CIRCLE WITH A DOT

The thing about Discord is that it has changed the meaning of "server" from "software running on some hardware, usually handling a single community" to "a community".

It seems that people tend to flock to services with centralized identity because it simplifies things. You no longer need to deal with a separate account and username and profile for every community. You have a discord account and you can join any discord server. And discord servers are great for larger communities because they can support more channels and have good features for self-governing inside these communities.

Any discord alternative that people would actually use will probably need centralized identity as a selling point. But unless you have the backing of VC funding or run at a loss as a public utility which is unlikely to happen at a global scale any time soon, it's not really sustainable to host whole communities.

I think one possible solution would be to create a centralized identity service, perhaps with OIDC, maybe something similar to how Bluesky has the PLC identities. Then for actual chats you would have a selection of servers to host the community. However the trick to avoiding making this ridiculously complicated like say Matrix, is to not do federation. You connect to the server hosting the community you want to participate in and that server owns all the data. This would spread out the costs of running communities and the identity infrastructure, while avoiding making it overly complicated.

This still leaves the problem of how to fund the central identity service. Should some features be paywalled? Should community host servers have to pay a fee if they exceed a certain user count? How to handle moderation in a scalable way?