Online Commentator's take on the ongoing enshittification of the internet (Discord's next)
Twitter, Reddit and Discord are simultaneously going to shit - because enshittification is what happens when suddenly money isn't free any more and borrowing carries an interest rate
The fediverse is not very well connected suburbs, good for what it is but doesn't do the same job
bsky is gonna do its own fediverse (with beer and shitcoins) and it's fun right now as a single instance with good users, but the staff are the sort of barely-crypto-reactionary free speech warriors who will never block the nazi instances
[youth pastor voice] you know, there's someone else who talked about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall
EDIT: to clarify: Discord is ticking along for now, but they hired some ex-Facebook execs, employees are in revolt and the org is hollowing out. hence (a) bad decisions (b) glitching https://archive.is/fI3hq
I was a wee bit surprised (but not really, I guess) when just before the Reddit blackout everyone on Reddit was spamming their relevant Discord links for the relevant subreddit.
I could only think, "That's no better!!"
We'll see if that changes.
To add to that, Discord is an entirely different kind of interaction. Fine if that's what you want, but not fine if you want something a bit more....static.
Discord is flat out garbage as a forum. Once you pass say even 15 people, it becomes a total mess of posts burying other posts, you can never find anything. I have no idea why everyone wants to use it for something it was never meant to be.
I'm glad someone else is saying it too because my lord I cannot for the life of me understand why people are so persistent on promoting discord as a social media platform
Seems like a kids thing really. I agree it is stupid and going form one corporate owned entity to another is no better. I think FOSS community run solutions while rough around the edges will have the last laugh. If they can sustain the current numbers. I'd also like to see more youtubers etc promote the fediverse and explain how it works as there seems to be a lot of confusion out there. Ultimately its exciting and healthy for the Internet and society as a whole
Yup, I agree wholeheartedly! It's just not my thing.
I use it for gaming with friend groups, but would gladly get off it if my friends would too. Sadly that is a near impossibility. lol
Yeah, for certain kinds of live conversations while involved in a group activity, it works fine. But only for that, in my opinion.
How does discord make money? It's always concerned me what data they're harvesting.
Back when I was still using it, so over 6 years ago, I had the same question and their apparently serious response was to sell merch like stickers.
I agree that there’s a currenct hard push for massive enshittification, so I think we’d better be ready and able to 1) embrace federation, 2) advance it to a degree that BigTech can’t keep up with (FTL speed), 3) pay actual money for it ourselves to ourselves, and 4) do what we must to enshrine anti-enshittification systems into the fabric of this new direction of online society.
I tried setting up discord once for a project. I use a whitelist firewall on my workstation for a few reasons. Discord is the most sketchy nonsense I have ever encountered. At least when I tried a few years ago, discord tries to make a cascade of connections to what appears to be random raw IP addresses on weird ports. I started punching a few holes to let it through but after a half dozen raw IP addresses and it still didn't work I said forget this nonsense. I'm probably just too dumb to understand what is going on, but I'm not willing to trust any proprietary service like that, especially when I really can't tell how they are remotely financially viable. Maybe someone here knows why they operate like this on raw IP addresses and ports. I didn't find any explanation on their website.