It's undeniable that the majority of people on the Internet, even those who participate in fringe communities use Discord.

The idea is simple and straight forward: Onboarding users to communicate with those using superior services as an alternative to not having it at all. Encouraging users to drop their centralized platforms by creating an artificially restricted space inside of it is something I'd like to experiment with.

https://cy-x.net/connect
This is retarded

Here's another idea: Discord is like a huge containment board for normies.

Having a Minecraft and Terraria server isn't alternative either and yet you have servers there. Ironic.

>Having a Minecraft and Terraria server isn't alternative either and yet you have servers there. Ironic.

Fair point. We host games people actually want to play while providing them through non-corporate channels (cracked servers, DRM-free clients).

The goal isn't purity testing every piece of software - it's demonstrating that you can enjoy mainstream content without feeding the surveillance machine. Same reason we have Discord but artificially restrict it to push people toward better alternatives.

If you have suggestions for genuinely alternative games worth hosting, we're listening.

You still use games from big corporations, even if they're cracked.

What the above guy said. Do a poll with games such as Hedgewars, freeciv, openTTD and host the winner

0A.D. is a cool one too.

>You still use games from big corporations, even if they're cracked.

This misses the point entirely. Running a server for a 14 year old version of cracked Minecraft or liberated TF2 from 2008 isn't "using corporate infrastructure" - it's using software that happens to have been made by corporations, but completely divorced from their control systems.

No telemetry. No accounts. No DRM. No forced updates. No data collection. The corporate surveillance apparatus gets exactly $0 and zero data points from our servers.

By this logic, using a ThinkPad is "supporting IBM/Lenovo" and running Linux is "supporting whatever corporate contributors touched the kernel." It's ideological purity to the point of uselessness.

The FOSS game suggestions are valid though. We'll run that poll and see what people actually want to play.

If you want to play Hedgewars instead of Minecraft, great. If you want to play liberated Minecraft without Microsoft getting a cent or a data point, also great. Both are infinitely better than paying for the game and logging into your Microsoft account.

Your site is cool, but you do a lot of really lame posturing about your ethics and point to other people and do call out posts and then completely contradict your ethics. It's like... if you're going to be Richard Stallman, cool, but if you're going to constantly preach about stuff like this and then make excuses for why you don't follow the strict rules of the philosophy... I don't know, man.

I can relate with how it feels to grow a small site in 2025 so I don't judge. But the first impressions here are mixed signals.

The Yesterweb had the biggest community about the 'alternative web' with Discord as the primary platform. One day they launched their forum, with the intention of moving everyone there, and closing off the Discord one day. The problem was, the conversion rate was terrible. The mode of Discord is almost opposite to a forum in every way: instant and slow, short and long, differences in intention too. I think that's hard proof that you cannot convert Discord users into forum users, even when you have one of the largest followings in the alternate web it's still impossible.
You don't have to experiment at all, we already know the results.

@52353

Hey, share your site, I'm curious!