Discord is a disjointed mess that is being abused by many to fill a role it was never designed to fill.
No, I don't want to join your discord to use a half assed search to be able to dig my way through what you think is an FAQ about your game.
Yeah, it really bugs me that it's basically absorbed what used to be public forums and whatnot into its own proprietary bubble where search engines don't reach while not even being a good fit for that kind of thing to begin with
I like discord a lot for support groups for small projects where it's about 50-100 ish people interested in it.
But when a project grows and the server grows with it definitely becomes a struggle for people to look back at whats already been discussed so people keep asking the same questions over and over.
And there is so much idle chatter to scroll through. I shouldn't have to scan through months of jokes and memes to get updated.
Heck, even with a handful of people anything longer form feels like a chore. I've been the admin of a tiny friends only server for a good few years and even in there it feels hard to keep track sometimes when there's more than a single laser focused topic.
That's a moderation issue. The servers I have in have channels per topic and quite aggressively redirect any offtopic convo's into the General Chat.
I mean stuff like parallel conversations on the same topic, a lot of it is probably on my ability to parse it all
And every gamer and his dog have their own, so communities are adhoc and lackluster. It does the opposite of what forums used to do.
for real, my local rhythm games community is split among 3 different servers (that I know of) organising meet ups is a challenge nowadays
A lot of people kept trying to tell me Discord was the new Reddit and a new ultimate messenger type software. I tried it a bit and found it lacking on both sides.
Perhaps it will swallow the rest of the world, but I'm happy with Lemmy and other messengers.
I'll give it another go from time to time
Edit: grammar
Imo it's decent at what it set out to be: user friendly, painless realtime chatting, with some voice/video calling to top it up. That said, they keep adding questionable bloat to try and upsell Nitro subs so honestly I can only see it worsening as time goes on.
Seriously. I hate discord. Its fine for you and friends fucking about and gaming on a saturday night.
but its been turned into an alternative to webforums. Where you have to go to get support and answers. Outside of where a websearch can index and archive.
Discord will eventually lead to a massive, catastrophic loss of information that will be unindexed, unarchived, and unrecoverable.
Jup, it's terrible. Where information goes to die. I wish devs would not use it as much as they do.
Ya this is true and that sucks and I don't see a way to change it. Would be nice to go back to get all this info back on forms
Back on forums so its indexable, so you can find the solution if you have the same problem.
You nailed it.
Don't even get me started on people actively chatting in public discord servers
It takes seconds to ask a question and receive an answer in discord. It's entirely likely that my problem was never discussed on a forum post from 10 years ago with 15 pages to sift through.
It takes seconds to ask a question and receieve an answer on a webforum to.
for the same reasons. The person was sitting there and can reply immediately.
and you dont get an instant reply for the same reason.
the person wasnt sitting there.
I'm always frustrated when a game or service says to check out their Discord for information. Discord is a confusing mess of chat channels, and while it can certainly be useful in (near-)realtime interactions, I can't imagine trying to look up longer-lived information, like what they're trying to use it for. Make a forum, or a blog, or use a subreddit, but not Discord.
I think the most recent case of this was the game Terra Invicta, where I saw a tangential reference somewhere to some coming updates to the game, and a game rep said to check their Discord for more details. No thanks.
It's an overwhelming mess of everything. So many things going on at once - notifications, badges, mentions, boosts, stickers, voice chats, kitchen sink ....
I just can't force myself to use it. My brain is accustomed to a minimalist UX, not whatever that is.
AGS took their working forums for Lost Ark and other games, deprecated them and turned them to read only and switched entirely to Discord.
The tin foil hat side of me says it's so all the complaints stopped showing up in Search Engine results. Also no pesky archives or waybackmachine to properly inform customers.
Happened with doujin style, it used to be a great site to search for indie albums but then they moved to discord and now it's a nightmare to browse unless you already know what you are looking for.
Honest question: is there a centralized alternative? Like “here, install this or use this SaaS, it enables your community to chat, discuss in forums, and allows you to manage a FAQ/KB from the content from the chat and forums”
EDIT: don’t get why the downvotes. It’s a question, not a statement.
We call them websites.
Oh, you don’t know what SaaS stands by?
I do, it's exactly what a website hosting is. We got hundreds of frameworks to do all those things that don't include signing your soul with blood to a cartoonishly evil corp or billionaire. Paying with privacy is not mandatory.
Good! Now that you know, can you answer my question and tell me an alternative?
Good point, and I think there isn't a one stop shop. But I think chat is overrated in this, it might be an addition. But having information that is not search indexed limits access and thus usability for the broader community. Also discord sucks for KB and FAQ in terms of formatting and setup (usually you see locked chat channels for that containing links to external sources. And the community discussions usually end up with multiple simultaneous discussions that get drowned out by new discussions in the same thread.
I think discord has a role. But it is not a good solution by any means. Lemmy, reddit, even the steam forums seem better.
They have forums within discord. Searching takes moments.
True-ish. Most discords are setup with chat channels that serve the function of a board. With all threads in a single timeline and several conversations running through one another.
In addition the interface is a cluttered mess with many different icons, buttons and panels all competing for your attention.
And the search then gives you a single post, leaving you to scroll in that messy interface through several mixed conversations to try and make heads or tails from it.
In the mean time the information cannot be found through search engines meaning I have to find the correct community (sometimes there are multiple) and hope the info is there.
It's not an improvement IMHO.
Discord does not allow you to search well. Discord's search function is EXTREMELY limited when it comes to symbols, so if you go to search for version numbers of a project, you are shit out of luck. Discord forums are not engine searchable, so discovering the content requires you to join yet another discord server (sometimes multiple servers) to get info you could have just searched (the point of discoverable forums).
Bullshit. Its on a quest to monetize the platform, thats all its doing.
If it wanted to be a better communication platform it wouldnt be adding all this pointless superfluous shit that exists only for nickle and diming.
Yeah the app is bloated as shit
And somehow making the UI worse every single update. HOW?
Taking lessons from Valve and steam, I suspect.
I genuinely don't understand how these companies go "Okay, we have a very elegant, simple, sleek, and fast interface here..Heres what we should do, we should completely fuck it up, make it slower, and make it require more resources for absolutely no reason"
Is this an old meme? They revamped their UI and I think it's (Steam) very intuitive now. I do remember when they had like 10 different styles of drop-down box on the desktop app. But, I don't see that now.
Main function are ok, sure, but Steam still is is inconsistant, the 40 different css for buttons is not just a meme. It improved with the revamp, but that was only a few pages. Take a look at the community, workshop and profile page it's a mess.
Same as discord it had a lot of feature creep over the years so it's not easy to understand, but for me it's worth giving up ease of use for theses features.
What revamp?
The recent one?
There was no improvement. Everythings factually worse now. Steam's interface has been on a hard downward spiral ever since they tried to take small mode away from us a couple years ago, but recent updates have made it even worse since it no longer remembers windows size or position. So every fucking time I start it or switch between small/large mode, I've gotta resize the damn window and move it back to where it belongs. and thanks to all the bloat they've added to it its slower than ever to do any of that.
They seem to be trying real hard slow march steam into becoming a social media platform, Which is 99% of the problem and probably where all the stupid decisions are coming from. Steam doesnt need to be a slow, bulky social media platform. Its a fucking storefront. It needs to be light weight, slick, and fast.
Community and socials features exist since ages, I don't think it's going in a social media direction at all. I've never seen anyone using chats seriously for exemple.
But it indeed is getting worse as they add new features which clutter even more the interface. I don't think the rework is better, but it wasn't a downgrade either imo.
(I didn't see the window position and size thing, but closing steam takes 1 more click tho, this suck)
It's just paycheck justification. "Look we did something, we are useful"
As long as they allow for free streaming and file sharing, they will need to monetize. That stuff gets real expensive real fast.
I mean, it is a company that employs people that gives away its product for free. Aside from Nitro, would you like them to monetize your personal info and sell it to 3rd parties?
You think they don't? How can we be sure when their motive is profit?
They literally do. Discord is google adservices integrated.
idk how else to put it, but discord feels like an information black hole with adhd
It was a great messaging app, before all the extra bullshit was added to it. The focus was on doing one thing, and doing it right. Now they do 35 different things, and abandon them in favor of mtx for profiles
If they could stop trying to foist nitro on me that would be great.
Bandwidth isn't free, they gotta make money somehow
Funny how when someone brings this up for a streaming service it's all "the ads are intrusive", "I don't want to pay this company". Etc. But when it's discord all the sudden "they gotta pay for bandwidth".
Steaming services don't give it to you for free with the only ads being for the premium version of their service that you don't really need..
So what you're saying is that since their ads are for the product I am using the free version of, I shouldn't get irritated about them?
You can feel however which way you want. But, comparing it to paid services isn't fair..
It is a paid service though?
In what world is it paid? I've used it for years and never gave them a dime. I decided to buy Nitro in the last year so that I can support the network. But, I was never held back from doing what I wanted to do because I didn't have nitro.
As someone who has hosted Team Speak servers. That shit isn't free.
If they're asking you to pay a subscription then they have a paid tier.
Having a paid tier and being a "paid service" aren't the same thing.
It seems like you don't maybe know what you're talking about. If the service is available for free but there is a paid tier (like Twitch) then that's still a paid tier. Just because it's not providing the exact same features for the payment means nothing.
I think the difference is that when you pay discord, they stop advertising to you.
They also stop advertising to you if you install a plugin that disables the ads, shame they're against TOS, not like there isnt many people using them anyways
There are streaming services that I pay for that have stopped advertising to me. Nitro makes it seem like I have notifications that I then have to hunt down in the app only to find that it's them suggesting I buy a subscription.
Because you are still paying the streaming service, and then they serve you ads.
Nope. They have a free model that is ads supported and a paid model that is not and doesn't have ads. That's my point. If the nitro ad was just a banner at the bottom of the app that would be one thing. But instead it shows up randomly as a notification like it's a message. That's garbage.
I thought about getting Nitro once, till I noticed it was a monthly subscription
It's a single ad.
Every time the damn thing opens. That’s too much
I miss the early days of Discord. Nowadays it's just a lot of advertising for their Nitro service.
Not even their marketing videos are fun anymore. Why can't they just bring Zencha back?
You usually know a company is slowly going to shit when they start to be serious and stop doing fun in their products and ads. Then you know lawyers and shareholders and people who think you can only do business with a straight face started to take over the company. Which is just sad.
As long as they don't start adding actual third party adverts in their 'free' version, I don't care how much they advertise Nitro.
I mean, it's a single notification that only comes up when you launch discord from scratch. It's not really intrusive.
I get them constantly in the form of a new message.
I keep getting stressed about my trial running out, then remembering I didn't start one, then reading closely and hating them bc it's just my window to start a trial ending, the 10th window this month.
Walled-gardens are fundamentally bad for communication. Discord is not a solution, it’s a problem.
We had IRC for years. Still do, for that matter. But we have to do every goddamn thing over ports 80 and 443 now.
"Better messaging app" my bubble ass
Keeps changing ui every month for no reason
Keeps adding disgracting prolife fluff that looks like shit. (Neither can be turned off)
Support is abbysmal.
Linux client is garbage. (Screenshare anyone)
Bloated mess.
Hates mods and custom clients.
Too big ( had a server of 3k people, know how many people I got to switch?90)
Their team us a bunch of pedophile furry porn lovers.
Fuck. Them.
I literally don't even install it on Linux because the screen share works more often through Firefox than through their native app. That doesn't mean it works consistently, and there's never any sound, but at least I can sometimes make it work in the Firefox webapp. The native app is worthless.
tell me more about this Mods and Custom Clients? What should I search?
Look up betterdiscord
Armcord
When did the UI change? I'm on discord pretty much constantly
They keep adding a ton of random shit to the app that constantly clutters the screen. Nobody gives a fuck about nitro or the constant flashing, in your face animations they’ve been adding recently
Yesterday
Discord is an absolute piece of garbage, it's not a good messaging app, definitely not a good place to host a community (seriously, I don't understand why some communities saw Discord as an alternative after the Reddit API changes), and most importantly, it's spyware. The company doesn't have a business model and it was founded by a guy who is notorious for creating random shit that's not economically sustainable at all. I don't understand why anyone would use this shit. This video outlines everything that's wrong with Discord: https://youtube.com/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU
The problem is convincing other people to switch as well. There's no point in me using Matrix if all of the people I want to communicate with only want to use Discord.
Because they didn't reinvent xmpp, they reinvented Google Wave.
A lot of Matrix.org is inspired by what Wave could have been - although we are running late with threading (but some work is happening currently there). From our perspective, one of the biggest gaps was the lack of bridging in Wave to other existing comms interfaces (eg email) - as well as the quirky UX.
Sadly, can't get my server to make the jump. Doesn't help that Revolt is missing a few features and Matrix just... Doesn't work at all for the flow of the server
Right now a bridge bot does heavy lifting for when Discord does piss off enough users to cause everybody to jump over
Are they? How? This article doesn't explain anything about functioning, just some design changes.
Is it becoming FOSS or supporting any meaningful level privacy?
Here's an idea to start making it better: ditch fucking electron. There are alternatives that won't need complete code rewrite or language change (tauri, neutralino). Better yet, actually go ahead with a full language change and pick Dart + Flutter, that shit is crossplat.
But we all know they won't, because fuck you, "ram is cheap". Good luck upgrading the ram on your phone.
It run fine on my 7 years old phone. Sure, native would be better, but electron mean they can make the website, the windows app and the android app all at once. So it's worth it.
Everyone on Lemmy is a programmer, so you should know how hard it is to support multiple version of a service with as much active developpement as discord.
The point of Tauri and Neutralino is to do what Electron does without needing to bundle a whole, isolated chrome browser to make it pretend it is a native app
I didn't know about that, sorry I missed it in you original comment.
Then maybe theses frameworks are too young or have some kind of limitation, or just discord did not switch yet, but I hope they do.
I know optimisation is not important for most company but if the switch is free they should do it.
They would have to change some parts that interact with the OS. It's probably not a big investment (especially for a company like Discord) but there are few reasons to do so, it won't increase users (by much) and doesn't affect revenue.
It still increase user experience so they would do it if it was easy. Or more like I would like so.
Except if we go full conspiracy theory and maybe they don't want poor people that won't buy nitro on the platform, it's possible.
Except if we go full conspiracy theory and maybe they don’t want poor people that won’t buy nitro on the platform, it’s possible.
Nah, most people just don't care that it uses electron.
Yes probably
Tauri and neutralino also do that?
Yes mb
I still run the last pre-JS version of the discord app on my phone, and it's sooo much snappier.
I didn't know it used to be on native, maybe I will try finding it so I can save some space
They used to be native with Kotlin on Android and IDK on iOS. Now they use React Native, which isn’t really electron or native. I’m not sure if it bundles a browser but it sounds like the same as Tauri and Neutralino
They need to try way harder.
Just curious. I have Signal, Element (FOSS version of Discord), GroupMe, Slack, Snapchat, Messenger, I have tried WhatsApp, Guilded, Telegram. I have tried a sleuth of messaging apps over the years from Web based, to niche apps that don't exist anymore, things that would let you message users around the world. I have even tried things like taste buds and app for users with specific tastes in music.
No matter what the case I find I prefer Discord. All of my groups and communities are there. I am 28 and my friends and being weird kids at heart use things like Discords soundboard for stupid annoying sounds, to stream our gameplay, and to even venture out to our own communities for things we love. Point being Discord has had all of what I personally want and enjoy for years and more. I mean I loved Google Plus when it was around because of the communities. I use Reddit because of the communities for things I enjoy and I wish Lemmy had more of them for that matter.
My only question being, what do you think they need more off to already be better than the platform most people consider the best? Encryption? Not to charge money for subs? It's not that Discord can't get better. It's that I end up on Lemmy looking for alternatives and see comments like this and people will talk about FOSS, cool I found things like amephyst and Element for my fill of FOSS apps. Even down to niche FOSS apps that I love for other things Lemmy has provided but there are apps like Discord that FOSS apps still don't fill every need for me no matter how hard I try to pull myself away from these massive companies.
I will make comments on Lemmy, knowing where I am at. Saying things like this and saying I am okay with spending money on things I enjoy and don't mind continuing to do so but it is usually met with comments like, "what is wrong with you." To the point my comments and posts have either tried to bring up valid call outs that some Lemmy users don't disagree with or me just stating we are all different and don't have to like what others like.
I am not in disagreement with our data being hogged, our private lives being at risk and not am I opposed to try different methods and even still use methods like Mullvad, Proton products, Tor, etc.
Yet no matter how much I try these products the separate Duck address accounts I have, Firefox, etc. I still primarily use Chrome, Google, Discord. Because despite the hate and reasonable hate mind you. Those products provide what I want and work better for me for regular use and certain FOSS or even competing apps just don't do that for me. Yet there are always comments like yours, "they need to try harder." Just vague statements made to justify some personal belief that these companies will rupture and fall apart but they are still successful and they doing exactly what you are saying they should do, trying harder.
I don't mean to poke or prod, start and argument because it will end in one with someone on here which just pushes users like me looking for answers farther away because I want to have discussion but turn to just that more than likely on Lemmy. I just don't know what Lemmy users want or think they are getting at by making statements like this?
honestly, i don't even want to use discord. i'd like to use mumble, irc, xmpp, email, jami, and jitsi. if discord were just a client that wrapped all of these into one user interface, i'd use it.
Discord is quickly becoming a dying service the way skype did. How did skype become a dying service?
Google ad services integration (Discord already has this): when you chat on discord about anything, your text and recent text from your friends are used to supply GAS keywords. Talk about the voice actor for the blue beetle on discord then type blue beetle in the search bar and check your suggestions.
Inserting ads INTO the chat client (Discord is beginning to do this): through activities first, then total corporation capitulation, Skype delivered ads to users. Discord has ads in activities already, and won't allow youtube premium users to skip ads on the watch together activity because they cannot log in. It's an ad delivery pipeline they nuked user created bots for.
If you are worried about privacy, discord is literally destroying yours as you use it. Sure, it isn't bought out entirely by google or microsoft yet, but it might as well be with how much of your data is used to deliver ads rather than enhance your experience. Game a lot? Discord will NEVER suggest new communities on discord to you based on your chat, just advertise to you based on it. Aside from that, discord has obfuscated information that was readily being added to wikis, so wikis that are straight up shit and wrong like fextralife are THRIVING. Seriously, their Nioh wikis are misinformation, their BG3 wiki was wrong on release for a lot of things like shopkeeper inventories and hasn't been updated whatsoever. DaS3 and elden ring info? Mostly straight up plagiarized info from other sites and a lot of it incorrect.
Interested in learning specific info for a game? Discord forums on invite only servers have destroyed this. Specific class information for your favorite MMO? Join that class discord from the game's community discord, wait for someone to give you the role (or if you are extremely lucky, react role in), and PRAY the pinned info is in date. Specific character in a fighting game? Better hope it's in anime airdasher, because outside of dustloop (which also has a discord you must weather for up to date info) all that shit is in discord forums you have to daisy-chain to get info.
TL;DR discord has pushed a bunch of features exclusively to destroy privacy and obtain google money, and a bunch of others are clearly "well the developers need to be working on SOMETHING" changes, like username ID reassignments. The numbered usernames are still visible. They weren't removed. Why did they change? Not for security or ease of use, that's for sure
"Discord is quickly becoming a dying service the way Skype did." I love an opinion and skimmed through what you said but I basically quit taking this comment seriously from the first sentence on. That is because that is the Lemmy mentality. I don't know what you are smoking, reading, seeing. But the, "it's a dying service absolutely so far off the truth. I mean have you been keeping up with Discord. Yeah, it's not fucking dying. It is quite literally growing and keeps continuing to do so. It is easily one of the most successfully growing platforms. When Facebook tries to copy your work, Treehouse, etc and none can quite get you then yeah, you are doing just fine. Ads haven't killed Facebook.
Also, ads aren't what killed Skype. What killed Skype is that it was an actually shit product/platform. I can't remember a single damn ad using Skype because it was shit for video chatting.
"You can't watch YouTube videos together because you can't sign in and there are ads." Yeah that is not why we don't watch videos on discord. I don't watch videos on Discord because my friends just don't want to and ads aren't the reason why. I would say people probably use the feature even with ads.
Also, I think you really missed the privacy part entirely and should read again. There is concern with privacy and there is acknowledgement with the privacy front hence the attempt to use more private products like Element. I appreciate the lesson though.
I am all for discussing but your comments are entirely the comments I am referring to on Lemmy. It's not informative it's a bubble that Lemmy users live in no differently than Reddit users. The forefront thought that because their are ads and people pay for things that their opinion on what makes something bad is clearly why something is suddenly dying. There is far more evidence to suggest, hell even support, that Discord is not dying. However, because there are ads, it's a dying platform and that is the Lemmy mentality. Product bad because ads. Ads have been around for years and have progressively gotten worse and Chrome is quite literally still the most used and successful browser. I like to call it the deniability factor on Lemmy. The in denial that products that we don't want users to continue using are still winning people's usage and that Google is going to topple over any day because we are right and ads bad and privacy. The average consumer doesn't care if they did Firefox would be doing better than Chrome.
It's not that your points are invalid, irrelevant, or not true or don't hold some some honesty that I wish people took more interest in. It's that Discord is a working product and somehow users on Lemmy just can't wrap their brains around the fact people keep using products that they think are bad or that people like me even attempt the other side and have both privacy centric apps and the opposite and still prefer the opposite.
This one should be short enough for you to understand completely: dumbass lmao
Glad you could provide relative insight and valuable information you counter all the statements made before.
So I have one for you a tad longer,: have a nice night.
Discord is spyware and all of my friends are the laziest most boring people for thinking they should spend their entire social lives on one app.
plus doesn't it just feel awful to use as software? the way lemmy looks and responds to clicks is night and day versus the le epic gamer kid dark mode awful buggy weird PC web view thing discord does where like, if you want to copy and paste you have to use their little tooltip menu which sucks instead of the system one. every time you launch it it forces you to wait 10 minutes for it to download every piddly little update which probably sucks and doesn't matter....
lemmy is buggy and has its flaws as well of course but it's just like...this is a good solid website. good bones. like the old days.
I don't ever use the desktop version because of these constant updates
Same. I use the app on android and a browser on desktop.
Lemmy feels great. Discord alternatives, some of them feel OK and when I bring up issues with their performance I'm reminded they are open source.
you can’t use find tool normally
I see a few claims of spyware in here. Not that I doubt you, but where can I find out more?
Anything closed source with a privacy policy is spyware to Lemmy users.
Why do you read Lemmy, while discounting the opinions and perspectives of other people here?
Because I don't want to live in a bubble? Isn't the whole point of Internet forums to have dissenting opinions? I made that comment to start a discussion or have others reflect on what their perspectives might be, because it really seems like almost all of Lemmy is anti-corporate, pro-hyper-privacy. I'm not pro-corporate by any means, but I really think it's time people reflect and think of reasons why some people may use a platform like Discord, instead of just assuming they are stupid, or otherwise lesser, and like being spied. Because it's just simply hyperbolic and not true. Not everything has to be FOSS, there are use cases for otherwise.
I believe communication should not be a commodity. It should be FOSS. I believe discord is free because it feels like something that provides little to no value, and yet the company has shareholders and must provide value to them. Ridiculous.
That is a fine perspective, and I'm here to learn about yours. However, that does not make it spyware.
Idk what the bar is for spyware but Ill be specific about my belief: discord is basically the most red flags of any social media and also has the facade of a very private and personal space.
You were the one that called it spyware. Your opinion is valid, but my opinion was that Lemmy users tend to exaggerate when talking about closed source software. People are so quick to trash on anything not FOSS, then when asked about sources to back claims up, they are mostly anecdotal and not directly related to the additional claims. Case-in-point, someone asked why you called it spyware, and you responded with the first two points referencing a clauses of a privacy policy that is nearly identical to every social media platform in existence today, and the last point referencing security flaws. The security flaws, in the past, were mostly around cookie stealers (which isn't Discord's fault, literally any browser is at risk if you download malware), and some chromium bugs. A lot of the "hacks" that went around were just scare-pastas that were just made up too. So, no, I don't think there are notable, active flaws that are currently being abused by third-parties as you claim, because Discord has a financial interest to keep their platform secure. If there were active holes being exploited and they just sat around and did nothing, it would upset shareholders, which you noted they did have.
So while you are entitled to your opinion, I do challenge you to consider the other sides of the argument, and consider that closed source software users may have good reasons to use such software. Also do consider that some of the points you made are hyperbolic and that you may be moving the goal posts a bit with your claims.
I wish you well, take care.
Okay, so...
I just conceded that I can't define spyware, and you're accusing me of moving the goalposts over it but I think Ive given ground.
I have not ever brought up the privacy policy.
I stand by my point that security flaws are of strategic benefit to the powers that be. We can't assume what shareholders want other than money. Yeah most of the exploits that were publicized were pretty basic and easy to avoid. These exploits are fundamentally discords fault that they were around so long, so easy to employ, etc.
Looking into it, I found those malicious scripts on google on the first page... Discord could have issued takedown requests to google and Github. When a company is so large, laziness is malice. Someone said "no, don't fix that." ha that's the scare-pasta you brought up, isn't it? Ah well.
You're asking me to consider that discord is just doing what everyone else is doing and doing what its told by shareholders, who want a perfect and safe platform. You're not asking me to change my mind, but actually make my arguments weaker. To moderate them. No thanks, I find the sharpest point to be more useful than a dull one.
Of course! Hope you're all good, too. Getting on with the replies I'm thinking like... Damn I use discord everyday, I use discord and occasionally talk to people who still use Twitter (X)... Ha. 🤷♀️
Will I ever stop using Discord?
So the basics of what I've read is:
Discord stores all messages and media. If you delete it, or delete your account, its still there.
Discord does not SELL that data. Instead, they hand it over to the ad companies that are the shareholders of Discord.
Discord has lots of security flaws that are abused by third parties all the damn time.
I know its different now because Discord has nitro and there are lots if good reasons to subscribe. But Discord ran without all if that subscriber funding and in that time they probably found ways to make money off of what resources they had at the time... Information.
Discord stores all messages and media.
I mean, how else do you think they can make it so all your existing chats show up when you log into your account from a different device? Signal stores all your messages and media as well, the difference is they encrypt it on their servers. Discord doesn't.
If you delete it, or delete your account, its still there.
That's more problematic, and there should honestly be a law against that. Come to think of it, doesn't that violate the GRDP? Either they have to treat their EU customers differently when it comes to this, or there's a lawsuit waiting to happen. In the former case, you might be able to force them to delete your data by using a VPN to pretend you're in Europe.
> Signal stores all your messages and media as well, the difference is they encrypt it on their servers.
What evidence do you have to support this claim?
The last time I looked into this, messages and media were only stored encrypted on servers until they were retrieved or expired.
After that, the local device is where things are stored.
How do they manage to make the same messages appear on multiple devices? I use Signal on my phone and two other computers. Even if one of them is offline, once I go online, it will show the same messages as the other devices, even if I have already seen them on my phone. They sure aren't going to connect to my phone to pull the messages from there.
I do think there is a limit to this feature – when you connect a new device, you will not see any history on there. Only messages you receive after activating the device will show up, so it's possible they just keep track of how many active devices you have, and once a message has been retrieved by all of them, it will be deleted from the server. But that would also mean that if you don't sign out of a device before retiring it, messages COULD potentially stay on their servers forever, unless they delete them after a certain period.
> How do they manage to make the same messages appear on multiple devices?
For a long time, they didn't.
I don't know for sure, but I expect it involves keys that multiple devices share. Any "linked" device would be able to download the encrypted copy and decrypt the message that way. Once any device has done that, it can send a copy to any other devices using the unique keys it knows for that device.
Right, that makes sense, although the article doesn’t go into detail about how the server decides when it’s time to delete a message.
It also doesn’t back up your claim that multiple devices sharing the same account will ever exchange messages amongst each other. Which would be a technical nightmare BTW since they could be located behind firewalls etc. and this still require a central server to coordinate. Might as well keep the middle man in that case and leave the messages on the server until they’ve been retrieved.
My initial point therefore is mostly correct: messages ARE stored on their servers in encrypted form for an unknown length of time, although likely not forever.
That's how Reddit works/worked. Probably lemmy too though I haven't looked too close. Deleting your account doesn't necessarily mean the content your account created is taken with it. Things not being deleted with your account is a werid thing to cite for spy ware, lots of stuff works like that and you can delete it, just isn't automatically deleted with your account.
Discord having security flaws does not make it spy ware. There have been some pretty severe security issues but almost every one I've heard of has its roots in a gullible user running some sort of application on their machine or scanning a QR code with the Discord app which makes it extremely clear you are logging into another device... The only one I'm aware of that I found very concerning was iirc a werid video player vulnerability that could yank your token.
I highly doubt Discord is giving advertisers access to the messages on their platform. That sounds insanely illegal and also largly a waste of time cause if they are doing that it doesn't work very well.
On reddit you can simply use a tampermonkey script to remove your data. On discord, there is no option to delete all your messages. To the extent that there's a discussion worth having about whether Discord is following the GDPR.
Not tackling security issues means discord is okay with third parties exploiting the software to gain info about certain users - which could include hacker groups or government actors targeting single targets.
I dont think discord can give individual messages over, legally, although they are stored unencrypted on Discord's server.
I heard this argument so long ago that basically Discord doesnt sell data but instead shares it with shareholders, which includes many ad companies, including tencent. They probably give this data to their linked partners like twitch and Microsoft. Discord still isnt profitable and they are a public company, they are expected to exhaust every opportunity to give value to those shareholders.
Yeah, there is one way to make it better, but it won't happen until they're forced to change: force them to integrate with the matrix protocol
yes, I know that it's possible to use a bridge, and I do it, but it still requires a discord account, it would be great if discord rooms were just accessible with the matrix protocol
It’s owned by Tencent btw , they absolutely don’t want matrix C
(X) Doubt
I can not find anything in there. I can not favorite messages to find them again. It is a hole where everything your write is virtually there, but practically lost.
You can pin msgs. But. There is a limit lmao
Take those paywalls down.
They have to make money somehow. Let's be realistic.
The only thing I want is a good Discord update for Linux. Streaming with sound still doesn't work and Discord hogs more CPU resources than on Windows.
Discord is the primary voice chat platform for a lot of my gaming groups, and half the time it can’t even detect the correct mic or output. Also routing my calls to the phone app for no reason when I am clearly ACTIVE AND TYPING on PC.
I don’t need another messaging app, I need an actual seamless voice chat experience.
discord is also the main place for reporting bugs related to the linux driver for xbox controllers, xone. I do not appreciate it.
Wait, am I seeing correctly? Did they really go so far as to completely disable the issue system in GitHub in favor of Discord?
That's certainly a... choice.
it's really surprising how many FOSS projects decide to use Discord as a bug report tool. it's like they've never heard of the little obscure website called Github.
The project I've linked is hosted on GitHub. They explicitly disabled issues and did not enable discussions.
Well, not github, but a FOSS alternative not hosted by Microsoft.
Also routing my calls to the phone app for no reason when I am clearly ACTIVE AND TYPING on PC.
And the opposite problem when you don't get message notifications on your phone because you forgot to close it on your PC.
I already have too many chat apps.
STAHP
one day it will need to become profitable and suddenly it will be a pile of shit
hah, I haven't updated mine since they switched from a native app to react native.
What? They never had a native app, it was Electron.
on android, not desktop
That version must be some 5 years old by now
last updated july 22, 2022. About a year and three months.
My bad. Didn't know they switched to React.
I guess it's less work maintaining two different mobile platforms.
It's going the complete wrong way if so.
Just read the headline... Will it stop spying on me o und which Servers i am?
I'm not sure what everyone is complaining about in the comments. I use discord pretty much constantly and at all times.
Nitro ads? It's 1 very minor ad when you launch the app. Then there's no more ads.
Not as good as forums? Bull. I get an answer to my question immediately on discord. I may never find the answer to my question by sifting through dozens of pages of forum posts of someone having a similar but not congruent problem to mine.
Can't find information? Discord has integrated forums with a search feature in each server.
Bloated? How so? You have an inbox and you have your list of servers on the left hand side. Okay, some of the options are a little obscured, but it's not like Discord is doing anything except connecting like minded people via text and voice/video chat.
I sincerely don't know what anyone is talking about. But part of me thinks it's because discord doesn't have E2E encryption and yall wanna discuss some naughty shit.
Discord has gotten much worse about pushing Nitro everywhere, and I can't be the only one that sees it more than just on launch.
Can’t find information?
Right. Discord itself is another silo, and a public forum is going to be better for just about any non-ephemeral type of info (pretty much everything Discord gets used for that is not messaging.) There are a lot of communities that decided with the fucking of reddit to move to Discord, which just changes which silo the info is at, and in this case is less accessible because it's not publicly searchable, indexable, etc. Things like the Internet Archive exist for a reason and have massive utility, and they can glean nothing from Discord. If Discord dies, so dies all of the info with it.
Bloated?
Discord, and like basically all of the modern Electron messaging apps (Slack's probably hiding in a corner trying to avoid getting noticed in this conversation) are massively bloated. These are basically ridiculously overgrown IRC clients which we had back in 1998 that cover about 90% of the functionality of Discord, except those IRC clients used to run in single digit mb's of RAM and CPU use was basically negligible and they launched more or less instantly. Can't launch Discord on either an M1 MacBook nor my I9 PC without it taking long enough to load for me to grab a coffee.
Anyway, Discord's original intended use of like realtime conversation is fine, but yeah the clients are garbage and as a replacement for reddit/lemmy/other forum software, it's just choosing the wrong tool for the job. Even for the use cases it does have, it's been a solved problem since the 90's, but those solutions didn't allow for some tech bros or VCs to make a bunch of money. It's always been amazing to me that either Discord or Slack even have a business model.
Oh, and personally I find Discord in particular atrociously designed, and Slack not much better. How either handle threading are enough to make me not want to bother with threading, for example. Discord is fantastically ugly also imo.
Nitro ads? It's 1 very minor ad when you launch the app. Then there's no more ads.
Recently I launched Discord on desktop and got big splash screen screaming about new shop items. Earlier, I've got constant popups about new nitro perks, new avatar decorations, new app icons.
Not as good as forums? Bull. I get an answer to my question immediately on discord. I may never find the answer to my question by sifting through dozens of pages of forum posts of someone having a similar but not congruent problem to mine.
You may get an answer immediately, but this answer will be lost after some messages. Someone with the same question may ask it again instead of searching. People in chat may get tired to answer over and over. On forums you have one question 10 years ago and answer to it. No need to ask again.
Can't find information? Discord has integrated forums with a search feature in each server.
Discord's internal search is very limited, not as good as Google. Discord is very hard to archive, so at some point information will be lost.
Bloated? How so? You have an inbox and you have your list of servers on the left hand side.
If you have many servers, you'll get many notifications and new messages badges. You'll also have many useless channels, which you need to manually mute or hide.
it's because discord doesn't have E2E encryption and yall wanna discuss some naughty shit.
I don't really think encryption is mandatory for every chat app, it has some problems with transferring messages to other devices. If you're working on some project, you probably don't want it to be leaked, so you'll encrypt your messages.
I think the biggest issue atm is that discord doesn’t/can’t get indexed by search engines
Who the hell uses the inbox
It's only useful when some random person pings you that got buried by hundreds of messages
Discord is a disjointed mess that is being abused by many to fill a role it was never designed to fill.
No, I don't want to join your discord to use a half assed search to be able to dig my way through what you think is an FAQ about your game.
Yeah, it really bugs me that it's basically absorbed what used to be public forums and whatnot into its own proprietary bubble where search engines don't reach while not even being a good fit for that kind of thing to begin with
I like discord a lot for support groups for small projects where it's about 50-100 ish people interested in it. But when a project grows and the server grows with it definitely becomes a struggle for people to look back at whats already been discussed so people keep asking the same questions over and over.
And there is so much idle chatter to scroll through. I shouldn't have to scan through months of jokes and memes to get updated.
Heck, even with a handful of people anything longer form feels like a chore. I've been the admin of a tiny friends only server for a good few years and even in there it feels hard to keep track sometimes when there's more than a single laser focused topic.
That's a moderation issue. The servers I have in have channels per topic and quite aggressively redirect any offtopic convo's into the General Chat.
I mean stuff like parallel conversations on the same topic, a lot of it is probably on my ability to parse it all
And every gamer and his dog have their own, so communities are adhoc and lackluster. It does the opposite of what forums used to do.
for real, my local rhythm games community is split among 3 different servers (that I know of) organising meet ups is a challenge nowadays
A lot of people kept trying to tell me Discord was the new Reddit and a new ultimate messenger type software. I tried it a bit and found it lacking on both sides.
Perhaps it will swallow the rest of the world, but I'm happy with Lemmy and other messengers.
I'll give it another go from time to time
Edit: grammar
Imo it's decent at what it set out to be: user friendly, painless realtime chatting, with some voice/video calling to top it up. That said, they keep adding questionable bloat to try and upsell Nitro subs so honestly I can only see it worsening as time goes on.
Seriously. I hate discord. Its fine for you and friends fucking about and gaming on a saturday night.
but its been turned into an alternative to webforums. Where you have to go to get support and answers. Outside of where a websearch can index and archive.
Discord will eventually lead to a massive, catastrophic loss of information that will be unindexed, unarchived, and unrecoverable.
Jup, it's terrible. Where information goes to die. I wish devs would not use it as much as they do.
Ya this is true and that sucks and I don't see a way to change it. Would be nice to go back to get all this info back on forms
Back on forums so its indexable, so you can find the solution if you have the same problem.
You nailed it.
Don't even get me started on people actively chatting in public discord servers
It takes seconds to ask a question and receive an answer in discord. It's entirely likely that my problem was never discussed on a forum post from 10 years ago with 15 pages to sift through.
It takes seconds to ask a question and receieve an answer on a webforum to.
for the same reasons. The person was sitting there and can reply immediately.
and you dont get an instant reply for the same reason.
the person wasnt sitting there.
I'm always frustrated when a game or service says to check out their Discord for information. Discord is a confusing mess of chat channels, and while it can certainly be useful in (near-)realtime interactions, I can't imagine trying to look up longer-lived information, like what they're trying to use it for. Make a forum, or a blog, or use a subreddit, but not Discord.
I think the most recent case of this was the game Terra Invicta, where I saw a tangential reference somewhere to some coming updates to the game, and a game rep said to check their Discord for more details. No thanks.
It's an overwhelming mess of everything. So many things going on at once - notifications, badges, mentions, boosts, stickers, voice chats, kitchen sink ....
I just can't force myself to use it. My brain is accustomed to a minimalist UX, not whatever that is.
AGS took their working forums for Lost Ark and other games, deprecated them and turned them to read only and switched entirely to Discord.
The tin foil hat side of me says it's so all the complaints stopped showing up in Search Engine results. Also no pesky archives or waybackmachine to properly inform customers.
Happened with doujin style, it used to be a great site to search for indie albums but then they moved to discord and now it's a nightmare to browse unless you already know what you are looking for.
Honest question: is there a centralized alternative? Like “here, install this or use this SaaS, it enables your community to chat, discuss in forums, and allows you to manage a FAQ/KB from the content from the chat and forums”
EDIT: don’t get why the downvotes. It’s a question, not a statement.
We call them websites.
Oh, you don’t know what SaaS stands by?
I do, it's exactly what a website hosting is. We got hundreds of frameworks to do all those things that don't include signing your soul with blood to a cartoonishly evil corp or billionaire. Paying with privacy is not mandatory.
Good! Now that you know, can you answer my question and tell me an alternative?
Good point, and I think there isn't a one stop shop. But I think chat is overrated in this, it might be an addition. But having information that is not search indexed limits access and thus usability for the broader community. Also discord sucks for KB and FAQ in terms of formatting and setup (usually you see locked chat channels for that containing links to external sources. And the community discussions usually end up with multiple simultaneous discussions that get drowned out by new discussions in the same thread.
I think discord has a role. But it is not a good solution by any means. Lemmy, reddit, even the steam forums seem better.
They have forums within discord. Searching takes moments.
True-ish. Most discords are setup with chat channels that serve the function of a board. With all threads in a single timeline and several conversations running through one another.
In addition the interface is a cluttered mess with many different icons, buttons and panels all competing for your attention.
And the search then gives you a single post, leaving you to scroll in that messy interface through several mixed conversations to try and make heads or tails from it.
In the mean time the information cannot be found through search engines meaning I have to find the correct community (sometimes there are multiple) and hope the info is there.
It's not an improvement IMHO.
Discord does not allow you to search well. Discord's search function is EXTREMELY limited when it comes to symbols, so if you go to search for version numbers of a project, you are shit out of luck. Discord forums are not engine searchable, so discovering the content requires you to join yet another discord server (sometimes multiple servers) to get info you could have just searched (the point of discoverable forums).
Bullshit. Its on a quest to monetize the platform, thats all its doing.
If it wanted to be a better communication platform it wouldnt be adding all this pointless superfluous shit that exists only for nickle and diming.
Yeah the app is bloated as shit
And somehow making the UI worse every single update. HOW?
Taking lessons from Valve and steam, I suspect.
I genuinely don't understand how these companies go "Okay, we have a very elegant, simple, sleek, and fast interface here..Heres what we should do, we should completely fuck it up, make it slower, and make it require more resources for absolutely no reason"
Is this an old meme? They revamped their UI and I think it's (Steam) very intuitive now. I do remember when they had like 10 different styles of drop-down box on the desktop app. But, I don't see that now.
Main function are ok, sure, but Steam still is is inconsistant, the 40 different css for buttons is not just a meme. It improved with the revamp, but that was only a few pages. Take a look at the community, workshop and profile page it's a mess.
Same as discord it had a lot of feature creep over the years so it's not easy to understand, but for me it's worth giving up ease of use for theses features.
What revamp?
The recent one?
There was no improvement. Everythings factually worse now. Steam's interface has been on a hard downward spiral ever since they tried to take small mode away from us a couple years ago, but recent updates have made it even worse since it no longer remembers windows size or position. So every fucking time I start it or switch between small/large mode, I've gotta resize the damn window and move it back to where it belongs. and thanks to all the bloat they've added to it its slower than ever to do any of that.
They seem to be trying real hard slow march steam into becoming a social media platform, Which is 99% of the problem and probably where all the stupid decisions are coming from. Steam doesnt need to be a slow, bulky social media platform. Its a fucking storefront. It needs to be light weight, slick, and fast.
Community and socials features exist since ages, I don't think it's going in a social media direction at all. I've never seen anyone using chats seriously for exemple.
But it indeed is getting worse as they add new features which clutter even more the interface. I don't think the rework is better, but it wasn't a downgrade either imo. (I didn't see the window position and size thing, but closing steam takes 1 more click tho, this suck)
It's just paycheck justification. "Look we did something, we are useful"
As long as they allow for free streaming and file sharing, they will need to monetize. That stuff gets real expensive real fast.
I mean, it is a company that employs people that gives away its product for free. Aside from Nitro, would you like them to monetize your personal info and sell it to 3rd parties?
You think they don't? How can we be sure when their motive is profit?
They literally do. Discord is google adservices integrated.
idk how else to put it, but discord feels like an information black hole with adhd
It was a great messaging app, before all the extra bullshit was added to it. The focus was on doing one thing, and doing it right. Now they do 35 different things, and abandon them in favor of mtx for profiles
If they could stop trying to foist nitro on me that would be great.
Bandwidth isn't free, they gotta make money somehow
Funny how when someone brings this up for a streaming service it's all "the ads are intrusive", "I don't want to pay this company". Etc. But when it's discord all the sudden "they gotta pay for bandwidth".
Steaming services don't give it to you for free with the only ads being for the premium version of their service that you don't really need..
So what you're saying is that since their ads are for the product I am using the free version of, I shouldn't get irritated about them?
You can feel however which way you want. But, comparing it to paid services isn't fair..
It is a paid service though?
In what world is it paid? I've used it for years and never gave them a dime. I decided to buy Nitro in the last year so that I can support the network. But, I was never held back from doing what I wanted to do because I didn't have nitro.
As someone who has hosted Team Speak servers. That shit isn't free.
If they're asking you to pay a subscription then they have a paid tier.
Having a paid tier and being a "paid service" aren't the same thing.
It seems like you don't maybe know what you're talking about. If the service is available for free but there is a paid tier (like Twitch) then that's still a paid tier. Just because it's not providing the exact same features for the payment means nothing.
I think the difference is that when you pay discord, they stop advertising to you.
They also stop advertising to you if you install a plugin that disables the ads, shame they're against TOS, not like there isnt many people using them anyways
There are streaming services that I pay for that have stopped advertising to me. Nitro makes it seem like I have notifications that I then have to hunt down in the app only to find that it's them suggesting I buy a subscription.
Because you are still paying the streaming service, and then they serve you ads.
Nope. They have a free model that is ads supported and a paid model that is not and doesn't have ads. That's my point. If the nitro ad was just a banner at the bottom of the app that would be one thing. But instead it shows up randomly as a notification like it's a message. That's garbage.
P2P is the answer, Matrix has been doing this for a few years
I thought about getting Nitro once, till I noticed it was a monthly subscription
It's a single ad.
Every time the damn thing opens. That’s too much
I miss the early days of Discord. Nowadays it's just a lot of advertising for their Nitro service.
Not even their marketing videos are fun anymore. Why can't they just bring Zencha back?
You usually know a company is slowly going to shit when they start to be serious and stop doing fun in their products and ads. Then you know lawyers and shareholders and people who think you can only do business with a straight face started to take over the company. Which is just sad.
As long as they don't start adding actual third party adverts in their 'free' version, I don't care how much they advertise Nitro.
I mean, it's a single notification that only comes up when you launch discord from scratch. It's not really intrusive.
I get them constantly in the form of a new message.
I keep getting stressed about my trial running out, then remembering I didn't start one, then reading closely and hating them bc it's just my window to start a trial ending, the 10th window this month.
Walled-gardens are fundamentally bad for communication. Discord is not a solution, it’s a problem.
We had IRC for years. Still do, for that matter. But we have to do every goddamn thing over ports 80 and 443 now.
"Better messaging app" my bubble ass
Keeps changing ui every month for no reason Keeps adding disgracting prolife fluff that looks like shit. (Neither can be turned off) Support is abbysmal. Linux client is garbage. (Screenshare anyone) Bloated mess. Hates mods and custom clients. Too big ( had a server of 3k people, know how many people I got to switch?90) Their team us a bunch of pedophile furry porn lovers.
Fuck. Them.
I literally don't even install it on Linux because the screen share works more often through Firefox than through their native app. That doesn't mean it works consistently, and there's never any sound, but at least I can sometimes make it work in the Firefox webapp. The native app is worthless.
tell me more about this Mods and Custom Clients? What should I search?
Look up betterdiscord
Armcord
When did the UI change? I'm on discord pretty much constantly
They keep adding a ton of random shit to the app that constantly clutters the screen. Nobody gives a fuck about nitro or the constant flashing, in your face animations they’ve been adding recently
Yesterday
Discord is an absolute piece of garbage, it's not a good messaging app, definitely not a good place to host a community (seriously, I don't understand why some communities saw Discord as an alternative after the Reddit API changes), and most importantly, it's spyware. The company doesn't have a business model and it was founded by a guy who is notorious for creating random shit that's not economically sustainable at all. I don't understand why anyone would use this shit. This video outlines everything that's wrong with Discord: https://youtube.com/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU
Switch to Revolt or Matrix
The problem is convincing other people to switch as well. There's no point in me using Matrix if all of the people I want to communicate with only want to use Discord.
I don't understand why Revolt decided to reinvent the wheel and not use Matrix. They could've been a great alternative server and/or UI.
Why don't you ask the Matrix team why they decided to re-invent XMPP and add a stupid HTTP API?
@onlinepersona
@netchami
Because they didn't reinvent xmpp, they reinvented Google Wave.
Arathorn on Feb 18, 2018 on HackerNews
I take it you weren't aware that Google Wave was based on XMPP.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/757722/opensource-subnet-nine-new-apps-that-show-off-the-power-of-google-wave.html
@onlinepersona
Thank you, I did not know that!
Very interesting.
I agree
Sadly, can't get my server to make the jump. Doesn't help that Revolt is missing a few features and Matrix just... Doesn't work at all for the flow of the server
Right now a bridge bot does heavy lifting for when Discord does piss off enough users to cause everybody to jump over
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
it's a good message app, it's how I stay in contact with the person I asked for commission artwork. So you are wrong
Are they? How? This article doesn't explain anything about functioning, just some design changes.
Is it becoming FOSS or supporting any meaningful level privacy?
Here's an idea to start making it better: ditch fucking electron. There are alternatives that won't need complete code rewrite or language change (tauri, neutralino). Better yet, actually go ahead with a full language change and pick Dart + Flutter, that shit is crossplat.
But we all know they won't, because fuck you, "ram is cheap". Good luck upgrading the ram on your phone.
It run fine on my 7 years old phone. Sure, native would be better, but electron mean they can make the website, the windows app and the android app all at once. So it's worth it. Everyone on Lemmy is a programmer, so you should know how hard it is to support multiple version of a service with as much active developpement as discord.
The point of Tauri and Neutralino is to do what Electron does without needing to bundle a whole, isolated chrome browser to make it pretend it is a native app
I didn't know about that, sorry I missed it in you original comment. Then maybe theses frameworks are too young or have some kind of limitation, or just discord did not switch yet, but I hope they do. I know optimisation is not important for most company but if the switch is free they should do it.
They would have to change some parts that interact with the OS. It's probably not a big investment (especially for a company like Discord) but there are few reasons to do so, it won't increase users (by much) and doesn't affect revenue.
It still increase user experience so they would do it if it was easy. Or more like I would like so.
Except if we go full conspiracy theory and maybe they don't want poor people that won't buy nitro on the platform, it's possible.
Nah, most people just don't care that it uses electron.
Yes probably
Tauri and neutralino also do that?
Yes mb
I still run the last pre-JS version of the discord app on my phone, and it's sooo much snappier.
I didn't know it used to be on native, maybe I will try finding it so I can save some space
They used to be native with Kotlin on Android and IDK on iOS. Now they use React Native, which isn’t really electron or native. I’m not sure if it bundles a browser but it sounds like the same as Tauri and Neutralino
They need to try way harder.
Just curious. I have Signal, Element (FOSS version of Discord), GroupMe, Slack, Snapchat, Messenger, I have tried WhatsApp, Guilded, Telegram. I have tried a sleuth of messaging apps over the years from Web based, to niche apps that don't exist anymore, things that would let you message users around the world. I have even tried things like taste buds and app for users with specific tastes in music.
No matter what the case I find I prefer Discord. All of my groups and communities are there. I am 28 and my friends and being weird kids at heart use things like Discords soundboard for stupid annoying sounds, to stream our gameplay, and to even venture out to our own communities for things we love. Point being Discord has had all of what I personally want and enjoy for years and more. I mean I loved Google Plus when it was around because of the communities. I use Reddit because of the communities for things I enjoy and I wish Lemmy had more of them for that matter.
My only question being, what do you think they need more off to already be better than the platform most people consider the best? Encryption? Not to charge money for subs? It's not that Discord can't get better. It's that I end up on Lemmy looking for alternatives and see comments like this and people will talk about FOSS, cool I found things like amephyst and Element for my fill of FOSS apps. Even down to niche FOSS apps that I love for other things Lemmy has provided but there are apps like Discord that FOSS apps still don't fill every need for me no matter how hard I try to pull myself away from these massive companies.
I will make comments on Lemmy, knowing where I am at. Saying things like this and saying I am okay with spending money on things I enjoy and don't mind continuing to do so but it is usually met with comments like, "what is wrong with you." To the point my comments and posts have either tried to bring up valid call outs that some Lemmy users don't disagree with or me just stating we are all different and don't have to like what others like.
I am not in disagreement with our data being hogged, our private lives being at risk and not am I opposed to try different methods and even still use methods like Mullvad, Proton products, Tor, etc.
Yet no matter how much I try these products the separate Duck address accounts I have, Firefox, etc. I still primarily use Chrome, Google, Discord. Because despite the hate and reasonable hate mind you. Those products provide what I want and work better for me for regular use and certain FOSS or even competing apps just don't do that for me. Yet there are always comments like yours, "they need to try harder." Just vague statements made to justify some personal belief that these companies will rupture and fall apart but they are still successful and they doing exactly what you are saying they should do, trying harder.
I don't mean to poke or prod, start and argument because it will end in one with someone on here which just pushes users like me looking for answers farther away because I want to have discussion but turn to just that more than likely on Lemmy. I just don't know what Lemmy users want or think they are getting at by making statements like this?
honestly, i don't even want to use discord. i'd like to use mumble, irc, xmpp, email, jami, and jitsi. if discord were just a client that wrapped all of these into one user interface, i'd use it.
Discord is quickly becoming a dying service the way skype did. How did skype become a dying service?
Google ad services integration (Discord already has this): when you chat on discord about anything, your text and recent text from your friends are used to supply GAS keywords. Talk about the voice actor for the blue beetle on discord then type blue beetle in the search bar and check your suggestions.
Inserting ads INTO the chat client (Discord is beginning to do this): through activities first, then total corporation capitulation, Skype delivered ads to users. Discord has ads in activities already, and won't allow youtube premium users to skip ads on the watch together activity because they cannot log in. It's an ad delivery pipeline they nuked user created bots for.
If you are worried about privacy, discord is literally destroying yours as you use it. Sure, it isn't bought out entirely by google or microsoft yet, but it might as well be with how much of your data is used to deliver ads rather than enhance your experience. Game a lot? Discord will NEVER suggest new communities on discord to you based on your chat, just advertise to you based on it. Aside from that, discord has obfuscated information that was readily being added to wikis, so wikis that are straight up shit and wrong like fextralife are THRIVING. Seriously, their Nioh wikis are misinformation, their BG3 wiki was wrong on release for a lot of things like shopkeeper inventories and hasn't been updated whatsoever. DaS3 and elden ring info? Mostly straight up plagiarized info from other sites and a lot of it incorrect.
Interested in learning specific info for a game? Discord forums on invite only servers have destroyed this. Specific class information for your favorite MMO? Join that class discord from the game's community discord, wait for someone to give you the role (or if you are extremely lucky, react role in), and PRAY the pinned info is in date. Specific character in a fighting game? Better hope it's in anime airdasher, because outside of dustloop (which also has a discord you must weather for up to date info) all that shit is in discord forums you have to daisy-chain to get info.
TL;DR discord has pushed a bunch of features exclusively to destroy privacy and obtain google money, and a bunch of others are clearly "well the developers need to be working on SOMETHING" changes, like username ID reassignments. The numbered usernames are still visible. They weren't removed. Why did they change? Not for security or ease of use, that's for sure
"Discord is quickly becoming a dying service the way Skype did." I love an opinion and skimmed through what you said but I basically quit taking this comment seriously from the first sentence on. That is because that is the Lemmy mentality. I don't know what you are smoking, reading, seeing. But the, "it's a dying service absolutely so far off the truth. I mean have you been keeping up with Discord. Yeah, it's not fucking dying. It is quite literally growing and keeps continuing to do so. It is easily one of the most successfully growing platforms. When Facebook tries to copy your work, Treehouse, etc and none can quite get you then yeah, you are doing just fine. Ads haven't killed Facebook.
Also, ads aren't what killed Skype. What killed Skype is that it was an actually shit product/platform. I can't remember a single damn ad using Skype because it was shit for video chatting.
"You can't watch YouTube videos together because you can't sign in and there are ads." Yeah that is not why we don't watch videos on discord. I don't watch videos on Discord because my friends just don't want to and ads aren't the reason why. I would say people probably use the feature even with ads.
Also, I think you really missed the privacy part entirely and should read again. There is concern with privacy and there is acknowledgement with the privacy front hence the attempt to use more private products like Element. I appreciate the lesson though.
I am all for discussing but your comments are entirely the comments I am referring to on Lemmy. It's not informative it's a bubble that Lemmy users live in no differently than Reddit users. The forefront thought that because their are ads and people pay for things that their opinion on what makes something bad is clearly why something is suddenly dying. There is far more evidence to suggest, hell even support, that Discord is not dying. However, because there are ads, it's a dying platform and that is the Lemmy mentality. Product bad because ads. Ads have been around for years and have progressively gotten worse and Chrome is quite literally still the most used and successful browser. I like to call it the deniability factor on Lemmy. The in denial that products that we don't want users to continue using are still winning people's usage and that Google is going to topple over any day because we are right and ads bad and privacy. The average consumer doesn't care if they did Firefox would be doing better than Chrome.
It's not that your points are invalid, irrelevant, or not true or don't hold some some honesty that I wish people took more interest in. It's that Discord is a working product and somehow users on Lemmy just can't wrap their brains around the fact people keep using products that they think are bad or that people like me even attempt the other side and have both privacy centric apps and the opposite and still prefer the opposite.
This one should be short enough for you to understand completely: dumbass lmao
Glad you could provide relative insight and valuable information you counter all the statements made before.
So I have one for you a tad longer,: have a nice night.
Discord is spyware and all of my friends are the laziest most boring people for thinking they should spend their entire social lives on one app.
plus doesn't it just feel awful to use as software? the way lemmy looks and responds to clicks is night and day versus the le epic gamer kid dark mode awful buggy weird PC web view thing discord does where like, if you want to copy and paste you have to use their little tooltip menu which sucks instead of the system one. every time you launch it it forces you to wait 10 minutes for it to download every piddly little update which probably sucks and doesn't matter....
lemmy is buggy and has its flaws as well of course but it's just like...this is a good solid website. good bones. like the old days.
I don't ever use the desktop version because of these constant updates
Same. I use the app on android and a browser on desktop.
Lemmy feels great. Discord alternatives, some of them feel OK and when I bring up issues with their performance I'm reminded they are open source.
you can’t use find tool normally
I see a few claims of spyware in here. Not that I doubt you, but where can I find out more?
I'm not sure it's correct to call Discord spyware, but it certainly has privacy implications. https://nerdbot.com/2023/02/24/using-discord-consider-these-security-and-privacy-factors/
Anything closed source with a privacy policy is spyware to Lemmy users.
Why do you read Lemmy, while discounting the opinions and perspectives of other people here?
Because I don't want to live in a bubble? Isn't the whole point of Internet forums to have dissenting opinions? I made that comment to start a discussion or have others reflect on what their perspectives might be, because it really seems like almost all of Lemmy is anti-corporate, pro-hyper-privacy. I'm not pro-corporate by any means, but I really think it's time people reflect and think of reasons why some people may use a platform like Discord, instead of just assuming they are stupid, or otherwise lesser, and like being spied. Because it's just simply hyperbolic and not true. Not everything has to be FOSS, there are use cases for otherwise.
I believe communication should not be a commodity. It should be FOSS. I believe discord is free because it feels like something that provides little to no value, and yet the company has shareholders and must provide value to them. Ridiculous.
That is a fine perspective, and I'm here to learn about yours. However, that does not make it spyware.
Idk what the bar is for spyware but Ill be specific about my belief: discord is basically the most red flags of any social media and also has the facade of a very private and personal space.
You were the one that called it spyware. Your opinion is valid, but my opinion was that Lemmy users tend to exaggerate when talking about closed source software. People are so quick to trash on anything not FOSS, then when asked about sources to back claims up, they are mostly anecdotal and not directly related to the additional claims. Case-in-point, someone asked why you called it spyware, and you responded with the first two points referencing a clauses of a privacy policy that is nearly identical to every social media platform in existence today, and the last point referencing security flaws. The security flaws, in the past, were mostly around cookie stealers (which isn't Discord's fault, literally any browser is at risk if you download malware), and some chromium bugs. A lot of the "hacks" that went around were just scare-pastas that were just made up too. So, no, I don't think there are notable, active flaws that are currently being abused by third-parties as you claim, because Discord has a financial interest to keep their platform secure. If there were active holes being exploited and they just sat around and did nothing, it would upset shareholders, which you noted they did have.
So while you are entitled to your opinion, I do challenge you to consider the other sides of the argument, and consider that closed source software users may have good reasons to use such software. Also do consider that some of the points you made are hyperbolic and that you may be moving the goal posts a bit with your claims.
I wish you well, take care.
Okay, so... I just conceded that I can't define spyware, and you're accusing me of moving the goalposts over it but I think Ive given ground.
I have not ever brought up the privacy policy.
I stand by my point that security flaws are of strategic benefit to the powers that be. We can't assume what shareholders want other than money. Yeah most of the exploits that were publicized were pretty basic and easy to avoid. These exploits are fundamentally discords fault that they were around so long, so easy to employ, etc.
Looking into it, I found those malicious scripts on google on the first page... Discord could have issued takedown requests to google and Github. When a company is so large, laziness is malice. Someone said "no, don't fix that."ha that's the scare-pasta you brought up, isn't it? Ah well.You're asking me to consider that discord is just doing what everyone else is doing and doing what its told by shareholders, who want a perfect and safe platform. You're not asking me to change my mind, but actually make my arguments weaker. To moderate them. No thanks, I find the sharpest point to be more useful than a dull one.
Of course! Hope you're all good, too. Getting on with the replies I'm thinking like... Damn I use discord everyday, I use discord and occasionally talk to people who still use Twitter (X)... Ha. 🤷♀️
Will I ever stop using Discord?
So the basics of what I've read is:
I know its different now because Discord has nitro and there are lots if good reasons to subscribe. But Discord ran without all if that subscriber funding and in that time they probably found ways to make money off of what resources they had at the time... Information.
I mean, how else do you think they can make it so all your existing chats show up when you log into your account from a different device? Signal stores all your messages and media as well, the difference is they encrypt it on their servers. Discord doesn't.
That's more problematic, and there should honestly be a law against that. Come to think of it, doesn't that violate the GRDP? Either they have to treat their EU customers differently when it comes to this, or there's a lawsuit waiting to happen. In the former case, you might be able to force them to delete your data by using a VPN to pretend you're in Europe.
> Signal stores all your messages and media as well, the difference is they encrypt it on their servers.
What evidence do you have to support this claim?
The last time I looked into this, messages and media were only stored encrypted on servers until they were retrieved or expired.
After that, the local device is where things are stored.
@MacNCheezus
How do they manage to make the same messages appear on multiple devices? I use Signal on my phone and two other computers. Even if one of them is offline, once I go online, it will show the same messages as the other devices, even if I have already seen them on my phone. They sure aren't going to connect to my phone to pull the messages from there.
I do think there is a limit to this feature – when you connect a new device, you will not see any history on there. Only messages you receive after activating the device will show up, so it's possible they just keep track of how many active devices you have, and once a message has been retrieved by all of them, it will be deleted from the server. But that would also mean that if you don't sign out of a device before retiring it, messages COULD potentially stay on their servers forever, unless they delete them after a certain period.
> How do they manage to make the same messages appear on multiple devices?
For a long time, they didn't.
I don't know for sure, but I expect it involves keys that multiple devices share. Any "linked" device would be able to download the encrypted copy and decrypt the message that way. Once any device has done that, it can send a copy to any other devices using the unique keys it knows for that device.
This link describes independent queues for devices: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/5532268300186-Disappearing-Messages-with-a-Linked-Device
@MacNCheezus
Right, that makes sense, although the article doesn’t go into detail about how the server decides when it’s time to delete a message.
It also doesn’t back up your claim that multiple devices sharing the same account will ever exchange messages amongst each other. Which would be a technical nightmare BTW since they could be located behind firewalls etc. and this still require a central server to coordinate. Might as well keep the middle man in that case and leave the messages on the server until they’ve been retrieved.
My initial point therefore is mostly correct: messages ARE stored on their servers in encrypted form for an unknown length of time, although likely not forever.
If you connect to Discord via VPN they will ask for your phone number haha
That's how Reddit works/worked. Probably lemmy too though I haven't looked too close. Deleting your account doesn't necessarily mean the content your account created is taken with it. Things not being deleted with your account is a werid thing to cite for spy ware, lots of stuff works like that and you can delete it, just isn't automatically deleted with your account.
Discord having security flaws does not make it spy ware. There have been some pretty severe security issues but almost every one I've heard of has its roots in a gullible user running some sort of application on their machine or scanning a QR code with the Discord app which makes it extremely clear you are logging into another device... The only one I'm aware of that I found very concerning was iirc a werid video player vulnerability that could yank your token.
I highly doubt Discord is giving advertisers access to the messages on their platform. That sounds insanely illegal and also largly a waste of time cause if they are doing that it doesn't work very well.
On reddit you can simply use a tampermonkey script to remove your data. On discord, there is no option to delete all your messages. To the extent that there's a discussion worth having about whether Discord is following the GDPR.
Not tackling security issues means discord is okay with third parties exploiting the software to gain info about certain users - which could include hacker groups or government actors targeting single targets.
I dont think discord can give individual messages over, legally, although they are stored unencrypted on Discord's server.
Alright, replies to my initial comment got me motivated to look for the receipts:
https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-stores-billions-of-messages
yes discord saves every message forever, to an extent that they are almost certainly breaking GDPR laws.
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/rsxeee/you_should_never_use_discord_and_heres_why/
https://meaww.com/discord-who-owns-jason-citron-microsoft-acquisition-company-net-worth-10-b-talks
I heard this argument so long ago that basically Discord doesnt sell data but instead shares it with shareholders, which includes many ad companies, including tencent. They probably give this data to their linked partners like twitch and Microsoft. Discord still isnt profitable and they are a public company, they are expected to exhaust every opportunity to give value to those shareholders.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90157501/how-widely-do-companies-share-user-data-heres-a-chilling-glimpse
https://stallman.org/discord.html
Thanks! I’ll take a look this evening.
Yeah, there is one way to make it better, but it won't happen until they're forced to change: force them to integrate with the matrix protocol
yes, I know that it's possible to use a bridge, and I do it, but it still requires a discord account, it would be great if discord rooms were just accessible with the matrix protocol
It’s owned by Tencent btw , they absolutely don’t want matrix C
(X) Doubt
I can not find anything in there. I can not favorite messages to find them again. It is a hole where everything your write is virtually there, but practically lost.
You can pin msgs. But. There is a limit lmao
Take those paywalls down.
They have to make money somehow. Let's be realistic.
The only thing I want is a good Discord update for Linux. Streaming with sound still doesn't work and Discord hogs more CPU resources than on Windows.
Try vesktop
If I wanted to get there I wouldn't start from here.
What are people using for gaming/chat other than discord?
Complaining alone on Lemmy.
Discord is the primary voice chat platform for a lot of my gaming groups, and half the time it can’t even detect the correct mic or output. Also routing my calls to the phone app for no reason when I am clearly ACTIVE AND TYPING on PC.
I don’t need another messaging app, I need an actual seamless voice chat experience.
discord is also the main place for reporting bugs related to the linux driver for xbox controllers, xone. I do not appreciate it.
Wait, am I seeing correctly? Did they really go so far as to completely disable the issue system in GitHub in favor of Discord?
That's certainly a... choice.
it's really surprising how many FOSS projects decide to use Discord as a bug report tool. it's like they've never heard of the little obscure website called Github.
The project I've linked is hosted on GitHub. They explicitly disabled issues and did not enable discussions.
yeah, I know. Proton-GE does the same thing.
Well, not github, but a FOSS alternative not hosted by Microsoft.
And the opposite problem when you don't get message notifications on your phone because you forgot to close it on your PC.
I already have too many chat apps. STAHP
one day it will need to become profitable and suddenly it will be a pile of shit
hah, I haven't updated mine since they switched from a native app to react native.
What? They never had a native app, it was Electron.
on android, not desktop
That version must be some 5 years old by now
last updated july 22, 2022. About a year and three months.
My bad. Didn't know they switched to React.
I guess it's less work maintaining two different mobile platforms.
It's going the complete wrong way if so.
Just read the headline... Will it stop spying on me o und which Servers i am?
I'm not sure what everyone is complaining about in the comments. I use discord pretty much constantly and at all times.
Nitro ads? It's 1 very minor ad when you launch the app. Then there's no more ads.
Not as good as forums? Bull. I get an answer to my question immediately on discord. I may never find the answer to my question by sifting through dozens of pages of forum posts of someone having a similar but not congruent problem to mine.
Can't find information? Discord has integrated forums with a search feature in each server.
Bloated? How so? You have an inbox and you have your list of servers on the left hand side. Okay, some of the options are a little obscured, but it's not like Discord is doing anything except connecting like minded people via text and voice/video chat.
I sincerely don't know what anyone is talking about. But part of me thinks it's because discord doesn't have E2E encryption and yall wanna discuss some naughty shit.
Discord has gotten much worse about pushing Nitro everywhere, and I can't be the only one that sees it more than just on launch.
Right. Discord itself is another silo, and a public forum is going to be better for just about any non-ephemeral type of info (pretty much everything Discord gets used for that is not messaging.) There are a lot of communities that decided with the fucking of reddit to move to Discord, which just changes which silo the info is at, and in this case is less accessible because it's not publicly searchable, indexable, etc. Things like the Internet Archive exist for a reason and have massive utility, and they can glean nothing from Discord. If Discord dies, so dies all of the info with it.
Discord, and like basically all of the modern Electron messaging apps (Slack's probably hiding in a corner trying to avoid getting noticed in this conversation) are massively bloated. These are basically ridiculously overgrown IRC clients which we had back in 1998 that cover about 90% of the functionality of Discord, except those IRC clients used to run in single digit mb's of RAM and CPU use was basically negligible and they launched more or less instantly. Can't launch Discord on either an M1 MacBook nor my I9 PC without it taking long enough to load for me to grab a coffee.
Anyway, Discord's original intended use of like realtime conversation is fine, but yeah the clients are garbage and as a replacement for reddit/lemmy/other forum software, it's just choosing the wrong tool for the job. Even for the use cases it does have, it's been a solved problem since the 90's, but those solutions didn't allow for some tech bros or VCs to make a bunch of money. It's always been amazing to me that either Discord or Slack even have a business model.
Oh, and personally I find Discord in particular atrociously designed, and Slack not much better. How either handle threading are enough to make me not want to bother with threading, for example. Discord is fantastically ugly also imo.
Recently I launched Discord on desktop and got big splash screen screaming about new shop items. Earlier, I've got constant popups about new nitro perks, new avatar decorations, new app icons.
You may get an answer immediately, but this answer will be lost after some messages. Someone with the same question may ask it again instead of searching. People in chat may get tired to answer over and over. On forums you have one question 10 years ago and answer to it. No need to ask again.
Discord's internal search is very limited, not as good as Google. Discord is very hard to archive, so at some point information will be lost.
If you have many servers, you'll get many notifications and new messages badges. You'll also have many useless channels, which you need to manually mute or hide.
I don't really think encryption is mandatory for every chat app, it has some problems with transferring messages to other devices. If you're working on some project, you probably don't want it to be leaked, so you'll encrypt your messages.
I think the biggest issue atm is that discord doesn’t/can’t get indexed by search engines
Who the hell uses the inbox
It's only useful when some random person pings you that got buried by hundreds of messages