Let's chat about Discord. If you missed it, the company announced they'll begin requiring some users to confirm their age via facial or ID scan to access certain age-restricted functionality on the platform (livestreams, content-restricted servers, etc.) starting next month.

Unsurprisingly, the news hasn't been well-received across the self-hosted and FOSS communities, many (most) of which have taken advantage of Discord's popularity to establish their own outlet for developers and users to interact. Among the more common complaints are general privacy concerns and a third-party security breach just a few months back that saw 70,000 government ID photos leaked.

To make matters worse, the rush to migrate to other platforms has highlighted a few longstanding issues that should sound familiar to regular readers of this newsletter – the self-hosted chat landscape is fractured and messy, and there are several factors that will make users hesitant to make the jump:

• Community Overlap: Given the large overlap between gamers and the technical crowd, Discord is an obvious destination for tech communities as their members are already registered on the platform. Lemmy and Voat experienced a similar issue during the attempted Reddit exodus, and the Fediverse – which somewhat mitigates this issue – is too confusing and clunky to newcomers in its current state.
• Discord has a ton of features. Discord has a robust feature set that is difficult to replicate for smaller projects with fewer resources. While there are a ton of great self-hosted alternatives, many excel at one thing and are lucky to include even basic support for others.
• Users won't actually leave Discord. I emphasized 'some' in the opening paragraph because the announcement states that the vast majority of existing users won't be impacted (the platform already has enough usage information to reliably identify their age). Unfortunately, humans are selfish creatures and the inconvenience this creates for new users won't be motivating enough to prompt existing users to leave.
• There is no clear successor. Spend any time browsing the various threads across the internet discussing Discord alternatives and you'll quickly notice there's no clear successor. Hosted services like TeamSpeak with dedicated resources have struggled to replicate what Discord has built – let alone open source projects with a fraction of the budget and contributions.
• Users want real-time communication. Like it or not, users are drawn to Discord because they want real-time communication. Unlike chat platforms, there's no shortage of great self-hosted forum options for communities craving that style of interaction – but there would need to be a massive mindset shift before we'd see broad adoption across the Discord crowd.

So what does all of this mean? I'm not sure, but I'm not necessarily advocating against self-hosted solutions – even if I agree that self-hosting shouldn't be the ultimate solution to the world's tech woes.

In the meantime, stay open-minded. Drop the abrasiveness to new and different ideas that makes the FOSS community so difficult to stomach at times. And if nothing else, stop buying Discord Nitro.

If you're looking to join the cause, here are some projects to consider deploying, supporting, or contributing to:

• Established: Matrix, Stoat, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, Zulip
• Smaller But Growing: Campfire, Spacebar, Positive Intentions
• Newcomers: Sharkord, Fluxer, Haven, OpenChat
• Forums: Discourse, NodeBB, Lemmy, Apache Answer, Flarum, Storyden
• See Also: Cinny (Discord-styled Matrix client), MostlyMatters (Mattermost fork without user limits)

And finally, other news and happenings for the week:

• The MinIO (object storage) GitHub repository has officially been tagged as no longer maintained – officially earning the project its own Alternative tag in my app directory
• The Vaultwarden team (password manager) issued a critical security fix for potential organization breaches and is urging users to update ASAP
• A newsletter reader heard last week's call for a Jellyfin newsletter and brought this plugin to my attention. In turn, I'm publicly committing to starting the transition away from Plex if someone can deliver on a Kometa alternative as well.
• Every so often, I stumble across a username that makes me giggle. This week, the developer of the well-known Jellyfin client Finamp changed theirs (and the project's repository) to UnicornsOnLSD.

Happy selfh.st/ing!

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Content Spotlight

Meet HabitSync, a self-hosted habit tracking platform. Developed with an emphasis on mobile usage, HabitSync's web interface makes it easy to add, track, and manage habits on the go from an intuitive web interface or Android app. Features include goals, frequencies, custom intervals, negative habits, social features (sharing, challenges, achievements, progress comparisons), multi-user support, SSO via OIDC, notifications, and more.

HabitSync can be easily deployed via Docker and doesn't require any additional containers for functionality.

Links: Source Code, Demo

Videos and Podcasts

• Top 10 Docker Apps You Should Be Running Right Now | Servers@Home
• How To Setup a Network Bridge in TrueNAS (and Why You Should) | Lawrence Systems
• Nexterm - Open Source, Self Hosted Server Management Made Simple! | Awesome Open Source
• Making Conventional Smoke Alarms Smart! — With Home Assistant Support! | Cameron Gray
• I Stopped Entering Transactions Manually with Firefly III | AlienTech42

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