I’ve been vouching for it since it admittedly works pretty well, but lately I’m back on the fence. I was under the impression that it only started as a vibecoded project, but has shifted gears since (and while I don’t like to excuse AI slop bullshit, unfortunately it is much more common in software dev than anything else). I thought I read that since putting a team together it’s become much better in that regard, but judging by very recent commit histories that doesn’t seem to be the case.
All of that, plus the early payment options and general corporate feel to it, I’m not really vouching for it much any more. It’s already starting to feel kind of bloated.
Unfortunately I still can’t really see most active discord users switching to any other alternative, because Fluxer is the only one that really aims to replicate the experience.
I mean realistically Matrix is what people should, but won’t use. So ignoring that Ive been sorta cheering for stoat.
The team actually seems to care about the project in like that… “old school open source” way, and they dont use ai. I believe funding is all donation only too, which is quite nice.
They had like 4 lines of ai code they removed and some people took that as ‘omg stoat uses ai’ and ran away from it, but IMO stoat is a good balance between discord-like and my “vibe check” as it were.
Agreed, though tbh even I found Matrix extremely confusing, buggy, and lacking features when I last tried it, I can’t imagine how non-technical users would find it. I don’t see it ever really becoming a massively widespread replacement (not that it needs to be, they’re very much doing their own thing).
Stoat felt really clunky last time I tried it but that was way back when Discord first announced the age bullshit, so maybe I’ll give it another look. Maybe I’m misremembering and/or it’s changed since then, but I don’t recall self-hosting and decentralization being on their roadmap?
Stoat is technically self hostable iirc, as everything is open source but federation isn’t planned so there’s not as much draw to selfhosting it, since you’d basically have a completely disconnected instance.
To me, that’s an acceptable con of the ‘vibe’ based decision I’m making, but to others it may not be.
and yeah stoat’s servers struggled with the large influx of people.
I’ve been vouching for it since it admittedly works pretty well, but lately I’m back on the fence. I was under the impression that it only started as a vibecoded project, but has shifted gears since (and while I don’t like to excuse AI slop bullshit, unfortunately it is much more common in software dev than anything else). I thought I read that since putting a team together it’s become much better in that regard, but judging by very recent commit histories that doesn’t seem to be the case.
All of that, plus the early payment options and general corporate feel to it, I’m not really vouching for it much any more. It’s already starting to feel kind of bloated.
Unfortunately I still can’t really see most active discord users switching to any other alternative, because Fluxer is the only one that really aims to replicate the experience.
I mean realistically Matrix is what people should, but won’t use. So ignoring that Ive been sorta cheering for stoat.
The team actually seems to care about the project in like that… “old school open source” way, and they dont use ai. I believe funding is all donation only too, which is quite nice.
They had like 4 lines of ai code they removed and some people took that as ‘omg stoat uses ai’ and ran away from it, but IMO stoat is a good balance between discord-like and my “vibe check” as it were.
Stoat is not currently interested in federation though: https://developers.stoat.chat/faq/
Agreed, though tbh even I found Matrix extremely confusing, buggy, and lacking features when I last tried it, I can’t imagine how non-technical users would find it. I don’t see it ever really becoming a massively widespread replacement (not that it needs to be, they’re very much doing their own thing).
Stoat felt really clunky last time I tried it but that was way back when Discord first announced the age bullshit, so maybe I’ll give it another look. Maybe I’m misremembering and/or it’s changed since then, but I don’t recall self-hosting and decentralization being on their roadmap?
Stoat is technically self hostable iirc, as everything is open source but federation isn’t planned so there’s not as much draw to selfhosting it, since you’d basically have a completely disconnected instance.
To me, that’s an acceptable con of the ‘vibe’ based decision I’m making, but to others it may not be.
and yeah stoat’s servers struggled with the large influx of people.