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.
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?
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 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.
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.
Discord. God I hated how I was one of my friends that got everyone to switch, and now I'm the first one out. I don't think they have added a feature that hasn't been an annoyance for a while, and after a year of no mobile notifications working and their staff being incompetent (especially if you are a free user) I'm just over it.
Everyone worshipping it is kind of a turn off too. It's a service y'all, I've had everything from AIM to Slack and I'm sure there will be a million others. Worshipping a corp is gross.
A question I was asked interviewing for my only marketing position: "What's a brand you admire?" I would have turned right the fuck around were I not supporting stepkids and looking at a 50% raise.
I don't understand the ability to have an emotional connection to a corporation.
Omg I would have absolutely no script for that. They would get the blankest expression and something snarky like "it was impressive how Nestle was able to get market share on water and baby formula in the African market" but knowing my luck I'd probably get unironicly hired with that line when I was trying to be sarcastic. 😭
Learning the truth about Nestle made finding out about Santa seem tame.
Robert hasn't really done a complete deep dive into Nestles horribleness, but he does have an episode for this atrocity.
Behind the Bastards: How Nestle Starved A Bunch of Babies
"Chiquita Bananas' ability to manipulate the government to further their own ends is admirable."
I don’t understand the ability to have an emotional connection to a corporation.
I do, but the corporations I have a connection with are not the ones people think of usually, it's the ones that are FOSS-first, or the ones that actually fight for what they believe. i.e. not 99.99% of corporations.
At least tell us what you made up lol
I looked at my clothes and said Eddie Bauer and then came up with a wildly embellished tale of how I grew up with their sleeping bags in my closet, and now they're the only jacket I'll buy because they make quality products. I don't know ... I did well enough through the blind rage to get the job.
Turned out my new boss' background was in journalism, so what I thought was a liability was actually an asset. The job wasn't terrible. I hated coming up with flowery descriptions of pedestrian English muffins and exhausted any and all citrus and citrus-adjacent puns known to man. And then we lost the contract less than a year later.
I found out about that the day I got back from hauling a truck from New Mexico to get my stuff out of storage.
I've set up matrix and element to replace discord. I even bridged discord so now my user can still talk to people they might still have on there.
But damn, does it feel good to self host shit again like in the days of TS3 and Mumble.
The bridge concept made me really excited! I can keep up with the few friends I have who enviably stay on discord long past when it looks like the Vegas Strip. 😂
I honestly don't mind this. This is really useful for small creators in not needing to do workarounds for Patreon or Patreon roles and this makes it easier by being baked into Discord itself. I get the worry of stuff being paywalled but since it is entirely set by the server owner/creator, it would be something to take up with them instead. The 10% cut is a bit rough but I know other platforms also take a cut, but I'm not too sure if 10% is high or low. That would be my own biggest concern since it only makes sense if it is comparable or lower than other platforms like Patreon.
This is essentially where I am with it. I get the outrage but for now I don’t have an issue. But likely as with many things lately, we should maybe pursue the federated option.
I created a Matrix account as Plan B now that the link is back in the sidebar. I was very active on Discord a few years back, but a week before joining Beehaw, I was ready to ditch it, since I can chat with my college roommate on Steam and I no longer DM with anyone else (also, all my servers from then are now dead).
I don't think I'm the target audience for Discord, so other than a few longstanding UI gripes, I'm kinda content to let them do whatever. Monetization won't hit me until you have to pay to be able to send text messages.
I use discord for 2 things, my personal group chat with friends that I manage, and keeping up with Mechanical Keyboard artisan shops and manufacturers. So I mean it wont be a huge leap for me to migrate to something better.
The 10% cut is a bit rough but I know other platforms also take a cut, but I’m not too sure if 10% is high or low.
I have a Patreon and their cut is about 3% there (at least for me, it varies depending on what services you use through Patreon). This is a very easy pass and the only people I see utilizing it are creators like Twitch streamers who already have a large Discord server/presence to build off of. It's a bad deal though 10% is real rough imo.
I imagine 7% isn't that much of a "loss" when compared to how much larger the market on discord is and how convenient it's going to be for these users to start spending on MTX.
Agree to disagree then, every percentage counts and the effects of each of those percentages is exaggerated with each additional patron. 7% of one patron is negligible, 7% of three hundred patrons is huge.
Edit: oh and the discord market is a niche market, the average person does not have a Discord and many aren't even familiar when it's brought up. I had a much easier time getting people to sign up for a paid Patreon than I had getting them to sign up for a free Discord account back when I was putting in the effort to grow a following on these platforms. I think it'll be good for people who are already building on that market but for every other creator it's an easy pass.
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.
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.
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.....
yeah, I particularly hate when mods and romhacks require you to join a discord server to download them
Well that usage makes the most sense. Having links to copyright-gray content in a closed garden makes it much harder to take down.
Not all discussions should be public.
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.
This is not good 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.
people don't just use discord for private communication, and that's what should be searchable. also, you do realize that discord doesn't feature any encryption and some people can read your "private" messages, right?
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.
use XMPP or Matrix.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Discord has been making a lot of bad decisions lately but imo this isn't one of them. It's not like they're forcing every server to setup paid channels.
Currently, many creators have Patreons setup and allow varying levels of access to their Discord servers based on Patreon tiers. Literally all this change does is give creators the option to do this entirely through Discord rather than using Patreon.
This is nothing new. Just a slightly different way to handle monetization.
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.
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'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’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
Oh god, here you go the next "enshitification" victim... Matrix isn't really that good of a replacement, I wonder what we will end up with.
Sure are a lot of tech companies seemingly speedrunning their self-destruction right now. Is there something in the water in the SF?
On a more serious note, Discord has always been mediocre. Makes me sad that the third-party client(!), Ripcord, is more or less abandonware. Being able to monitor just the specific channels you're interested in is infinitely better than being forced to use servers wholesale given it's near impossible to keep an eye on one at a time beyond notifications -- which are clumsy at best. But for how useful that is, not having access to things like spoiler tags, most voip (and all video related) stuff really limits its practical use.
Oh well.
Makes me sad that the third-party client(!), Ripcord, is more or less abandonware
If this were free software, someone would probably have already picked it up and continued development of it.
You can select which channels you’re interested in in Discord now (though maybe it’s not enabled by default for all servers yet?). I want to be able to see all those channels in a single place instead of clicking between servers but 🤷
I want to be able to see all those channels in a single place instead of clicking between servers but 🤷
That's precisely what Ripcord does so well! I can hardly fathom how decision-making works at Discord, given all the random bells and whistles they add, but not a core feature like this.
Usually I'd think this was just another case of developers not using their own product, but I mean ... they hardly use slack, do they?
I like Matrix, my friends and I had a lot of fun with Element. Didn't stick because of course everyone else was still on Discord but Matrix works as well as... Well, Lemmy
Since they introduced super reactions, which nobody needs, I've become a bit worried, because I live on discord.
Do they even have a consumer version? I've seen them linked before but their whole site looks like they only want Enterprise users. The lowest pricing plan is "Business - $5/month/user". I'm not an organization and while that's not extremely expensive as an individual, it adds up if I'm paying separately for everyone in my family to join. My "senior executive discussions" consist of polling the family about what we want for dinner next week and what other groceries we need, not how we can achieve nationwide scalability for our household.
If they have offerings for individuals outside of business, they really need to point people to it and have a better landing page for them.
Element is just a client that can connect to the Matrix which is federated and decentralized just like Lemmy. Element is heavily promoted because element is the most well-developed client out there (made by the same people behind the matrix so they get the new features first) but far from the only one.
Regular element is free on all operating systems including windows, linux, android, etc. And there's even a web version.
And just like Lemmy you can register on any instance and communicate with any other (federated) instances. Matrix.org being the biggest one but there are countless and you can even self-host.
I typed a reply and it seems to have vanished, so my apologies if you end up getting two similar yet not identical replies to this.
Thanks for elaborating. I did end up trying out Fluffychat the last time I looked into Matrix. It looks like Element on the web isn't available on mobile, so I might give it a try later on my computer or download their app.
I still think the Element site should do a better job of explaining it's also available for personal users for free. I had to go 11 links into their footer to find that information, the pricing page has no mention of their personal offerings at all.
Yeah, if you just want to use it personally, you should click Sign In in the menu, then Open Element Web, which brings you to https://app.element.io/.
Alternately Get Started then Download the app.
Either gets you to a client where you can easily create a Matrix account (on matrix.org).
Give Revolt a try if you want something that feels like Discord without all the bloat.
I misread this as "give Reddit a try" and thought you were insane.
Revolt seems pretty promising. Info is kinda scarce, are they a purely volunteer driven product?
As long as I can still use all the current free functionality then I don't mind these things. It's when these things become the only option ala Reddit killing 3rd party apps that it becomes a problem.
Yea, I don't have a problem with a company, whose service I use, try to sell additional services or create a paid tier that basically pays for me to use it for free.
I like discord. The name change hubbub was..a nothing burger. If people want to pay for extra emojis or whatever for their server....cool? How does that impact me?
As long as daily usage is not affected, I don't think this should be a problem.
Maybe this could be used as a way to pay mods/admins for their work as well.
I'm still using discord for basic party chat functions for my small group of friends. As long as that continues to work, I don't care at all about paid memes.
I generally hate that I have to go into other servers because indie games confuse a discord as being a replacement for forums and a wiki
For real. Crowdsec, a crowd sourced blocklist / basic IPS system doesnt really have a living forum. You ask question through unindexable discord threads.... so often times I cant just google an issue i am having with the app. I have to open up my damn Discord account while at work to get answers.
Its awful.
Now that I've started playing around with my own lemmy instance I guess it's fitting for possibly my last beehaw post to reflect my first.
I see discord’s business model is still burning cash trying to be the next slack steam zoom reddit patreon
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.
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.
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.
What did people use before discord?
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 just switches it's business model yearly to clone the one thing it hasn't killed yet. Started out to kill TS and IRC, then went on to kill the forum, then it tried to kill Steam/GOG but failed, now it's trying to kill Patreon.
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.
Discord voice quality is significantly worse than TS3, and it has way less features actually related to voice chatting.
As for Vent and especially Skype, it's an improvement.
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?
Teamspeak, Skype. Funny enough up until redesigning a year to two years ago they advertised themselves as being the replacement to these.
because skype was worse
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.
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
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
It's definitely marketed that way, but I'm on a few Slacks that are just small, private groups. It's private by default while Discord is public by default.
I actually discovered Matrix through the comments on here and am now using Element. I'm really glad about it. I knew there was something fishy with discord suddenly being so intrusive about their super long "birthday celebration" (with annoying unread notification needing me to click on their gift reveals ugh) and making activities free or whatever lol.
And it's their 8th birthday. EIGHTH! WHY DO THEY CARE ABOUT THEIR EIGHTH?!
"microtransactions" "exclusivities". Average silicon valley update gruel. The best that comes out of this is probably competition, while i like discord basic featureset is solid, the UI is genuinly one of the worst things i have experienced.
It's not just me then... I consider myself tech savvy and I have such a hard time finding the message that notified me. Getting back to an old message is just impossible for me.
Well... Maybe I am getting old.
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
Gross. Time for a mass exodus to Matrix.
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.
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.
Oh yeah sure, this would be cool and all if they didn't screw 99% of their users out of their usernames first.
I don't even get how this would make them more money. Maybe they could sell the "OG" names they reserved, but that's likely very little compared to all the people cancelling Nitro.
Many people, including myself, had Nitro just for the ability to choose a custom discriminator. Regardless of whether we liked the update, that reason is no longer valid.
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_
I lost my username. It sucked but I don't feel screwed. I do feel like the username change was not necessary.
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.
Where are the Discord alternatives? Just in cause Discord goes to hell
divolt looks pretty good, has bridge support so you dont need to make all your friends move to something else
I heard about "guilded" but i don't have direct experience.
We could always go back to ventrilo servers for voice chats! I miss hopping into vent with my WoW guild for raids back in the day.
Matrix is the ultimate alternative to Discord! It's a FOSS protocol, which has numerous server and client implementations available—much like the ActivityPub protocol.
Hmm. This makes too much sense to me for me to be mad. Discord can easily compete with patreon the way I see it. Obviously, they could fuck it up and ruin the whole platform but if their team has more than a few brain cells it should work out fine right?
vomits
Capitalism claiming it's next victim.
Can't wait for the 2nd hand free exclusive meme trading scene!
Ph hell naaahj
Will the memes be immune to screenshotting and OBS? lmao
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.
There's Matrix/Element and now Revolt
Revolt is one, and the app is basically a clone of Discord.
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
Yaaaaaaaaaay
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.
The "enshittification" continues
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?
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.
The trick is to not have friends sucka
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.
If this is an isolated issue I don't mind.
@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.
bad idea when revolt exists and is basically exactly the same software but open source and self hosted
Second this. Revolt looks exactly like Discord except it's open source and privacy focused.
https://revolt.chat
"Exclusive memes" this is hell.
That's an exotic synonym for "dank."
it's the opposite of dank
Stank memes?
Rank memes
rank
Discord. God I hated how I was one of my friends that got everyone to switch, and now I'm the first one out. I don't think they have added a feature that hasn't been an annoyance for a while, and after a year of no mobile notifications working and their staff being incompetent (especially if you are a free user) I'm just over it.
Everyone worshipping it is kind of a turn off too. It's a service y'all, I've had everything from AIM to Slack and I'm sure there will be a million others. Worshipping a corp is gross.
A question I was asked interviewing for my only marketing position: "What's a brand you admire?" I would have turned right the fuck around were I not supporting stepkids and looking at a 50% raise.
I don't understand the ability to have an emotional connection to a corporation.
Omg I would have absolutely no script for that. They would get the blankest expression and something snarky like "it was impressive how Nestle was able to get market share on water and baby formula in the African market" but knowing my luck I'd probably get unironicly hired with that line when I was trying to be sarcastic. 😭
Learning the truth about Nestle made finding out about Santa seem tame.
Robert hasn't really done a complete deep dive into Nestles horribleness, but he does have an episode for this atrocity.
Behind the Bastards: How Nestle Starved A Bunch of Babies
Episode webpage: https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/how-nestle-starved-a-bunch-of-babies
Media file: https://chtbl.com/track/5899E/podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/e5f91208-cc7e-4726-a312-ae280140ad11/96484ec5-e7bf-4f31-9aec-ae2801525baa/audio.mp3?utm\_source=Podcast&in\_playlist=d64f756d-6d5e-4fae-b24f-ae280140ad36
"Chiquita Bananas' ability to manipulate the government to further their own ends is admirable."
I do, but the corporations I have a connection with are not the ones people think of usually, it's the ones that are FOSS-first, or the ones that actually fight for what they believe. i.e. not 99.99% of corporations.
At least tell us what you made up lol
I looked at my clothes and said Eddie Bauer and then came up with a wildly embellished tale of how I grew up with their sleeping bags in my closet, and now they're the only jacket I'll buy because they make quality products. I don't know ... I did well enough through the blind rage to get the job.
Turned out my new boss' background was in journalism, so what I thought was a liability was actually an asset. The job wasn't terrible. I hated coming up with flowery descriptions of pedestrian English muffins and exhausted any and all citrus and citrus-adjacent puns known to man. And then we lost the contract less than a year later.
I found out about that the day I got back from hauling a truck from New Mexico to get my stuff out of storage.
I've set up matrix and element to replace discord. I even bridged discord so now my user can still talk to people they might still have on there.
But damn, does it feel good to self host shit again like in the days of TS3 and Mumble.
The bridge concept made me really excited! I can keep up with the few friends I have who enviably stay on discord long past when it looks like the Vegas Strip. 😂
I honestly don't mind this. This is really useful for small creators in not needing to do workarounds for Patreon or Patreon roles and this makes it easier by being baked into Discord itself. I get the worry of stuff being paywalled but since it is entirely set by the server owner/creator, it would be something to take up with them instead. The 10% cut is a bit rough but I know other platforms also take a cut, but I'm not too sure if 10% is high or low. That would be my own biggest concern since it only makes sense if it is comparable or lower than other platforms like Patreon.
This is essentially where I am with it. I get the outrage but for now I don’t have an issue. But likely as with many things lately, we should maybe pursue the federated option.
I created a Matrix account as Plan B now that the link is back in the sidebar. I was very active on Discord a few years back, but a week before joining Beehaw, I was ready to ditch it, since I can chat with my college roommate on Steam and I no longer DM with anyone else (also, all my servers from then are now dead).
I don't think I'm the target audience for Discord, so other than a few longstanding UI gripes, I'm kinda content to let them do whatever. Monetization won't hit me until you have to pay to be able to send text messages.
I use discord for 2 things, my personal group chat with friends that I manage, and keeping up with Mechanical Keyboard artisan shops and manufacturers. So I mean it wont be a huge leap for me to migrate to something better.
I have a Patreon and their cut is about 3% there (at least for me, it varies depending on what services you use through Patreon). This is a very easy pass and the only people I see utilizing it are creators like Twitch streamers who already have a large Discord server/presence to build off of. It's a bad deal though 10% is real rough imo.
I imagine 7% isn't that much of a "loss" when compared to how much larger the market on discord is and how convenient it's going to be for these users to start spending on MTX.
Agree to disagree then, every percentage counts and the effects of each of those percentages is exaggerated with each additional patron. 7% of one patron is negligible, 7% of three hundred patrons is huge.
Edit: oh and the discord market is a niche market, the average person does not have a Discord and many aren't even familiar when it's brought up. I had a much easier time getting people to sign up for a paid Patreon than I had getting them to sign up for a free Discord account back when I was putting in the effort to grow a following on these platforms. I think it'll be good for people who are already building on that market but for every other creator it's an easy pass.
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.
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.
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.....
yeah, I particularly hate when mods and romhacks require you to join a discord server to download them
Well that usage makes the most sense. Having links to copyright-gray content in a closed garden makes it much harder to take down.
Not all discussions should be public.
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.
This is not good 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.
people don't just use discord for private communication, and that's what should be searchable. also, you do realize that discord doesn't feature any encryption and some people can read your "private" messages, right?
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.
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?
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.
Matrix is searchable through https://archive.matrix.org/
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Discord has been making a lot of bad decisions lately but imo this isn't one of them. It's not like they're forcing every server to setup paid channels.
Currently, many creators have Patreons setup and allow varying levels of access to their Discord servers based on Patreon tiers. Literally all this change does is give creators the option to do this entirely through Discord rather than using Patreon.
This is nothing new. Just a slightly different way to handle monetization.
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.
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
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
Yep, we've seen that before
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
Oh god, here you go the next "enshitification" victim... Matrix isn't really that good of a replacement, I wonder what we will end up with.
Sure are a lot of tech companies seemingly speedrunning their self-destruction right now. Is there something in the water in the SF?
On a more serious note, Discord has always been mediocre. Makes me sad that the third-party client(!), Ripcord, is more or less abandonware. Being able to monitor just the specific channels you're interested in is infinitely better than being forced to use servers wholesale given it's near impossible to keep an eye on one at a time beyond notifications -- which are clumsy at best. But for how useful that is, not having access to things like spoiler tags, most voip (and all video related) stuff really limits its practical use.
Oh well.
If this were free software, someone would probably have already picked it up and continued development of it.
You can select which channels you’re interested in in Discord now (though maybe it’s not enabled by default for all servers yet?). I want to be able to see all those channels in a single place instead of clicking between servers but 🤷
That's precisely what Ripcord does so well! I can hardly fathom how decision-making works at Discord, given all the random bells and whistles they add, but not a core feature like this.
Usually I'd think this was just another case of developers not using their own product, but I mean ... they hardly use slack, do they?
I like Matrix, my friends and I had a lot of fun with Element. Didn't stick because of course everyone else was still on Discord but Matrix works as well as... Well, Lemmy
Since they introduced super reactions, which nobody needs, I've become a bit worried, because I live on discord.
Gonna leave this here for the inevitable dissenters: https://element.io/
Do they even have a consumer version? I've seen them linked before but their whole site looks like they only want Enterprise users. The lowest pricing plan is "Business - $5/month/user". I'm not an organization and while that's not extremely expensive as an individual, it adds up if I'm paying separately for everyone in my family to join. My "senior executive discussions" consist of polling the family about what we want for dinner next week and what other groceries we need, not how we can achieve nationwide scalability for our household.
If they have offerings for individuals outside of business, they really need to point people to it and have a better landing page for them.
Element is just a client that can connect to the Matrix which is federated and decentralized just like Lemmy. Element is heavily promoted because element is the most well-developed client out there (made by the same people behind the matrix so they get the new features first) but far from the only one.
Regular element is free on all operating systems including windows, linux, android, etc. And there's even a web version.
And just like Lemmy you can register on any instance and communicate with any other (federated) instances. Matrix.org being the biggest one but there are countless and you can even self-host.
If you'd rather use another client you can use any of these listed here: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
To use Element on the web you just need to go to:
https://app.element.io/
I typed a reply and it seems to have vanished, so my apologies if you end up getting two similar yet not identical replies to this.
Thanks for elaborating. I did end up trying out Fluffychat the last time I looked into Matrix. It looks like Element on the web isn't available on mobile, so I might give it a try later on my computer or download their app.
I still think the Element site should do a better job of explaining it's also available for personal users for free. I had to go 11 links into their footer to find that information, the pricing page has no mention of their personal offerings at all.
Yeah, if you just want to use it personally, you should click Sign In in the menu, then Open Element Web, which brings you to https://app.element.io/.
Alternately Get Started then Download the app.
Either gets you to a client where you can easily create a Matrix account (on matrix.org).
Give Revolt a try if you want something that feels like Discord without all the bloat.
I misread this as "give Reddit a try" and thought you were insane.
Revolt seems pretty promising. Info is kinda scarce, are they a purely volunteer driven product?
As long as I can still use all the current free functionality then I don't mind these things. It's when these things become the only option ala Reddit killing 3rd party apps that it becomes a problem.
Yea, I don't have a problem with a company, whose service I use, try to sell additional services or create a paid tier that basically pays for me to use it for free.
I like discord. The name change hubbub was..a nothing burger. If people want to pay for extra emojis or whatever for their server....cool? How does that impact me?
As long as daily usage is not affected, I don't think this should be a problem.
Maybe this could be used as a way to pay mods/admins for their work as well.
I'm still using discord for basic party chat functions for my small group of friends. As long as that continues to work, I don't care at all about paid memes.
I generally hate that I have to go into other servers because indie games confuse a discord as being a replacement for forums and a wiki
For real. Crowdsec, a crowd sourced blocklist / basic IPS system doesnt really have a living forum. You ask question through unindexable discord threads.... so often times I cant just google an issue i am having with the app. I have to open up my damn Discord account while at work to get answers.
Its awful.
Now that I've started playing around with my own lemmy instance I guess it's fitting for possibly my last beehaw post to reflect my first.
I see discord’s business model is still burning cash trying to be the next
slack steam zoom redditpatreonThose 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.
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.
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.
What did people use before discord?
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 just switches it's business model yearly to clone the one thing it hasn't killed yet. Started out to kill TS and IRC, then went on to kill the forum, then it tried to kill Steam/GOG but failed, now it's trying to kill Patreon.
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.
Discord voice quality is significantly worse than TS3, and it has way less features actually related to voice chatting.
As for Vent and especially Skype, it's an improvement.
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?
Teamspeak, Skype. Funny enough up until redesigning a year to two years ago they advertised themselves as being the replacement to these.
because skype was worse
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.
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
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
It's definitely marketed that way, but I'm on a few Slacks that are just small, private groups. It's private by default while Discord is public by default.
I actually discovered Matrix through the comments on here and am now using Element. I'm really glad about it. I knew there was something fishy with discord suddenly being so intrusive about their super long "birthday celebration" (with annoying unread notification needing me to click on their gift reveals ugh) and making activities free or whatever lol.
And it's their 8th birthday. EIGHTH! WHY DO THEY CARE ABOUT THEIR EIGHTH?!
"microtransactions" "exclusivities". Average silicon valley update gruel. The best that comes out of this is probably competition, while i like discord basic featureset is solid, the UI is genuinly one of the worst things i have experienced.
It's not just me then... I consider myself tech savvy and I have such a hard time finding the message that notified me. Getting back to an old message is just impossible for me.
Well... Maybe I am getting old.
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
Gross. Time for a mass exodus to Matrix.
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.
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.
Oh yeah sure, this would be cool and all if they didn't screw 99% of their users out of their usernames first.
I don't even get how this would make them more money. Maybe they could sell the "OG" names they reserved, but that's likely very little compared to all the people cancelling Nitro.
Many people, including myself, had Nitro just for the ability to choose a custom discriminator. Regardless of whether we liked the update, that reason is no longer valid.
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_
I lost my username. It sucked but I don't feel screwed. I do feel like the username change was not necessary.
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.
Where are the Discord alternatives? Just in cause Discord goes to hell
divolt looks pretty good, has bridge support so you dont need to make all your friends move to something else
I heard about "guilded" but i don't have direct experience.
We could always go back to ventrilo servers for voice chats! I miss hopping into vent with my WoW guild for raids back in the day.
Matrix is the ultimate alternative to Discord! It's a FOSS protocol, which has numerous server and client implementations available—much like the ActivityPub protocol.
Hmm. This makes too much sense to me for me to be mad. Discord can easily compete with patreon the way I see it. Obviously, they could fuck it up and ruin the whole platform but if their team has more than a few brain cells it should work out fine right?
vomits
Capitalism claiming it's next victim.
Can't wait for the 2nd hand free exclusive meme trading scene!
Ph hell naaahj
Will the memes be immune to screenshotting and OBS? lmao
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.
There's Matrix/Element and now Revolt
Revolt is one, and the app is basically a clone of Discord.
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.
@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
Yaaaaaaaaaay
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.
It's the defacto way many communities stick around and communicate with each other, especially in the gaming world.