Then we’ll all run for Matrix in a few years once Discord goes full anti-consumer. As if none of us have ever been through a situation like this. Nope, never.
…Says the guy who’s like in 50 Discord servers…Including one for friends and another for family.
I’m confused, this changes nothing for most users. All this does is allow creators that use Patreon tiers to grant certain roles in Discord to do this entirely through Discord. If you’re not in one of these servers, this probably won’t affect you.
I don’t subscribe to any creator, but I often hear them talk about “this tier gives you X on Discord” and I wondered if it’s all manual. Some are people with hundreds of subscribers who want to make use of those perks, it would be a nightmare to manage manually.
Or as Cory Doctorow calls it - “Enshittification”. They’re now in the second stage - open the gates for other companies to market to Discord users:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
I don’t mind it. It’s outing all the companies who are run by people who lack critical thinking skills. Thanks for letting me know which corners of the internet to avoid
Kinda like how Apple often makes terrible decisions that everyone hates, and then every other company follows suit because it actually worked and it’s been normalized now. Musk made all sorts of garbage decisions and didn’t lose critical mass of users, so now every other social media company is gonna follow suit now that the terrible ideas have been “normalized” by one of them.
Terrible decisions? I would say they’re really conservative about it and it shows. It took them probably a decade to make an AR headset and it looks like it may succeed. They said nothing about AI lately, presumably because they’re waiting to see how it matures.
I think they’re complaining about the headphone jack. But the reality is most people didn’t even care, it’s a problem solved with a $5 dongle that just lives on your earbuds.
companies running unprofitable social media (read: not worth the 100s of millions of investor money for some fuckin basic chat or forums) figured out they cant ever become super profitable like theyd hoped and try to monetize to the max while they can
So it’s just an expansion of what can be monetized within a server. I see nothing wrong with this. It even gives small indie devs like me a chance at a small revenue stream.
If you don’t like the things a specific server is doing, leave. It’s pretty simple.
It’s the beginning of the entire platform turning to shit. Because it’s never enough money. More ads, more tracking, more locked in features.
This is the cycle of monetization. It gives you a small revenue stream, but only until users get fed up and leave. Because it’s never enough money coming in. More more more.
I have no problem paying for a service or an app if it is good and fits my needs. It’s the microtrans and battle passes that people generally have issues with. Paying for every little thing like a meme.
You seem to be forgetting that it is the server owner who decides these things. If you’re on a server that is monetizing memes and you don’t like it, leave.
Monetizing memes was given as an example. A stupid example Yes but only an example.
I found the PC Gamer article a bit confusing so I read other articles and understood it better. I get it now. It’s not Discord setting these sub tiers etc. They are allowing more servers. Doesn’t sound so bad. I guess depending how much a person uses a server they are a member of, they can help support the server and receive premium benefits and Discord who gets a cut of the purchases. All optional. Not too bad as it is up to the individual servers.
Edit: this can be a good thing and help support discord financially. So far we are lucky discord has not sold to a tech corp or gone public.
The thing is, between stuff like this and nitro, discord can fund itself without ads. Something like this literally helps everyone involved. If you don’t want to donate to a server, then don’t. It’s literally that simple.
I get tired of people jumping on this bandwagon because it’s popular to hate on discord. The people that are hating on it generally are the ones who fundamentally do not understand what is going on. They read some ragebait article and instead of digging a little bit deeper in trying to understand they just take it at face value. It’s very irritating. The latest buzzword is “enshitification”, which, by itself is a good descriptor for some things but these people throw it around so liberally that it loses all significance. “Oh an app did something I don’t like and I’m not going to take the time to learn more about it <insert meme of hand smacking button labeled enshitification>”.
Think of it this way… Discord is doing a Patreon but for discord servers. This is cool. This is neat. It hurts exactly no one and helps potentially everyone. At the most it’s a net zero effect for most users.
I won’t pay for anything that discord offers. I understand that companies are there to make money but they do not have anything of actual value to sell me. I don’t care about emojis or Nitro or whatever. I just want a chat client that allows me to communicate with people I play certain games with. In-game chat can do this as well and I will simply go back to that if the monetization of discord gets to be too big of a problem. It’s less convenient and sometimes sucks when folks are on different platforms but it’s free.
I’m going to take a rather controversial stance on this. I don’t see this as such a bad Thing
First of all, running a discord server, especially a large one is not easy and discord mods deserve to be paid for their time just as much as anyone else.
While I will say that I’m not a huge fan of discord’s new focus on massive servers, it’s clear that that’s what brings in the big dough for them.
If this helps discord keep the lights on, and keep small servers running that’s good for me as much as it is good for them.
Well, this seems like powerful motivation for me to eventually find a free open source positive alternative to Discord, while ignoring Discord in the meantime. I would love to bypass their enshittification phase entirely.
Good. Discord is the cancer of the free searchable internet.
If you really need communication, use XMPP or Matrix.
And for everything else use stuff like forums and Lemmy and mastodon reddit Twitter whatever. But not closed walled gardens that are not searchable on the net. It’s astonishing that so many people gatekeep content behind this Discord crap.
But not closed walled gardens that are not searchable on the net. It’s astonishing that so many people gatekeep content behind this Discord crap.
I disagree entirely. People have a right to privacy. It’s like demanding that we remove all the walls of all the buildings because you want to see what’s going on inside.
I’m not much of a Discord user, chat has always been harsh for me because I need time to gather my thoughts. But one thing I do like is how closed-off it is. Reminds me of the private-mode old forum softwares have (which Lemmy should give as an option for the instance owners, actually).
Discord is a chat and the default setting of every server is that to see the content of it, you need to join the server.
It make sense for a chat.
However, companies and communities have largely misused discord and basically turned it in forums.
Lots and lots of knowledge is spread on these chats with no way of finding it unless you know which server to join and provided they do not shut down at some point.
On top of that, the discord search feature is barebone at best.
There’s already a lot of knowledge everywhere, and nothing groundbreaking will stay confined within Discord (or any other private-mode social media website/interface/service). I don’t understand the argument from that perspective, sorry.
I can see how some companies that aren’t Discord would be desperate to get their hands on the content generated there, especially to feed the hungry AIs. But, again, there’s plenty of public platforms to leech off of.
What has discord to do with privacy? you really going the privacy route here while using Discord? Is this a troll or should I need to send you their privacy policy and tos?
Nobody is talking about private chats you have with your buddies on Discord. Nodoby want to see this anyway. (expect Discord ofc) we are talking about PUBLIC discord servers with thousands of people in it, where content is posted that only is accesable via a gateway of making a discord account + phone number and is in no way searchable on the internet.
Now imagine, everything would be like that, you wouldn’t even be here arguing with me because you would’ve never known what Lemmy is or even reddit. Because nothing would be searchable on the internet.
Totally, I too think that one should prefer Element for multiple reasons (feature richness, app availability, … I mean, the web widgets absolutely rule imo), after all, it’s UI is similar to Discord/Slack but it also feels somewhat different here and there. For the first 1-2 hours it can be a bit overwhelming for newbies. Cinny’s UI is much closer to Discord’s UI, and it seems fine for chatting as far as I have tried it.
the encryption broke first just for the desktop app, later also for web browser several times, people couldn’t see what I was writing to them, all while it worked in element. I was able to create nested rooms but nobody could see them for joining… the overall experience was painful and it probably cost me my one chance to convince people to get away from discord after their policy change to record audio from calls
Oh shoot nvm then. I only used it for like two weeks before I went back to Element because of it’s feature richness. And even during the time I used it I rarely chatted.
XMPP is mostly dead these days. The protocol is very inefficient (it’s all XML) which isn’t ideal on mobile devices since it uses more bandwidth to transfer and more processing power to parse.
I work at a big tech company, and at work we use Mattermost hosted outside our data center for cases where our internal stuff doesn’t work. It seems fine and I think it’s open-source, but I don’t know a lot about it.
I’ve heard about Matrix but haven’t tried it yet! Is it good?
Xmpp is far from death. Just because many started to use matrix instead doesn’t mean it’s dead. Even though matrix is a Ressource and performance nightmare much more so than xmpp will ever be.
I’m an IT specialist and work in IT too. I also selfhosted a lot of stuff publicly.
XMPP is used by many companies like Facebook , Google, Nintendo, GitHub, zoom, WhatsApp, Apple etc.
Xmpp is a an official Standard.unlikr things like matrix.
And if you think that xmpp has battery issues.oeadays then that tells me you used any xmpp app like conversation/snikket etc. like many years ago.
My xmpp Apps use way less battery than any matrix app ever could.
XMPP is fast, reliable and just works. Matrix is a nightmare to selfhost, too.
IRC? Irc has no E2EE whatsoever. Therfore isn’t even comparable to xmpp with omemo or matrix.
XMPP is used by many companies like Facebook , Google, Nintendo, GitHub, zoom, WhatsApp, Apple etc.
Facebook doesn’t use XMPP; they use a custom protocol built on top of MQTT. WhatsApp was using a binary equivalent to XMPP (keeping the same stanzas but removing the XML), but I’m not sure if they still are. Do you have a source stating that the other companies use XMPP?
Xmpp is far from death. Just because many started to use matrix instead doesn’t mean it’s dead. Even though matrix is a Ressource and performance nightmare much more so than xmpp will ever be.
How is matrix a performance nightmare? been running a matrix server for years with almost no issues. I guess the only exception was the few times I ran out of hdd space, but that’s it.
Xmpp is a an official Standard.unlikr things like matrix.
What’s an official standard? Matrix is a protocol just like xmpp and the specs are public, just like with xmpp.
Matrix is a nightmare to selfhost, too.
It’s literally as easy as running a docker container and editing a yaml file, at least for synapse.
It is very well known that Synapse is a ressource hog. Heck, you can’t even enable presence because it would kill your server ressources. Why do you think almost all instances have it disabled? Cmpared to an XMPP server ressource usage, Snypase is a nightmare to host. I also hosted a public server for a long time.
It’s literally as easy as running a docker container and editing a yaml file, at least for synapse.
just like xmmp is, difference is, matrix snypse uses like 20x the amount of ressources.
Just try to host a public server for more than 100 people and you will know.
There is a reason why people make stuff like Conduit or the matrix team works on Dendrite as a new server.
It sucks that Discord is being used for a bunch of large communities that would be better served by a forum for future access, but for just groups of friends, it’s way easier to use than anything fediverse. And if I’m chatting with my friends, I don’t NEED my shitposting to be easily searchable on Google.
I’m not against using Matrix, but I could only get select people to join me. Discord is where all the more tech-illiterate gamers live and sometimes I wanna hang out with them too. It’s not the same as Lemmy, where I want to talk to complete strangers, so it doesn’t matter too much if more than half a community is lost by migrating from reddit to lemmy.
Yes, that’s my reason for still having it too. All my friends are on there. And getting them to change platform is almost as hard as getting a woman to like you.
Why does everything need to be free searchable on the internet?
Call me crazy but I don’t want my group chats publicly available on the internet. Discord feels… private. I know they have access to all the data, but it’s not like a public website, forum, or even an open irc chatroom. It’s my walled garden to chat with friends, stream games, game chat, post dumb memes, etc.
That’s like saying signal is cancer to free and open internet. Or hell, email because it’s not indexed and searchable?
undefined> Why does everything need to be free searchable on the internet?
imagine everything is behind a gateway of account + phone number. you wouldn’t be here on Lemmy because you would’ve never heard about it and couldn’t search about it, or reddit etc.
It’s not hard to get your head around why searching the internet is the most important part to get things going. You wouldn’t get ANY information if you need to get your phone number out for every single site/forum/whatever.
And if you have no experience with Discord and how it evolved over the last years, I can’t help you. Discord already replaces many sites and forums, or give support via Discord only… now these things are no longer searchable because people somehow like to idle in Discord servers and search for things in there.
If you can’t see the issue with this, even right now already and especially in the future if it continous like that, then I can’t help you, sorry.
You cherry picked one line of my post and didn’t address the entire context or intent of it. Im not defending companies or businesses using discord as a drop in replacement for forums or support pages. Imo that’s a mis use of the tech.
I think that’s stupid.
But discord isn’t designed for that. It’s a chat app (voice and text). I don’t want my chats with friends publicly searchable on the internet. That’s dumb. Having my emails publically searchable on the internet is dumb too.
If a company started using Signal or Whatsapp for support, would you be clamoring for all signal and Whatsapp messages to be searchable on the internet?
That doesn’t make any sense. You seem more upset that companies are misusing Discord than mad at Discord.
This is not how it’s been used for the vast majority.
Companies and big communities use it as a forum, sharing knowledge more or less important.
For example, i dabble in modding games, nowadays i need to join a game discord server and ask there hoping that someone is kind enough to repeat for the nth time something asked already, probably several time a week.
Most often than not, you don’t get an answer due to several factors, one of which is that if you ask when the people that can help are not online, nobody answer really.
On a forum you could have searched your question and find some answer anyway.
THAT is a very big problem. Knowledge is walled in and the search provided is the equivalent of digging in the sand with a spoon.
I never understood why everyone moved to discord. Regardless of this, it actually just sucks and is hard to use. Discord really gives me hope that the fediverse will succeed, just because the UI sucks so fucking much.
Also, weirdly, a lot of people seem to use Discord for things used to be (and I would say should) be on a forum (or community, magazine, etc.)
Trying to follow the thread of a discussion about some obscure point you’re interested in is much easier when it’s in a thread, instead of an undifferentiated chat log with a bunch of unrelated cross-talk.
Discord replacing the third is the saddest. It completely isn’t fit for purpose. Part of the reason you can’t find anything on Google now is that forums died, and Discord is unsearchable.
Versus Slack, it was an easier sign-up process for ad hoc communities. You could just have people sign up instead of going through an approval process. (Slack’s approval process could be automated with third-party tools, but it was a hack. Slack was meant to be a specific group of known people.)
Exactly, I can go to discord and create a new server with a few clicks. Even as a somewhat tech savvy person I am not that confident about setting up a server, securing it properly, making it scalable for large amount of users, handling data storage and backups and all that.
The usernames stuff was stupid, but pray tell. How did users get “screwed out of their usernames”.
Did you know that when choosing a username you could just do your name and the number sans the hashtag and it’s functionality exactly the same as before.
It was a stupid change and unnecessary, but nobody got screwed out of anything.
I’m sure most people got the username they wanted, definitely more than 1% anyways. But if more than one person had the same username, people would be “screwed out of their username”
Now if someone wants the same name they’d have to add numbers at the end, or something stupid like xX_
Not necessarily true. Celebrities and Nitro subscribers also got early picks, and it isn’t like they wait for each person one-by-one: you are in a bucket with others who might get to your preferred username before you.
Those flashy animated reactions are just incredibly annoying. Wish I could disable them, but of course Discord would never allow you to turn off the monetization.
Here’s the thing… If your name was gamers_mate#2002 before the change, after the change you could make your name gamers_mate2002 and functionally nothing would change.
As I’ve said elsewhere, the user name stuff was stupid, but it’s not that big of a deal.
you are working really really hard in these comments defending a platform thats pretty arguably indefensible when it comes to both privacy and basic UX
every thing discord does at this point is to increase numbers on a chart and make an accountant happy
Discord is a for profit company. Everyone here except you understands and accepts that.
I find discord’s ux to be very pleasing. You want to cry and whine about element but … Discord uses electron. I’m starting to doubt that you have much/any development experience and are just spouting off stuff you have heard.
Discord is trying to find a path to fund itself. It is a business. Making money and being a good product are not at odds with one another. Via nitro and server subscriptions discord can fund itself while still remaining an excellent and free platform. What they have added is the ability for server owners to basically do Patreon type things inside their own servers.
I’m guessing that you didn’t actually bother to read far enough to understand that server owners set up subscription terms, not discord. This is not discord forcing anything upon servers. This is discord giving server owners the ability to monetize their individual server by having subscriptions. If a server does this and you don’t like it then just leave.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
This is the classic tactic of make a product free and run it at a loss until you have full market share then you can extort users for whatever.
Then we’ll all run for Matrix in a few years once Discord goes full anti-consumer. As if none of us have ever been through a situation like this. Nope, never.
…Says the guy who’s like in 50 Discord servers…Including one for friends and another for family.
And who also pays for Nitro… =/
Yep, we’ve seen that before
I’m confused, this changes nothing for most users. All this does is allow creators that use Patreon tiers to grant certain roles in Discord to do this entirely through Discord. If you’re not in one of these servers, this probably won’t affect you.
Even if you are, it’s still barely a change
Oooh, this should automate that stuff, right?
I don’t subscribe to any creator, but I often hear them talk about “this tier gives you X on Discord” and I wondered if it’s all manual. Some are people with hundreds of subscribers who want to make use of those perks, it would be a nightmare to manage manually.
No, it’s automated via Patreon as well.
Oh, thank you!
Or as Cory Doctorow calls it - “Enshittification”. They’re now in the second stage - open the gates for other companies to market to Discord users:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Did that fucknugget ruining Twitter cause EVERYONE to have the same hair brained idea?
I don’t mind it. It’s outing all the companies who are run by people who lack critical thinking skills. Thanks for letting me know which corners of the internet to avoid
Kinda like how Apple often makes terrible decisions that everyone hates, and then every other company follows suit because it actually worked and it’s been normalized now. Musk made all sorts of garbage decisions and didn’t lose critical mass of users, so now every other social media company is gonna follow suit now that the terrible ideas have been “normalized” by one of them.
Terrible decisions? I would say they’re really conservative about it and it shows. It took them probably a decade to make an AR headset and it looks like it may succeed. They said nothing about AI lately, presumably because they’re waiting to see how it matures.
I think they’re complaining about the headphone jack. But the reality is most people didn’t even care, it’s a problem solved with a $5 dongle that just lives on your earbuds.
companies running unprofitable social media (read: not worth the 100s of millions of investor money for some fuckin basic chat or forums) figured out they cant ever become super profitable like theyd hoped and try to monetize to the max while they can
So it’s just an expansion of what can be monetized within a server. I see nothing wrong with this. It even gives small indie devs like me a chance at a small revenue stream.
If you don’t like the things a specific server is doing, leave. It’s pretty simple.
It’s the beginning of the entire platform turning to shit. Because it’s never enough money. More ads, more tracking, more locked in features.
This is the cycle of monetization. It gives you a small revenue stream, but only until users get fed up and leave. Because it’s never enough money coming in. More more more.
I have no problem paying for a service or an app if it is good and fits my needs. It’s the microtrans and battle passes that people generally have issues with. Paying for every little thing like a meme.
You seem to be forgetting that it is the server owner who decides these things. If you’re on a server that is monetizing memes and you don’t like it, leave.
Monetizing memes was given as an example. A stupid example Yes but only an example.
I found the PC Gamer article a bit confusing so I read other articles and understood it better. I get it now. It’s not Discord setting these sub tiers etc. They are allowing more servers. Doesn’t sound so bad. I guess depending how much a person uses a server they are a member of, they can help support the server and receive premium benefits and Discord who gets a cut of the purchases. All optional. Not too bad as it is up to the individual servers.
Edit: this can be a good thing and help support discord financially. So far we are lucky discord has not sold to a tech corp or gone public.
The thing is, between stuff like this and nitro, discord can fund itself without ads. Something like this literally helps everyone involved. If you don’t want to donate to a server, then don’t. It’s literally that simple.
I get tired of people jumping on this bandwagon because it’s popular to hate on discord. The people that are hating on it generally are the ones who fundamentally do not understand what is going on. They read some ragebait article and instead of digging a little bit deeper in trying to understand they just take it at face value. It’s very irritating. The latest buzzword is “enshitification”, which, by itself is a good descriptor for some things but these people throw it around so liberally that it loses all significance. “Oh an app did something I don’t like and I’m not going to take the time to learn more about it <insert meme of hand smacking button labeled enshitification>”.
Think of it this way… Discord is doing a Patreon but for discord servers. This is cool. This is neat. It hurts exactly no one and helps potentially everyone. At the most it’s a net zero effect for most users.
I won’t pay for anything that discord offers. I understand that companies are there to make money but they do not have anything of actual value to sell me. I don’t care about emojis or Nitro or whatever. I just want a chat client that allows me to communicate with people I play certain games with. In-game chat can do this as well and I will simply go back to that if the monetization of discord gets to be too big of a problem. It’s less convenient and sometimes sucks when folks are on different platforms but it’s free.
“Exclusive memes” this is hell.
That’s an exotic synonym for “dank.”
it’s the opposite of dank
rank
Stank memes?
Rank memes
I’m going to take a rather controversial stance on this. I don’t see this as such a bad Thing
First of all, running a discord server, especially a large one is not easy and discord mods deserve to be paid for their time just as much as anyone else.
While I will say that I’m not a huge fan of discord’s new focus on massive servers, it’s clear that that’s what brings in the big dough for them.
If this helps discord keep the lights on, and keep small servers running that’s good for me as much as it is good for them.
Also, I’d much rather this than ads ngl
Oh God anything but ads
Lol pay for exclusive memes, I’m out guys
Where are the Discord alternatives? Just in cause Discord goes to hell
I heard about “guilded” but i don’t have direct experience.
divolt looks pretty good, has bridge support so you dont need to make all your friends move to something else
Well, this seems like powerful motivation for me to eventually find a free open source positive alternative to Discord, while ignoring Discord in the meantime. I would love to bypass their enshittification phase entirely.
@PositiveNoise @dirtmayor Have you tried revolt.chat ?
I’ll check out revolt.chat. Thanks for the suggestion!
Maybe this is a sign people need to stop expecting everything on the Internet to be free?
If you’re selling my data, it’s not free
https://nerimity.com/
It’s very new, but that’s one. Spacebar was one but seems to be stuck in limbo. Then yeah there’s Revolt I guess.
Revolt is one, and the app is basically a clone of Discord.
There’s Matrix/Element and now Revolt
Good. Discord is the cancer of the free searchable internet.
If you really need communication, use XMPP or Matrix.
And for everything else use stuff like forums and Lemmy and mastodon reddit Twitter whatever. But not closed walled gardens that are not searchable on the net. It’s astonishing that so many people gatekeep content behind this Discord crap.
I disagree entirely. People have a right to privacy. It’s like demanding that we remove all the walls of all the buildings because you want to see what’s going on inside.
I’m not much of a Discord user, chat has always been harsh for me because I need time to gather my thoughts. But one thing I do like is how closed-off it is. Reminds me of the private-mode old forum softwares have (which Lemmy should give as an option for the instance owners, actually).
Discord is a chat and the default setting of every server is that to see the content of it, you need to join the server.
It make sense for a chat.
However, companies and communities have largely misused discord and basically turned it in forums.
Lots and lots of knowledge is spread on these chats with no way of finding it unless you know which server to join and provided they do not shut down at some point.
On top of that, the discord search feature is barebone at best.
This is the problem with discord.
There’s already a lot of knowledge everywhere, and nothing groundbreaking will stay confined within Discord (or any other private-mode social media website/interface/service). I don’t understand the argument from that perspective, sorry.
I can see how some companies that aren’t Discord would be desperate to get their hands on the content generated there, especially to feed the hungry AIs. But, again, there’s plenty of public platforms to leech off of.
[redacted]
I thought about clarifying the use of “private” but I thought the context was enough, sorry.
I’m not talking about Privacy private, just “not everyone in the world casually stumbles upon it” private.
What has discord to do with privacy? you really going the privacy route here while using Discord? Is this a troll or should I need to send you their privacy policy and tos? Nobody is talking about private chats you have with your buddies on Discord. Nodoby want to see this anyway. (expect Discord ofc) we are talking about PUBLIC discord servers with thousands of people in it, where content is posted that only is accesable via a gateway of making a discord account + phone number and is in no way searchable on the internet.
Now imagine, everything would be like that, you wouldn’t even be here arguing with me because you would’ve never known what Lemmy is or even reddit. Because nothing would be searchable on the internet.
Not sure what is so hard to grasp about that.
Yeah, Cinny does look like Discord anyways but it’s lack of voice chat is a bummer
I really disliked my cinny experience, element was much superior
Totally, I too think that one should prefer Element for multiple reasons (feature richness, app availability, … I mean, the web widgets absolutely rule imo), after all, it’s UI is similar to Discord/Slack but it also feels somewhat different here and there. For the first 1-2 hours it can be a bit overwhelming for newbies. Cinny’s UI is much closer to Discord’s UI, and it seems fine for chatting as far as I have tried it.
the encryption broke first just for the desktop app, later also for web browser several times, people couldn’t see what I was writing to them, all while it worked in element. I was able to create nested rooms but nobody could see them for joining… the overall experience was painful and it probably cost me my one chance to convince people to get away from discord after their policy change to record audio from calls
Weird, when was that ? In onboarded 6 non-tech people recently on element and it went fine and easy.
Yes element works, I use it still. I had issues with cinny as a discord replacement. This was in the time from march-april.
Oh shoot nvm then. I only used it for like two weeks before I went back to Element because of it’s feature richness. And even during the time I used it I rarely chatted.
Not all discussions should be public.
XMPP is mostly dead these days. The protocol is very inefficient (it’s all XML) which isn’t ideal on mobile devices since it uses more bandwidth to transfer and more processing power to parse.
I work at a big tech company, and at work we use Mattermost hosted outside our data center for cases where our internal stuff doesn’t work. It seems fine and I think it’s open-source, but I don’t know a lot about it.
I’ve heard about Matrix but haven’t tried it yet! Is it good?
What about IRC?
Matrix is searchable through https://archive.matrix.org/
This couldn’t be more wrong actually.
Xmpp is far from death. Just because many started to use matrix instead doesn’t mean it’s dead. Even though matrix is a Ressource and performance nightmare much more so than xmpp will ever be.
I’m an IT specialist and work in IT too. I also selfhosted a lot of stuff publicly.
XMPP is used by many companies like Facebook , Google, Nintendo, GitHub, zoom, WhatsApp, Apple etc.
Xmpp is a an official Standard.unlikr things like matrix.
And if you think that xmpp has battery issues.oeadays then that tells me you used any xmpp app like conversation/snikket etc. like many years ago.
My xmpp Apps use way less battery than any matrix app ever could.
XMPP is fast, reliable and just works. Matrix is a nightmare to selfhost, too.
IRC? Irc has no E2EE whatsoever. Therfore isn’t even comparable to xmpp with omemo or matrix.
Facebook doesn’t use XMPP; they use a custom protocol built on top of MQTT. WhatsApp was using a binary equivalent to XMPP (keeping the same stanzas but removing the XML), but I’m not sure if they still are. Do you have a source stating that the other companies use XMPP?
How is matrix a performance nightmare? been running a matrix server for years with almost no issues. I guess the only exception was the few times I ran out of hdd space, but that’s it.
What’s an official standard? Matrix is a protocol just like xmpp and the specs are public, just like with xmpp.
It’s literally as easy as running a docker container and editing a yaml file, at least for synapse.
It is very well known that Synapse is a ressource hog. Heck, you can’t even enable presence because it would kill your server ressources. Why do you think almost all instances have it disabled? Cmpared to an XMPP server ressource usage, Snypase is a nightmare to host. I also hosted a public server for a long time.
XMPP standards: https://wikiless.ftw.lol/wiki/XMPP https://xmpp.org/extensions/ https://xmpp.org/about/technology-overview/
just like xmmp is, difference is, matrix snypse uses like 20x the amount of ressources. Just try to host a public server for more than 100 people and you will know.
There is a reason why people make stuff like Conduit or the matrix team works on Dendrite as a new server.
yeah, I particularly hate when mods and romhacks require you to join a discord server to download them
It sucks that Discord is being used for a bunch of large communities that would be better served by a forum for future access, but for just groups of friends, it’s way easier to use than anything fediverse. And if I’m chatting with my friends, I don’t NEED my shitposting to be easily searchable on Google.
I’m not against using Matrix, but I could only get select people to join me. Discord is where all the more tech-illiterate gamers live and sometimes I wanna hang out with them too. It’s not the same as Lemmy, where I want to talk to complete strangers, so it doesn’t matter too much if more than half a community is lost by migrating from reddit to lemmy.
Yes, that’s my reason for still having it too. All my friends are on there. And getting them to change platform is almost as hard as getting a woman to like you.
Why does everything need to be free searchable on the internet?
Call me crazy but I don’t want my group chats publicly available on the internet. Discord feels… private. I know they have access to all the data, but it’s not like a public website, forum, or even an open irc chatroom. It’s my walled garden to chat with friends, stream games, game chat, post dumb memes, etc.
That’s like saying signal is cancer to free and open internet. Or hell, email because it’s not indexed and searchable?
I don’t get the sentiment.
undefined> Why does everything need to be free searchable on the internet?
imagine everything is behind a gateway of account + phone number. you wouldn’t be here on Lemmy because you would’ve never heard about it and couldn’t search about it, or reddit etc.
It’s not hard to get your head around why searching the internet is the most important part to get things going. You wouldn’t get ANY information if you need to get your phone number out for every single site/forum/whatever.
And if you have no experience with Discord and how it evolved over the last years, I can’t help you. Discord already replaces many sites and forums, or give support via Discord only… now these things are no longer searchable because people somehow like to idle in Discord servers and search for things in there.
If you can’t see the issue with this, even right now already and especially in the future if it continous like that, then I can’t help you, sorry.
You cherry picked one line of my post and didn’t address the entire context or intent of it. Im not defending companies or businesses using discord as a drop in replacement for forums or support pages. Imo that’s a mis use of the tech.
I think that’s stupid.
But discord isn’t designed for that. It’s a chat app (voice and text). I don’t want my chats with friends publicly searchable on the internet. That’s dumb. Having my emails publically searchable on the internet is dumb too.
If a company started using Signal or Whatsapp for support, would you be clamoring for all signal and Whatsapp messages to be searchable on the internet?
That doesn’t make any sense. You seem more upset that companies are misusing Discord than mad at Discord.
This is not how it’s been used for the vast majority.
Companies and big communities use it as a forum, sharing knowledge more or less important.
For example, i dabble in modding games, nowadays i need to join a game discord server and ask there hoping that someone is kind enough to repeat for the nth time something asked already, probably several time a week.
Most often than not, you don’t get an answer due to several factors, one of which is that if you ask when the people that can help are not online, nobody answer really.
On a forum you could have searched your question and find some answer anyway.
THAT is a very big problem. Knowledge is walled in and the search provided is the equivalent of digging in the sand with a spoon.
Seriously. The worst is when developers distribute their software on Discord. WHY.
lol, that, or when they insist discord is the best place to store documentation…
🤮
I never understood why everyone moved to discord. Regardless of this, it actually just sucks and is hard to use. Discord really gives me hope that the fediverse will succeed, just because the UI sucks so fucking much.
What did people use before discord?
Teamspeak, Skype. Funny enough up until redesigning a year to two years ago they advertised themselves as being the replacement to these.
I never used Discord but used google hangouts before switching to Telegram and Matrix (the former for family and the latter for everything else).
Also, weirdly, a lot of people seem to use Discord for things used to be (and I would say should) be on a forum (or community, magazine, etc.)
Trying to follow the thread of a discussion about some obscure point you’re interested in is much easier when it’s in a thread, instead of an undifferentiated chat log with a bunch of unrelated cross-talk.
I plan to check out matrix since the /r/firefox group has been chatting through that.
Does matrix have a voice/video functionality or is it strictly text chat?
For voice, TeamSpeak
For text chat, IRC
For forums, phpBB or any other forum software
Discord replacing the third is the saddest. It completely isn’t fit for purpose. Part of the reason you can’t find anything on Google now is that forums died, and Discord is unsearchable.
Discord is pretty great for video/voice chat - the things it tries to do outside of that can be frustrating.
It’s miles ahead of having to use Ventrillo, Teamspeak, Skype like we had to in the past.
Versus Slack, it was an easier sign-up process for ad hoc communities. You could just have people sign up instead of going through an approval process. (Slack’s approval process could be automated with third-party tools, but it was a hack. Slack was meant to be a specific group of known people.)
I always thought Slack was just for businesses
because skype was worse
Was it though?
Eh, it’s the only voip number provider I’ve found that will sell me a number despite not being a business buying 1000 numbers and that isn’t Google
I mean I guess? Aside from the calling it’s fine imo. UI was also easier for me to use
wasn’t the calling the main thing Skype was used for tho?
No. Messaging was just as popular if not more so back when Skype was at its peak.
Discord provides free hosting.
Everyone talking about alternatives like Revolt or Mumble does not realize how big of a deal that actually is.
Exactly, I can go to discord and create a new server with a few clicks. Even as a somewhat tech savvy person I am not that confident about setting up a server, securing it properly, making it scalable for large amount of users, handling data storage and backups and all that.
Oh yeah sure, this would be cool and all if they didn’t screw 99% of their users out of their usernames first.
The usernames stuff was stupid, but pray tell. How did users get “screwed out of their usernames”.
Did you know that when choosing a username you could just do your name and the number sans the hashtag and it’s functionality exactly the same as before.
It was a stupid change and unnecessary, but nobody got screwed out of anything.
I’m sure most people got the username they wanted, definitely more than 1% anyways. But if more than one person had the same username, people would be “screwed out of their username”
Now if someone wants the same name they’d have to add numbers at the end, or something stupid like xX_
But they went in order of sign up, so if they had used this model from the beginning those users still wouldn’t have been able to get that username.
Not necessarily true. Celebrities and Nitro subscribers also got early picks, and it isn’t like they wait for each person one-by-one: you are in a bucket with others who might get to your preferred username before you.
Those flashy animated reactions are just incredibly annoying. Wish I could disable them, but of course Discord would never allow you to turn off the monetization.
While I think 10% is a bit steep I don’t think this is as bad as getting rid of the discriminators at the end of usernames.
Here’s the thing… If your name was gamers_mate#2002 before the change, after the change you could make your name gamers_mate2002 and functionally nothing would change.
As I’ve said elsewhere, the user name stuff was stupid, but it’s not that big of a deal.
you are working really really hard in these comments defending a platform thats pretty arguably indefensible when it comes to both privacy and basic UX
every thing discord does at this point is to increase numbers on a chart and make an accountant happy
Discord is a for profit company. Everyone here except you understands and accepts that.
I find discord’s ux to be very pleasing. You want to cry and whine about element but … Discord uses electron. I’m starting to doubt that you have much/any development experience and are just spouting off stuff you have heard.
Discord is trying to find a path to fund itself. It is a business. Making money and being a good product are not at odds with one another. Via nitro and server subscriptions discord can fund itself while still remaining an excellent and free platform. What they have added is the ability for server owners to basically do Patreon type things inside their own servers.
I’m guessing that you didn’t actually bother to read far enough to understand that server owners set up subscription terms, not discord. This is not discord forcing anything upon servers. This is discord giving server owners the ability to monetize their individual server by having subscriptions. If a server does this and you don’t like it then just leave.
go back
You know how you can tell if you’re in the wrong? It’s when you have to edit your comment to make the reply look wrong.
It’s the defacto way many communities stick around and communicate with each other, especially in the gaming world.
Meh, I couldn’t care less. Never used anything but the basic features, and if anyone wants to throw money at them, that’s their choice.
As long as I’m not rate limited when using the regular chat in the free tier, I’m good.
I only use it because my friends like to for when we game or watch stuff together. But, never bothered to actually install the app or software.
Unless it gets in the way of that don’t see people moving.
Yeah, if it keeps the basic functions free and without restriction I am good with adding some extra glitter like that.
The issue is that once they start heading down that path, they will probably start enshittifying the experience for non-paying users.