of shit all the time

              • carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works
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                5 months ago

                That’s why I also mentioned archivable. Public forums can be archived. If I hit one of those issues I look for archived pages. Deleted discord comments are just silently gone and deleted servers are lost forever

          • GalacticSushi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            5 months ago

            Back when Google was a decent search engine you could just search “something site:someforum.com” since the built in search was so ass

            Something Reddit has in common with old forums

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I mean the masses are pretty fucking stupid and I don’t think following them is a good strategy for life.

        Also, reddit was and somehow still is pretty popular and stack exchange is being killed by AI not discord, so that’s not really accurate anyways.

      • XeroxCool@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        They slowly ditched better services for convenience. The account/login struggle is the barrier to entry that myspace/facebook/discord “solved”. A unique login for each forum, a different set of rules between each, some auto-deletion of supposedly inactive accounts, no photo hosting capability until death bed, yet another set of credentials for the latest photo host, and so on. Nothing was immediate because it took time to build the replacement communities and libraries. The problem is, it took years to realize how inaccessible the information became.

        • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          If the old service is less convenient that fucking Discord, it’s not better.
          The information is as inaccessible now, just in different ways.
          We never had a good solution. We had different bad solutions, each bad in it’s unique way.

  • paraphrand@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    How many of these have moderation issues? Like, unwanted content uploads and stuff. How many expose you to accidentally hosting illicit content?

    • ignirtoq@feddit.online
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      5 months ago

      That’s their “safety” category in his rankings. They talk about moderation tools and risks like bad actors posting illicit content quite a bit, actually.

      • paraphrand@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Wow, so signal ranks second worst in “safety” with a 2. While discord has a 4.

        So it’s worse than discord at dealing with unwanted CSAM uploads? What a wild ranking system this guy has.

  • Nima@leminal.space
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    5 months ago

    did he not try stoat? he just put a bunch of question marks there.

    I’d have thought if that was the case it’d be left out of the rankings.

      • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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        5 months ago

        If we’re referring to the article in the link, being self-hosted didn’t seem to be a hard requirement, merely that the app is a potential alternative.

        • naught@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          You’re correct. I think a lot of folks are looking for something decentralized/self-hostable to avoid the lock-in disaster that Discord has created, at least, I am. And I have found a dearth of alternatives! Good article, though.

  • thesmokingman@programming.dev
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    5 months ago

    It’s very important to call out this dude either doesn’t understand what a community is or comes from this new generation that thinks docs should be on Discord and not easily accessible.

    Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?

    Somehow Discord gets a 4 there. A chat server is a community of a kind but it will never rise the level of a platform’s community because it is, by definition, somewhat ephemeral and just a bunch of chat logs. There’s a big difference for example between IRC and bash.org for things like AzureDiamond.

  • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Trash guide to be fair.

    Discord has more functionality than all of these, that’s why it’s in the position it’s in today, yet it gets ranked lower than… Rocket chat??

    If we’re objectively finding alternatives then we need to be objective, this guide seems sus AF.

    • HyperfocusSurfer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      What functionality are we talking about? Genuinely curious here, since I use discord like a couple of times a year.

      From what I’ve noticed, matrix can do basically the same, except for the voice chats which are a pain to setup (and are better handled by jitsi anyways).

    • iamthetot@piefed.ca
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      5 months ago

      I don’t really see how someone can position Discourse as the number one Discord alternative. Surely most people looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing… Or am I just in the minority here?

      For the record, I think Discourse looks awesome and even thinking about how I might use it for a project, but I do not see it as a Discord alternative.

      • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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        5 months ago

        I thought Discourse was bought by Roblox, merged into Roblox, and then discontinued outside of Roblox?

        I’m thinking of something else, I think.

      • karashta@piefed.social
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        5 months ago

        I also want this suite of things. I stream movies to friends, share games I’m playing…

        These are core features to me now in a robust chat client

      • SkavarSharraddas@gehirneimer.de
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        5 months ago

        By reducing a complex topic down to one score that has “features” as only one of many factors, so that “openness” and “safety” push it to the top.

      • Mark with a Z@suppo.fi
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        5 months ago

        Lots of communities use discord as a replacement for a forum despite it not being fit for it at all

        • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          5 months ago

          Sure, but that’s not an argument for replacing Discord with forums. The two serve entirely different use cases, and should be treated like two entirely separate products.

          • gloktawasright@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Isn’t it though? A forum wouldn’t do all the things discord does, but the argument is that trying to use discord for a forum was a mistake in the first place. So replacing discord with a forum and then a dedicated chatting app makes sense, no?

            • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              5 months ago

              I think we’re essentially saying the same thing in different ways. Yes, I 100% agree that forums should be separate from whatever the new Discord replacement ends up being.

              I was more arguing that we can’t only use forums to replace Discord, because the realtime communication aspect would be a different use case. I’ve seen lots of “lol just use forums” types of posts, which completely ignore the realtime side of things. There would still need to be some service to replace the realtime aspects that Discord does serve.

              • gloktawasright@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                Agreed. I think the fact that discord kind of does all the things is what made it attractive. But it’s not GOOD at the forum aspect, and it has its flaws for the other use cases as well.

      • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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        5 months ago

        I would bet on the screen sharing not being that big of a requirement for most people. Voice and text chats though? Yeah, that’s the minimum.

        • ne0phyte@feddit.org
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          5 months ago

          A lot of people I know regularly use screen sharing through discord or opentalk. Both for work/productivity and while gaming (watching each other, helping, sharing what people are up to etc).

          To get people to switch it sadly should support all features: text, voice, video and sending files/images/gifs/videos.

          It’s tough.

      • Ulrich@feddit.org
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        5 months ago

        A lot of people don’t seem to realize that Discord has a variety of features, and each feature can be more or less useful for different types of communities. There’s almost no platform that has all of them so you have to zoom out and look at more of the general purpose. The Discord “servers” I’ve used NEVER used anything but text chat.

        • iamthetot@piefed.ca
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          5 months ago

          I understand that but even the text chat is a different experience than what Discourse offers. Even people who only used Discord for text chat and want a replacement for that would be better on IRC.

            • iamthetot@piefed.ca
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              5 months ago

              I honestly think the vast majority of people on Discord don’t know what IRC is, and therefore don’t have an opinion of it. However, I didn’t mean to suggest IRC as the best alternative anyway.

              • Ulrich@feddit.org
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                5 months ago

                Okay so they know what Discord is, but they don’t know what IRC is, despite it being 20 years older. What does that tell you?

          • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            It’s not the text chat they’re referring to. An annoying amount of open so it be projects use Discord as a replacement for forums specifically.

            • iamthetot@piefed.ca
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              5 months ago

              I’m aware but I don’t think this was the issue Ulrich was speaking of. If they were, I don’t think it was well conveyed.

      • JayGray91🐉🍕@piefed.social
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        5 months ago

        looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing… Or am I just in the minority here?

        I’ll keep you company in the minority, since that’s what I want too

    • Ontimp@feddit.org
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      5 months ago

      Rocket.chat uses Matrix though, too. It’s not only Matrix but it makes use of Matrix federation among other things and they built their own Matrix server implementation in TypeScript last year

  • WraithGear@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    i notice people not mentioning team speak 6. when our discord group were planning everything team speak 6 seemed to be the winner. it’s not free, but if i am hosting it with a license and have more control over the experience, then its not that big of a deal. from what i gather team speak 6 has better faster audio, and a better screen share for gaming. but we only just started poking around at options atm.

    • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      My friend group also jumped to that first, unless it’s federated though it’s not going to be “like discord” enough in the long run.

      Part of what makes discord so good to many is that it’s one app where you can connect to various different friend groups/modding groups/artists/etc…

      Matrix does allow that with its federation model, ts6 does not 🤷

      • WraithGear@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        i HATE when i have to connect to other discords for that purpose. finding information on discord is the worse of all possible outcomes. if i am running into trouble i much prefer a searchable forum. as for different friend groups, i think team speak has the ability to save multiple friend groups servers.

          • WraithGear@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            the rant was basically summed up as: “i think forums are archaic and i feel the ability to search them was bad

            i think that discord has a much better system because the devs can answer people’s questions directly.”

            except my experience with these discords results in: me asking the question, a bot or some person states that the devs no longer answers questions due to having to answer the same questions over and over and to use the search function. the search function pulls up every time the key word is mentioned but not the context or resolution, and i end up having to read the time line, including random people chiming in with their own questions and now i am tracking who is talking to which person in tandem on the same chat, and some times they cross, some times other people come in to give their 2 bits, sometimes it’s starts an argument or is wrong, it irrelevant. an absolute fucking nightmare.

            with a forum, i am usually directed there via a google search, it’s a sub division of the topics forum specifically created by the person with the question, the responses of everyone are for the topics exclusive benefit, and if there is arguments or wrong info, everyone can easily point it out without missing it in real time. and when the topic is either resolved, or given up on the topic ends. it’s not used for other people’s problems at any point.

              • WraithGear@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                you are as helpful as a discord support chat, congratulations, you can sit there and be smug that it suddenly means you are right in your own head

                • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
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                  5 months ago

                  I’m working bro, just read the first bit and saw how you completely misinterpreted my points

                  Edit: Have some time now, here’s my response.

                  *the rant was basically summed up as: “i think forums are archaic and i feel the ability to search them was bad

                  i think that discord has a much better system because the devs can answer people’s questions directly.”*

                  Completely wrong, I literally said the exact opposite in fact, what we need is a better discord wherein there is no lock in where you have to have a discord account to be able to search for things with an engine.

                  The search functionality literally in forums is and was bad, your point about how bad discord search is, is exactly the same thing I experienced on forums with their built in search functions, Google worked great by comparison of often getting me to the most relevant portion of a thread. Sure I still had to sometimes look forward and backwards a bit but it worked well enough.

                  I also never said anything about devs being able to answer peoples questions directly, I did however say it being a real-time chat made it much easier. Obviously the devs would hopefully be active whether it was async or not, but that’s not a platform feature lmao.

                  I do not see how you so wildly misinterpreted what I said to be the exact opposite.

                  except my experience with these discords results in: me asking the question, a bot or some person states that the devs no longer answers questions due to having to answer the same questions over and over and to use the search function. the search function pulls up every time the key word is mentioned but not the context or resolution, and i end up having to read the time line, including random people chiming in with their own questions and now i am tracking who is talking to which person in tandem on the same chat, and some times they cross, some times other people come in to give their 2 bits, sometimes it’s starts an argument or is wrong, it irrelevant. an absolute fucking nightmare.

                  This is the same experience I mentioned before with built in forum search being bad, also discord users/servers do not use functionality like the forum feature or threading hardly ever, many don’t even know those features exist, I’d like those to be an option in any discord-like replacement as they help alleviate those issues a good bit on their own.

                  Specifically, you can group things by topics or threads, it still has some poor ux tho that could be much better, but overall I think search engines are simply better then basically any search tooling these platforms build for themselves.

                  with a forum, i am usually directed there via a google search, it’s a sub division of the topics forum specifically created by the person with the question, the responses of everyone are for the topics exclusive benefit, and if there is arguments or wrong info, everyone can easily point it out without missing it in real time. and when the topic is either resolved, or given up on the topic ends. it’s not used for other people’s problems at any point.

                  Again, there is functionality in discord with similar features, people just don’t use them out of laziness or not being aware they exist.

                  I work at a major corporation as a senior tech specialist working with lower representatives actually speaking to clients, real time communication is leaps and bounds preferable to async communication in my 7 years in this role. {Edit2: We had to train the representatives to keep their discussion of their kssue in one thread, it was not inherent knowledge, used slack initially and now have to use teams which was definitely a step down but at least it has threading at all. Same with teaching them to search the channel, so often the answers are there if you search for them.}

                  I’ll clarify since you seem to think I’m a discord lover, I literally canceled my nitro a year ago when rumblings of IPO was coming because I knew what followed, I looked into replacements like Revolt (now stoat) and Matrix and tried to convince all my friends to move off discord.

                  I’m not a fan of discords direction, however I am intimately familiar with it, and can speak to its strengths and weaknesses as I have seen them, and prior to that, a lot of experience with forums, from being a user to hosting my own, my goal is to hopefully share that with others to maybe be able to steer a future FOSS/federated version that is more open and usable.

  • nek0d3r@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 months ago

    Unfortunate to see that Revolt hasn’t really changed much since I last tried it out. It’s the closest alternative I can see that seems like it would actually look like a replacement for the average Discord user.

  • Rachel@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    5 months ago

    Matrix is probably the most well funded and supported open source platform that might be able to compete with Discord but even then it’s not a fair fight.

    Sadly most people won’t leave discord. People will forget about this next week.

    • lepinkainen@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      They should use some of the funds for UX.

      For gods sakes copy the Discord UI EXACTLY and replicate the backend with Matrix. That’s it.

      Not whatever they’re doing now.

        • Rachel@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          5 months ago

          I think that is one of the problems. People want an exact copy of discord but don’t ask if discord even has the perfect layout and if it should be copied directly. Anyway there are clients like cinny which look similar and other chat platforms like stroat(previously revolt) and spacebar which look exactly like discord and they are not doing massively well either so shrugs.

  • Strider@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    No, he hasn’t been running a discord server. It’s a channel. Discord is running the servers.

    • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      I highly doubt that when you start a “Discord server”, there’s any new machinery spun up. There is a near 100% chance it’s just an entry in a database. Nobody’s running a server just for him. So I don’t think there’s even reason to be charitable.

      • Strider@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I can only assume it’s on purpose so average users really understand it wrong to avoid the associated negative view. Clever, really. But absolutely evil.

        • Izax@pawb.social
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          5 months ago

          This wasn’t intended to be misleading. The term “Server” as in a Discord Server is because, be fore Discord were the days of Ventrilo and TeamSpeak. For many of us gamers used to have to run or pay for their own actual server to have that kind of functionality. Then we’d combine direct calling with Skype for small groups and video. The term made sense at the time, but hasn’t held up to the test of time. Basically Discord solved a problems of having to pay for those servers, and having to use two separate programs.

          • Strider@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            I’m a it professional (working in enterprise DCs) and have been running ts2 and murmur myself. It was misleading from the beginning and while I do understand your point I can not see a company doing this in good faith, I am too old for that.

          • Ulrich@feddit.org
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            5 months ago

            You didn’t provide any evidence that it wasn’t intentionally misleading. Discord was clearly intended to replace communities like IRC, Ventrilo and TeamSpeak so they used language that was familiar to them, even though it was completely incorrect.

    • exist@sopuli.xyz
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      5 months ago

      Users (and I think Discord too) call the communities servers, and channels are the individual topics/threads in a community. It might not make sense from a hosting perspective but people do call it that

    • jcorvera@quokk.au
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      5 months ago

      The older terminology, which is still used in the API, was a lot better.

      It was Guild. It was a Discord Guild. Probably because Stanislav was working on it after he abandoned Guildwork.

  • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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    5 months ago

    If Stoat (formerly Revolt) can integrate screen sharing capabilities soon enough, they will be the closest, user-friendly experience to Discord. Even the UI is familiar, if you come from Discord.

    • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I‘m surprised Stoat is gaining so much traction here. It‘s no open source and will likely go down the same path as Discord if given the chance.

    • Neshura@bookwyr.me
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      5 months ago

      Apparently that’s already in the backend since december, they’re just getting their infrastructure up to snuff before they enable it

    • hornedfiend@piefed.social
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      5 months ago

      I can’t even create an account on Stoat yet. New account confirmation emails take hours to arrive and by the time they do, they are already expired.

      This is not a discord alternative yet and not be for a long time most likely.

      • KSP Atlas@sopuli.xyz
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        5 months ago

        They’re having issues with their email provider due to the hug of death effect, they did not expect to get so much traffic so fast

        • hornedfiend@piefed.social
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          5 months ago

          I understand, but they are losing the train I guess. People are giving up easily when they need a solution fast.

          • IronKrill@lemmy.ca
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            5 months ago

            Their loss. They have at least a month to migrate, probably more before most users get forced to verify, there is no rush. That and an ad-free hobby-run project like Stoat doesn’t gain anything from a massive user increase unless it correlates to an increase in devs or money.