There seems to be a serious lack of a Discord equivalent fediverse platform unlike other social media alternatives. Most of the closest options are either too overwhelming in UI/UX for majority of people coming from Discord, missing deal-breaking features like video calling or are not federated.
Could it due to some technical limitation of the ActivityPub protocol? I skimmed through its documentation and I get the impression that content may not be accommodating of instant messaging without unconventional modifications. It would also be troublesome to federate massive bunch of messages across (physical) servers in real time.
If it were truly possible to create a Discord alternative, what would it take to make it compatible with the fediverse while also ensuring it feels functional and intuitive for migrating users and not pose too much of a resource drain for self hosters?
Edit: Modified title to clarify post talking about ActivityPub in particular
Discord? UUUUGGHHHHH. For chat, XMPP already exists.
But overall, one of the issues of “why does an alternative to XYZ not exist?” is that usually, when we talk about those corporate jails, XYZ does too much for anyone to up and create a 1:1 alternative. This is valid both in and out the Fediverse. Discord is currently a chat platform, a video platform, a streaming platform, a documentation platform (ugggh), an issue tracker (UUUGHHH), an FBI / ICE honeypot, and a picture gallery.
For unreasonable people (the majority of the internet as it would seem), even lacking one of those features is somehow a “deal breaker”, when it actually makes perfect sense in terms of maintainability and independence to design and work up an alternative to characteristics such as chat or videos individually, rather than to platforms. Text chat? IRC / XMPP. Video calls? Jitsi. Picture gallery? phpgallery. Documentation? Wikis. Issue tracker? Forgejo / Chiselapp. ICE? Get Kirk’d.
So for people who create solutions for their own scale and usually without a profit or a means to operationally maintain the project, they are at a severe disadvantage that people won’t put up the effort to even learn there is an alternative. I’m guessing partly it’s because YT, TikTok and ChatGPT have turned people’s attention span to brainrot to such a degree they can’t follow a simple instruction pamphlet with pictures.
No-one wants to use these things at scale and the interconnectiveness between different instances on these things are just non-existent.