Stop Doing Discord

Gil (he/they)@beehaw.org to Jokes and Humor@beehaw.org – 47 points –

Repost from @technomancy@icosahedron.website

Alt text:

Stop doing Discord

  • capitalists were not supposed to own your community
  • Years of hanging out yet no real-world use found for sending your private data to be sold to advertisers
  • Wanted to leak private data anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that; it was called "turning off ublock origin"
  • "Yes please search our chat archive for answers to your question. it will certainly remain up forever and not get deleted when the shareholders realize it's not profitable" statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

Look at what discord admins have been demanding your respect for all this time:

  • task manager screenshot, discord using 97% of CPU
  • discord making too many automated requests and getting throttled
  • crash screenshot

"3rd-party client? lifetime ban"

They have played us for absolute fools

Based on this image macro

49

anybody else old enough to remember hopping from chat program to chat program? When I first started gaming it was teamspeak in the majority with other programs like ventrillo in the minority. Then when teamspeak got shit everybody moved to Skype. Then when Skype got shit we moved to Discord. I will say it's shocking Discord has lasted this long honestly, but I'm not surprised if another one turns up whenever Discord gets inevitably too shit for the majority of people to handle.

Those all-in-one chat programs like Trillian, Adium, and Pidgin were what I ended up using.

Roger wilco? 🀣 I remember seeing an advertisement for Roger wilco in a program installer and was so jazzed about the idea of talking with my friends over voice while playing games lol

3 more...
3 more...

Let's be real here for a second: Companies are NEVER your friend. NEVER EVER. But if you keep looking for it, you will find something that makes you leave every company behind. You'll end up in the woods. Some ignorance is needed to live a decent life. You can act if a company gets to a point where it's too much.

Okay, but on the other hand Discord is basically IRC but worse, and I hate it every time I need to use that stupid site. The fact that its evil is really just rubbing salt in the wound. For me anyway.

On the other hand, I have hated the experience every single time I ever needed to get on to IRC for any reason. And needing to either stay logged in or run my own private always-on bounce server in order to see what overseas friends have been up to while I was asleep? Man, that's such a bad user experience. :(

That's fair. It would probably be more precise to say that Discord adds a whole bunch of stuff to IRC, and for my purposes it's more bad than good, but if you're trying to use it like a social media platform IRC just doesn't really work.

But personally, I've never looked at IRC and thought "You know what this needs? To be turned into a purple gamer social media site that's used for tech support for some bizarre reason." That is just not a thing I need in my life.

Discord is easily accessible text/image and voice chat that just works for the majority. If you want people to switch off it then you're going to need Matrix to catch up in basic features and accessibility at the very least.

I mean honestly has matrix not caught up? It's been perfectly usable and honestly more responsive than discord so far. The only real pain point was the most baseline effort that goes into e2e encryption but even then that wasn't really.. difficult?

Does it have voice chat built in and is it as easy to use and accessible as Discord?

Last time I looked this was not the case. No point lecturing people until Matrix or a viable alternative catches up at least.

Yeah it has voice chat, video calls, and screen sharing. I haven't tested any of them yet personally (soonβ„’) but they are stated features. Element in particular is rolling out video rooms right now, still in beta, which operate identically to voice channels in discord from a UX perspective. So all said not too bad.

I see that it has 8 person voip.. but does it have an actual voice chat like Discord?

Voip is a voice chat, so your question doesn't make much sense. You can voice chat in voice rooms identically to discord, as I said above.

There is no longer an eight person limit on video or voice calls. There is a limit depending on your server.

The best that I could find was that there was an 8 person limit and that it wasn't as straightforward as Discord at all.

It's still nice to see them trying and hopefully one day it'll be a viable alternative to Discord itself.

The best that you could find?

I am personally unconvinced it's not a viable alternative to dsicord already. But yes it will always be improving and it will be good to see how far it continues to improve.

Serious question, can you join multiple homeservers yet? Having an account tied to one server is a massive drawback compared to Discord. I tried Cinny earlier and currently use Element with my friends but I don't think that feature exists.

Yes matrix account migration across homeservers is possible, though it looks a little annoying so hopefully you'd never need to do it.

I'm not sure what you mean though about being a downside compared to discord. In discord's case, your homeserver is the discord service. In matrix it could be one of any number of servers. But unlike discord, you can talk to those other home server users. So to be clear: a 'discord server' is more like a room in matrix. While your homeserver is akin to the entire discord service. Literally their servers, as in their server farms.

It would be like talking to someone's steam account or facebook messenger directly via discord. It's actually more versatile in this regard, far moreso. Your discord account is locked to discord's walled garden, a matrix account is not locked to any walled garden.

So if I'm on a self-hosted matrix server I could join rooms in any number of other matrix servers (just like joining communities across Lemmy instances)? That's a game-changer if that's the case. I have no idea how to do that within Element.

Yes that's the central idea of matrix. Element is just the client interacting with the matrix code, there are likely guides for self hosting Matrix. I don't think it's trivial though, a secure messaging system is a bit heftier than a public facing messaging board, but I am fairly confident people familiar with self hosting could do it.

I honestly wouldn't mind seeing an extension to the IRC spec to bring in reasonable discord-like functionality to some servers. It's time we start moving back to open standards from walled gardens.

Discord is Gen Z Facebook now. I want to leave it so bad but at this point I would miss 95% of my friends(both online and irl), plus the communities that are not tech savvy enough to build a Matrix bridge.

Maybe try Revolt Chat. Open source and appears to be like the old Discord. I really only use chat to play games with friends though. Consider Discord communities a pain in the ass to navigate and use.

Edit: Maybe not lol. Haven't been able to get into the account all evening. Sounds like they may have got DDOSed but it was earlier in the day according to their Twitter.

I can't remember what Discord did at the time, but there was a decent push to try and move to a different platform. We tried out Guilded, but we had a pretty hard time getting adoption from the users on our Discord server and ended up dropping the transition.

I didn't think I'd ever say this again, but TeamSpeak 5 is actually looking like it could be the solution we're looking for. I still need to figure out how I can host a server compatible with version 5 though.

What about element/matrix?

I only just learned about that combination yesterday. Sounds like I should look into it a bit more?

Absolutely, it's fantastic and I highly recommend it.

I use community.rs if you're in NA it's pretty good.

Does Matrix have an equivalent to "servers" on Discord? Like, I can join one and it comes with a bunch of chat rooms owned and moderated by the same community? Because that's the biggest thing I used Discord for is following and interacting with communities I'm in; and I just fired up Element and I see nothing that hints that it would be possible...

Yes, they're called spaces.

If you're on the desktop, they're the thing on the far left where you see a home icon

I literally only use discord to voice chat with my friends once a year when we are gaming.

Do people use it for other stuff?

Yes, some developers use Discord to provide technical/product support - this is where the "Yes please search our chat archive for answers to your question. it will certainly remain up forever and not get deleted when the shareholders realize it’s not profitable" comes from. It's honestly really annoying, since I don't really want to add yet another Discord server to my existing clutter just to get an answer that may not even be there.

I really only like using Discord as a parallel community, like the Discord guild for Beehaw or the ones I used to be on which were associated with other forums/subreddits/etc. Making it a privileged channel for getting important announcements, support, or other information feels like stretching it beyond what it's good for, on top of the fact that it's still corporate and stuff could (and does) happen to it without user input.

Everything you said is true. But the capitalists own the Internet service providers and cellular carriers. If you know a "federated cellular operator," let me know and I'll hook you up right away. However, there is no such thing. So we get another illusion of freedom in a beautiful package.

For the life of me I can't find it but years ago there was a push for the internet to adopt a new standard that was fully run on individuals' wifi board in their computers. It was Japanese if I remember right. I'll try to find it.

I don’t know of any community cell carriers, but co-op ISPs are a thing. Toronto Freenet was probably the first ISP I ever used (stretching the term a bit, since it was more of a BBS service at the time if I remember correctly), and it looks like it’s still going relatively strong.

http://www.torfree.net/about-freenets.html