Another Discord alternative that popped up a few months ago like the others out of no where. This one promises voice channels and is evidently entirely encrypted.
But out of the blue they “halted” service and now one again are open for registration?
Has anyone tried this yet ? Just a web app and it’s not open source.
While it sounds promising , and not everything HAS to open source. I just can’t help but feel off about something…
Not personally a fan of it since it’s not federated (and has no plans to implement federation) meaning its one centralized point of failure and one centralized point for governments to subpoena. It has no plans to implement any form of encryption (Movim has solid encryption, and Fluxer plans to implement encrypted DMs in the future).
Also very concerning to me is that it uses the MIT license, which allows for the company to do a rug-pull and close-source the code in the future so they can enshittify it. Only the GPL license ensures that it remains open-source and in the community’s hands forever.
If it was GPL and they wanted to go closed source, they could do it since they are the authors.
The MIT is a problem when others (not the authors) go closed source.
The GPL would only let them close source their own code, but to close source any code that was contributed by others, they would need to explicitly ask permission from each and every user that added to the codebase, which generally isn’t feasible.
That prevents the original creators from being able to benefit from free and rapid community development and then close sourcing it all later. To effectively close source the app, they would need to re-implement every contribution themselves.
They would only be able to do what you describe with the GPL if they also required every contributor to sign a CLA which explicitly gives up ownership of the contribution to the project owners.
The MIT license allows anyone (including the original creators) to close source the app without needing permission from anyone.