As I'm writing these lines, the Discord API seems to have some serious issues and is not reachable for me. I have been wanting to write this blog post for a while already but this situation finally gives me a proper excuse to address the heavy dependence of Splinterlands on Discord and why this is a bad idea:
First of all, Discord is a proprietary piece of software. I could reiterate now why it might not be a good idea to rely on proprietary systems but the famous Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation did that already here.
Completely decentralized, free and open-source solutions, such as Matrix, already exist. Using such an alternative would have completely avoided this downtime we are experiencing right now.
I would like to use this post to start a discussion with the @splinterlands community: What are your thoughts about switching to an alternative to Discord? I know that it would be a huge challenge as all official channels heavily depend on Discord right now but in my opinion, it would be a good idea to start a slow but steady migration to an alternative solution, which would make sense from a technological perspective and would fit much better for an open-source game, that @splinterlands already is.