The importance of alternatives and FOSS

If you’ve been paying attention to world news lately, you probably know about the Brazilian election this year. It’s a very “sus” (for the lack of better term) election, where Lula won yet again under questionable circumstances (poll closing times, the right winning the first election merely weeks ago, the “runoff election” system that’s ripe for rigging, Lula jumping up millions mysteriously). Regardless on if you feel it was fair and square and his loyalists voted him in or if it was rigged, the damage has been done. It hasn’t been taken well, the stock market in Brazil has triggered emergency halts in trading due to collapsing so hard, and others are dreading another 4 years of hell.

But perhaps the biggest issue for the average online user, discounting the economic situation that I hear is terrible (with high taxes), is the fact that video chat on Discord will be gimped for 4 more years as users have to use VPNs to use video chatting.

In fact, it’s only going to get worse. Lula is making vows to regulate social media platforms, meaning sites will gimp themselves for Brazilians. A lot of countries that are harsh on speech end up developing their own local alternatives to Western companies to control speech, as can be seen with China’s entire market or Russia and platforms such as vk or MAX.

It’s not even just a “shithole country” thing either, as Western “democracies” love to push age ID laws, backdoors in chat apps to stop criminals, and spyware everywhere. People distrust their own governments so much that they would rather take their official enemy spying over them over the USA, just because China has no power there.

So it’s important to some degree that alternatives to Discord, Telegram, Windows, and whatnot exist. Unfortunately it seems as if these projects keep getting dogged down with drama, lack of focus, and outside factors. I’d like to talk about why these are important with important reasons for why these projects need to exist.

Good things never last

To start it off, I’d like to talk about something that seems to be the cycle in tech. Someone comes out with a really cool product or service and everyone is using it. Then out of nowhere, things go south. New updates and versions are awful, management doesn’t know what the users want, management sells out to another company who wants the patents, it gets shut down, the list goes on and on. If it’s FOSS doesn’t matter, as some of these issues can happen to either one.

Case in point: Microsoft Windows has been falling apart for a while. Windows 10 and 11 are notably buggier than Windows before 10 was. Every time you search Windows 11 on the news, there’s always some news report about bugs or how you’re getting screwed by Windows.

Or Discord for that matter. Discord has entrenched itself as the “everything” chat app in a way with communities built upon it going back 10+ years even, to the dawn of Discord. There are Discord servers where there are vast amounts of technical knowledge and info, locked away behind the app. It’s also what your online friend group uses to keep in touch. It’s also no longer the same app or community it was circa 2015-18.

Nowadays it’s known for age verification (ironic given that random Discord admins ask for your ID), bans for no apparent reason, and having some of the most caustic communities on the internet. Back in the days of 2015-18 (when the internet was better) it was the place to be online. You really had to have been there when nobody took it seriously, and now it’s an infinite drama pit of bans and chat feuds. But it gets worse, try joining a major public Discord for say an emulator and you will be asked to verify a phone number.

Why did Discord get so big? Because the cycle played itself out with Skype previously, as Skype ran itself into the ground before becoming irrelevant…and Microsoft deprecating it for Teams.

Of course, this is where the appeal of FOSS and hosting your own stuff comes into play. Hotline might be a dead protocol, and yet there are still people hosting servers and running their own clients to this day. Because it was something anyone could host, even when the mothership had long departed anyone can host it to this day. The same goes with old online games with dedicated servers or direct IP connections, you can play something like Madden 08 on the PC without EA’s servers by directly joining games.

Government/external pressure

On top of this, corporate platforms and software always have to obey the government where they’re at, and will happily cave faster because they would rather keep it going than go down in a fight. This is why platforms have age ID rules, geolocked features, and geolocking. On the other hand, advertisers and payment processors can also tilt a platform to do what it wants. YouTube ended up doing this, and the reason the site is a censored shell of its former self is because they keep caving to advertiser pressure. Say too many swear words or cover controversial topics and you’ll get demonetized if not banned.

When Twitter was bought by Elon Musk and relaxed rules, they did not cave and as a result the only ads you see on Twitter are for weed, supplements, nicotine pouches, AI girlfriend/anime simulator apps, and smaller advertisers who don’t care about Elon. Elon has “fuck you” money, Google runs YouTube at a loss and has to make up the money for hosting infinite videos somehow.

It’s even worse if you piss off the payment processors. Matt Mullenweg, current owner of Tumblr, won’t roll the site back to the “old days” pre-porn ban because he’s worried about the power they have. He’s not the only internet person to have the same opinion, as Josh of the Kiwi Farms has talked about the same thing. Think of payment processors as the final boss of free speech and the internet with regards to what you can and can’t do online. If they’re mad, they will make sure you can’t earn a single cent. They will make sure that you obey every single ToS and if you break the ToS of say Visa, you’re done.

You now have to deal with the infinite friction and pain of using crypto to take payments, which only really works if you’re an online casino because people want to gamble anyway. Of course, Matt would be better off if he only allowed drawn NSFW, but even in that situation payment processors would demand that you can’t post something they don’t like (as seen with Pixiv, Patreon, etc.)

Backdoors and privacy

The reason Linux is so popular among both the privacy crowd and the absolutely paranoid is that Linux doesn’t have open backdoors (exploits don’t count). Windows has had allegations of them, but in 2026 Microsoft helped the feds deanonymize a user using Windows user IDs. This was something to do with Microsoft account logins, and if you use a Microsoft account you should assume you’ve been deanonymized. Oh and by the way, Windows 11 keeps blocking bypasses for logging in to Microsoft with each update and it’s a cat and mouse game (unless you install 23h2 or something and use the old bypass trick).

The same goes with Android and Google Play. Privacy conscious people will oftentimes run forks of Android such as Graphene to have a more secure phone (or as secure as something that uses the public cell network can get) and get away from Google.

Something gets abandoned

Another reason why things can go downhill is when software gets abandoned. In this day and age, every skid has access to an LLM and knows the “right terms” to bypass any “guardrails” and “safety checks”, or runs their own uncensored model. They can find novel exploits and bugs in what you’re running that you never cared about.

Case in point, October 2026 has been called by Wikipedia “Black October” due to the fact that a lot of serious exploits have been found in this month alone. Most notable of these was a PHP exploit that took much of the internet down for patching, but also there was a cert compromise (because the private key was literally the number 4) and an exploit in Node.JS. These are in actively managed software stacks.

Now imagine pointing an LLM at some old host running some old OS. You can guarantee that there will be exploits found in it. Even 15 years ago, I remember reading online about people on vintage computing forums saying to recover passwords from AIX using old CVEs, and an AI will probably do that for you automatically.

Recently poa.st was hacked in this manner as well, the owner was running a server he could have sworn was updated but one server was running an old version of XZ with the infamous XZ backdoor found in 2024 some old version of SSH with a race condition (awesome software, great job!). LLM tools found it and the hackers got in.

But even pre-AI this has happened. Call of Duty in particular has been plagued with RCE exploits everywhere, that can plant malware on your PC by being in the same lobby as other people. On consoles, there are so many ways to cheat online as well to the point old CoDs are unplayable. The only Call of Duty title actively being patched from this era is the PS4/5 version of Black Ops 2. Otherwise, you need to use third-party fan patches on the PC versions like IW4x or Plutonium to ensure you can play online safely.

Or if you wanted to host some old version of forum software to run a site “like in the old days”, you’ll be dealing with tons of unpatched exploits or a hard-dependency on say PHP 5. I knew people who did this and their site lasted a week or two before being hacked. This is also how 4chan got hacked; they ran old versions of FreeBSD and PHP, and got hacked via an old version of Ghostscript. I’ve even had this myself: when I’d run a specific server for an old Source 2006 engine mod I would be DDoSed until I took the server offline. The only way you can host an old website is with numerous patches, like what SomethingAwful does with its hacked-up 2000s era forum software.

The silver lining with PC games is that if it has a community, people will find workarounds for these exploits.

Making an alternative needs to be taken seriously

The big problem and what I was getting at this entire time, and what I want to address is that making an alternative to “big tech” and companies that shaft you has to be taken seriously. A lot of times when I run into these FOSS clones of major projects, they’re not taken seriously at all.

When Donald Trump came into office a second time and instantly waged trade wars, there was a big thing in Europe about having a plan B, or “tech sovereignty”. The idea was smart on paper, have your own alternatives decoupled from a country that might or might not turn on you. They don’t want the plot of Homefront 2 to happen where North Korea uses a kill switch on the USA’s tech. The difference is, when there’s nothing forcing you to act (such as social media bans or sanctions like with Russia and China), there’s no motivation to make something functional.

Take Matrix for example. Someone I knew from the past decided to try to get me into Matrix, and what I found was pretty sad. There was some of the same Discord behavior on these groups, invite-only public groups that have you request to join, among other things. There was serious lag, and I was told that e-mail signups on his instance are restricted to the big providers and some privacy-centric ones due to having illegal image spammers using the network. I saw error messages, join failures, and groups taking forever to join. I even saw a chat group doing the Discord thing of “you need to show us a censored ID to join with the group name written next to it”.

Hosting a server on Matrix is also a disaster, as it can bloat up fast as you run it. It will also be slower than the mothership matrix.org server as well.

But don’t take my word for it: a Politico article about the EU trying to use it had people saying it was “worse than Teams”. Imagine something so awful that you’d rather use Microsoft Teams of all things for communication! Of course, the one guy defending it unironically said “microslop” and it was obvious that he was using it for political reasons.

XMPP is also a patchwork of clients, servers, and half-baked standards. You can’t use calls in MUCs, and another server I’m in has calling greyed out. Not even all clients support calls properly. The big XMPP implementations are using it as some backend software that you don’t normally know about, and it definitely is less of a technical nightmare than Matrix is from using it.

Then there’s Linux, where there’s a big war between the Wayland and X11 camp going on. Wayland is supposed to be more secure and fix screen tearing, but X11 lets you do things Wayland lacks such as screensavers and screen locking, pop up video playback, and window positioning. It’s a petty feud between two groups that “know best” as they’ve lost the plot of trying to dethrone Microsoft.

To them, it’s not about dethroning MS. It’s about declaring yourself the king of open source or something. In fact, I see that with many of these projects. Petty drama and infighting is everywhere, and the reason people like Lunduke get so much engagement is because he’s made himself the Keemstar, Asmongold, or Jerry Springer of FOSS.

The same goes with abandoning projects and projects made by grifters. Much of the hate for AI comes as a result of nobodies who want to make some “Discord alternative” (as an example) that’s obviously vibecoded and has few people using it. There’s also a trend where actual grifters and those writing software in protest will abandon their project after a while. Case in point, Wayback was made solely as a petty response to people who wanted XLibre in certain distros and it’s barely getting updates while XLibre (despite constant drama within and around it) is updated much more frequently.

I feel as if all this petty drama and fighting as opposed to “making shit work” is moving people away from “the goal”. The goal should be to make alternatives that are on-par if not better than what you want to use. It shouldn’t be solely to get yourself in the history books or famous online.

Discord is so big because it works and people use it. Windows is so big because software and games are tied to it, and there’s no real alternative (though EAC and Fortnite are coming to Linux soon and business software usually doesn’t whine about VMs). Social media sites are so big because they work with little friction (and people use them). Desktop Linux, despite its flaws, has also gotten use because it supports enough hardware for the Average Joe to browse the web on. Meanwhile the ChromeOS and Android OSes built on Linux “just work” for most people.

This is what I’m getting at here. A major country is going to be forcing Discord to geolock features at best, and the alternatives are so lousy that people would rather use a VPN to get the Real McCoy instead of using the FOSS alternative. The alternatives need to kick themselves into gear and make themselves relevant as opposed to existing solely to be on some FSF “approved alternative” list. It can’t just be a pet project for when the time comes, it has to actually work.

In fact, this is something the FSF of all people really tries to push even if it’s futile with the state of FOSS. They try to market alternatives, but them merely existing is only half the battle. The other half is making sure people can use them, because much of the world is like Ellen Feiss was in the Apple ad: just a normie who wants their PC to work. Just like the EU Element Pro example, they will switch back if this unfamiliar app is buggy and offers nothing Teams doesn’t. Apple on the other hand had it right under Steve Jobs: they knew people will eat up an unfamiliar OS if it doesn’t go BLEEPBLEEPLBEPLBEBPLEBLPBELP like their PC did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c72d4-LpilM