I've been playing with Harmony, a promising ActivityPub-federated Discord-like lately, which is to say, you can start a Discord-server-like on an instance of one of these, as well as join other Discord-server-likes on other instances from your account. Federation of Discord-server-likes between instances happens over ActivityPub, and non-chat updates like regular posts and server announcements federate out to Mastodon and other more traditional servers so you can subscribe to a Discord-server-like's announcements and updates from Mastodon without having to create an account and explicitly join Harmony.

When I say this thing looks like Discord, I mean right down to the accessibility, which shares a lot of characteristics and works mostly well but has a few rough edges. I filed an issue where I did something a little differently than I normally do--I pointed Claude at the accessibility problems I experienced, had it ground my explicitly-stated recommendations in code, had it draft a concise document which I reviewed, and also had it build a GreaseMonkey user script with my recommendations implemented. This let me not only check whether I was full of shit in thinking I knew how to make things work better, but also gave me a working experience I could validate and advocate for.

Anyhow, if you're curious, the issue includes that user script so you can play with it yourself, though the script only works on the flagship instance right now. I'm excited about this because it looks easy to self-host for anyone who can dedicate a Linux VM, and it seems to tick all the right boxes for a project like this (I.e. voice/video are handled via LiveKit when available.) I wish Matrix could have been this, but Harmony could be its replacement for anyone wanting to self-host something like a Discord server that wasn't a closed silo.