Discord’s secret weapon against open source competitors (it’s PluralKit)
With the fediverse gaining attention and anti-Discord sentiment on the rise within tech-conscious communities, I’ve seen some people express befuddlement at Discord’s continued popularity. FOSS alternatives like Matrix exist, which boast many of the same features, but are open source and can be self-hosted. With federation between different Matrix servers, what’s the holdup? Why aren’t people leaving Discord?
Discord may advertise itself as “chat for gamers”, but it has a unique popularity among one demographic in particular that uses it more than anything else: Queers with extremely fringe identities. Oh sure, Tumblr is the traditional social network for gays and it has kept up with the times. And certainly TikTok is attracting the young people. But Discord has cultivated a queer membership by serving a different need than those platforms: privacy.
I know, I know, it’s ironic to be talking about privacy when this is an article about how Discord beats its FOSS competitors. But we’re talking history, here, we’re not yet up to current events. See, Discord allows you to say whatever you want in a safe space. You cannot be reblogged, quote tweeted, or typically even screenshot by people you don’t choose to trust on Discord. Servers are closed environments moderated by a team you may have a personal relationship with. Nobody is going to come harassing you on Discord if your posts are in line with the vibe of the community. You can theoretically pick a community that accepts you, and you’ll never have to worry about bigotry or about whether faceless admins and algorithms are going to take your side. It’s a pretty good deal if you’re closeted.
So Discord attracted the kind of people who did not wish to have a public identity as queer. Closeted trans people, and people with extremely fringe identities. There’s a reason reddit /r/otherkin is so small, and it’s that most of the otherkin are off on discord where it’s safe. The reddit otherkin are exposing themselves to hate, harassment, and online violence from the public. Sure, they have moderators to protect them, but they can be attacked elsewhere and then they have to rely on unknown mods and admins to protect them, which doesn’t always work. That’s why there was a /r/otherkringe up until the APIpocalypse. The users there would make fun of the people on /r/otherkin because their posts were public. In order to demean discord otherkin, they had to send spies, one of whom I helped catch and kick out of the community.
And as a result there’s this community of closeted and deeply fringe queer people on discord. Most of them are trans, and/or otherkin, and/or the point of this article, plural. Plural people share their heads with others. The “classic” reason for this is dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. But plurality comes in many forms. Some unhealthy, many healthy. The validity of healthy plural systems is a point of controversy with the sysmedicalist community, but those guys suck and I’m not giving them more than a sentence of this article. Plurality can arise as the result of trauma, religious experiences, meditation, a fluid ego, and causes we don’t understand or have yet to map out.
Plurality presents a unique technical challenge to online interactions. You have one head, with one computer or phone, one social media account, that would like to be able to convey the voices of multiple different people. Sure, you can prefix your posts with the member of the system who’s speaking, but that’s clunky and boring. There’s a way to handle the problem way better, and it’s the method used by PluralKit.
Pluralkit, once invited to your discord server, scans all of your messages for a certain key string. It could be something appended to the message, prepended, or, um… “bipended”? Once it locates the key string, it deletes your message, and reposts the part of the message that is not the string from a webhook. A webhook is an automated message sent by a bot that looks like its own account. You can configure the name and avatar of your members/headmates/alters in PluralKit, and messages that use your chosen string will be proxied with a webhook that uses the name and avatar configured for that member. TL;DR? The bot makes fake user accounts for your headmates and lets you send messages using those accounts.
PluralKit was a gamechanger. Many plural systems became more capable of expressing themselves and their individual identity on Discord than anywhere else, including meatspace. Discord became an accessibility tool, vitally important to many people’s wellbeing. A lot of plural people just don’t have accounts elsewhere. If they do, it’s often an account just for one member, or where they aren’t honest about their identities. Because otherwise you risk ending up on places like kiwifarms and otherkringe.
Plural systems have in some ways become the bedrock of Discord’s queer communities. Discord’s fiercest allies, with the most investment in the platform and the most time by necessity using it. Moderators and power users, many of them. When a queer community is created on Discord, odds are good that eventually someone’s gonna ask for pluralkit. On Discord, understanding and acceptance of plural systems is the norm. There are more allies of plural people on Discord than anywhere else, and they understand how important pluralkit is to their friends, even possibly their partners.
So, Matrix isn’t going to be poaching the fringe queer communities any time soon. Not until it gets a PluralKit equivalent. It’s simply not accessible. Many of Discord’s biggest users, the people spending all day on the platform, they know about pluralkit and they know Matrix just isn’t good enough for themselves or their plural friends. There is a massive amount of friction moving a majority of queer communities onto a platform like Matrix. Without features that many consider to be necessary, the idea isn’t even considered. And while plural proxying isn’t considered necessary on platforms like instragram or shitter, it’s become an essential feature on Discord-like platforms.
Matrix is behind. It’s not feature-complete. And the reasons might not be obvious to someone who doesn’t live in the closed-source environment of Discord. Precisely the same people who tend to be open source advocates. But in order to move a community, you have to understand that community. And I’ve seen a lot of discussions about Discord’s failings that don’t understand the value of its secret weapon.
