I don’t even see this as a purely negative thing. Discord is already trash, Microsoft buying it means either

1. They mess it up, like they do with almost everything, and its obscene dominance comes to an end, or
2. Nothing.

There’s even a part of me that could see them open sourcing it/parts of it, now that they “love open source”. This would of course be a part of a calculated play to stifle the rise of alternatives like Matrix. We’re already seeing a gross trend of developers using Discord as their project discussion platform, and it would be in Microsoft’s interest to try to maximise this as much as possible, keeping them in a centralised walled-garden under their control.

A few years ago (2017?) I decided I would move messenger apps. The aim (and what I’ve achieved) was all my messaging going through a secure, private app.

Signal was never an option.

In 2017, Signal really was the only option. Element (Riot, back then) was really bad and didn’t feature e2ee (which only got enabled by default last year!). XMPP was and remains difficult to use (not even many people here use it, how could I expect “normal people” to use it?)

I made the choice to use Signal, and I don’t regret it. I only regret that it has taken until now that we are starting to see a glimmer of a real competitor, in the form of Matrix. But a really competitor to Whatsapp and the like, back in 2017, just didn’t exist outside of Signal.