Discord is opening the monetization floodgates: get ready for microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'

dirtmayor@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 293 points –
Discord is opening the monetization floodgates: get ready for microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'
pcgamer.com
222

You are viewing a single comment

Matrix has always been a great alternative. Any service that is owned by a corporation will eventually be monetized. I never liked discord in the first place.

Matrix rules, but I can’t get my friends to leave Discord because that’s where all their friends are, they run servers, etc. it sucks.

Getting friends to leave facebook messenger for discord 8 years ago already, never underestimate how much the average person can ignore. For the time being I'm on discord, but if they start cracking down on small servers I'll be spinning up alternatives overnight

My instance is discord bridged. When discord user wants to voice chat, I fire up discord just for that.

But my discord text chats and servers? All in matrix baby.

Makes it a lot easier to convice friends to swap, too. Especially when I show them that telegram and whatsapp can be bridged, too.

Everything one app.

I have that too, but you have to be admin to be able to do that, and I didn't figure out how to connect the 1-1 chats in Matrix yet.

Once you have the bridge plugin set up, you need to talk to it in matrix to set up your stuff. Just open a chat with whatever your config says its username is. I set mine to be @discordbot

I have it set up with rooms where several people are in but have no idea how to set it up in 1-1 rooms.

Oh, you're using it for just bridging group chats.

For one to one you need to link your matrix account to your discord account using the !login command. After this you can access everything that your discord account can access. Manually managing anything except for which servers you want bridged is completely unnecessary.

Oh that sounds much better, I'll try it.

Ah, there's more than one bridge available. I am using mautrix-discord, if you are using matrix-appservice-discord, mautrix has a far superior featureset, full double-puppetting, server bridging, typing notifications. It is also in more active development.

I'm using https://www.t2host.io/discord/ because I thought it'd be easier to use than hosting it myself.

Ah, that's cool, I hadn't even looked into options like this as I always intended my node to be closed. But this wont ever do what a proper self-hosted bridge can. When installed and attached to the matrix server you are on, the bridge is able to do a lot more thanks to the access permissions that brings. Such as double puppeting, which means that if you send a message in discord, it actually gets bridged in reverse, and the bot will add the message as you in matrix, keeping both chat histories matching.

With mautrix, you get everything you had in discord, in your matrix account:

Spaces are used to mirror every server you decide to link, and the DM section is also present. The only thing that doesn't work is anything with voice or video.

Do you host your own matrix instance? Or are you on someone elses?

Yes I host my own instance and I already host other mautrix bridges, didn't know the discord one is so much more powerfull. Will have to check it out.

It's probably fine, but I recommend never using tools like t2host.io. If anything happens to them, the credentials of thousands of users could be exposed, if you self host your own bridge the risks are lower, as someone would have to target YOU directly and hack YOUR server directly to get the credentials.

this feels like back in 2015 when I was trying to get all my friends to go from TeamSpeak to Discord because it had Text & Media Channels and you didn't have to pay for the server

Matrix won't seem to let me on via my vpn so I can't even download the client on my computer. Makes it hard to see what the fuss is about.

You're comment makes no sense. Matrix is a federated chat protocol, and works kind of like lemmy. Matrix itself has more in common with ActivityPub, the protocol that the fediverse uses. What's more comparable are the matrix clients.

There are many, many matrix clients to choose from, and even more instances, including the option to set up your own.

Which client? There's a lot more than Element, including clients like Nheko and Cinny.

I think it was element, but some more searching got me on a server. Now to find rooms I guess.

I'm loving Matrix.

I really need to get on Matrix, but I haven't put the time to learn it.

The Element app for it works pretty well. There are some edges to smooth, but it functions.

And if Element isn't to your tastes (like it wasn't for me), there are other clients to choose from. I use Nheko on PC and FluffyChat on my phone.

Revolt.chat is far nicer than Matrix usability-wise

What's to stop Revolt from becoming the next Discord?

Edit: I just logged into my account to see that Revolt had removed a "server" for breaking foreign (unjust) laws. That seems to go against everything the fediverse stands for.

How can revolt "remove" a server since you can connect to any custom hosted server? It's like saying lemmy removed an instance.

And besides, I'm pretty sure that is something that federated instances will have to worry about too, you might not care about your local laws but the ISP or hosting provider of your server where possibly illegal data is, will care.

@RosalynKirk

1.) because Revolt isn't trying to do federation. It's community driven open-source project not backed by a company.

2.) you can easily self-host a Revolt server. Then you can make your own rules.

Not everything has to be federated

...is Discord trying to do federation? I'm confused.

Someone is in charge of Revolt, doesn't matter if it's a company or someone else. Someone is in charge of the servers. What's stopping them from ultimately selling the company? Reddit didn't start out as a corporation. Nor did WhatsApp, but after creating a trusted userbase they were sold off to Facebook to be exploited for data.

IT people love to talk about how "easy" it is to create and run your own server, but this is simply not true and they just lack awareness.