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Discord’s secret weapon against open source competitors (it’s PluralKit) (medium.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Why are FOSS platforms like Matrix having such a hard time getting users to migrate from Discord? Because of PluralKit.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (1 children)

So, let me see if i understand the argument: Discord, a piece of closed source software which is very popular at the moment because they hit first (user inertia) and haven't yet ramped up the enshittification (but sooner or later will because they already announced the intention to go the IPO route), wins over free software alternatives because of a 100% unofficial bot designed to help with one tiny niche user case most users of the platform haven't even heard about, which is itself free software and therefore could be migrated and/or adapted to other free software?

I'm not sure the argument is very solid

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

This bot detects messages with certain tags associated with a profile, then replaces that message under a "pseudo-account" of that profile using webhooks. This is useful for multiple people sharing one body (aka "systems"), people who wish to roleplay as different characters without having several accounts, or anyone else who may want to post messages as a different person from the same account.

Yeah, that seems incredibly niche. Never heard or thought of necessity of it.