Why can't you just say "you will possibly regret it" or even "you will probably regret it"?

It's not inevitable that people will regret going with Discord, Slack, or Skype. Most people won't.

Yet there is a network effect...I may regret relying on them, but I will also regret avoiding them. Boycotts without critical mass just punish the participants.

I dont have a solution to that, but I feel like we need to find one over just self-flagellation while waiting for a critical mass to appear.

Yep. Use MatterMost self-hosted at worst, or something simple like OpenFire/XMPP

I've never heard of MatterMost. It's good to see that there's an open-source alternative out there with a similar interface. I've never really given XMPP a fair rap... Maybe it's time again to check if any decent implementations have popped up.

If anyone can recommend any other open platforms for me and the other concerned readers of this post, that would be highly appreciated.

In my mind, federation is a pretty important feature, as it allows you the possibility to bridge the gap between all the disparate chat systems we currently have. Chat bifurcation is a major issue that is serving to help divide us all.

The problem is that neither of those really seem to fill the shoes of Discord for us. In Discord I can do text chats, voice chat, can post gifs, and can even screen share. It also does all of that with no requirements for hardware or setup on my part.

Yeah that's the issue with most self-hosted solutions. Pretty invariably they're either a pain to setup, require someone to provide an always on server (either in their house or pay someone else to host), or are hideous/missing major features. Discord does well because it requires pretty much zero setup on my part to have a place where me and my friends can chat while playing games!

Personally availability was always a major issue to me when it came to older self hosted solutions, with Discord I don't have to worry if group B has someone willing to bother hosting because it's always there hosted on Discord's servers and if something happened we don't suddenly lose our hub and chat.