Enshittification Continues: Discord to begin showing advertisements on it's free platform
archive.is
They supposedly can be disabled in settings- but we all know that won't last. They're going full Microsoft Skype mode and it's only a matter of time.
Discord keeps getting used for things it shouldn't be used for like tech support. I will be glad when it dies. Don't hide your support behind a platform that can't be searched from the web. It's not a replacement for forums and issue trackers.
I couldn't agree more. I hate that some open source projects are using discord for communicating.
I especially hate that it's being used as a login for some things. Goddammit, let me just use my fucking email address.
If a service ever says discord only when I try to login, that service no longer exists. Find an alternative or make do without it.
You found out about Nostr yet?
I completely agree, fuck discord
On the other hand, after looking for and failing to find an issue I’m facing, discord servers usually have way faster response times compared to forums.
I think this is the main disconnect for people.
What a lot of technical people want is a forum. They want to have every problem discussed one time and then if someone brings it up again they can link to it and not have to discuss it again. This exists, it’s called stackoverflow and if technical people want someone to close their question as “already answered” or “off topic” they can go there.
Most discord communities though aren’t attempting to build a permanent corpus of knowledge carefully curated and searchable. Instead it’s basically the polar opposite, someone can show up and ask the question that every beginner stubs their toe on and people answer it and chat with them and help them learn.
It is more work for the people giving out the help, but it is seems like it’s what new users want. A place they can ask a question and get an answer or get someone to ask them questions to improve their question.
A lot of technical people get blinded by their own knowledge. Indexable searchable information is great if you know what to search for, but new people seldom do and they don’t even know the right way to formulate the questions. Asking other human beings that know what they are doing is a good way to learn stuff. Discord facilitates that, people like that, and no amount of highly technical people kicking their feet and holding their breathe and shouting at the communities “you are doing it wrong, you need a highly curated forum where questions are never asked twice” is going to stop human nature.
We used Slack and we had a Confluence Wiki. No one bothered to keep Confluence up-to-date because everyone was just used to ask ad-hoc questions on Slack and get an answer by one of the respective team members. We "solved" this issue at one company with one reasonably simple policy: people were free to ask questions on Slack as much as they wanted, but the response should always have a link to the related Confluence page. You could even answer the question directly with a TL;DR, but the Confluence Page link should always be part of the answer.
Every time that there was an Slack response without a link to Confluence, the responder's team would get a mark, and every month the team with the most marks would have to bring something to the rest of the company. Basically, it forced everyone in the team to step up their documentation game, and it got everyone in the spirit of "collaborative editing": sometimes, people would just write create a page with a very basic paragraph. Another team member would use that to extend the answer and so on. In just a few months, every department had a pretty solid documentation space and we even got used to start our questions with "I looked for X on Confluence and didn't find anything. Can someone tell me where I can find info about it?"
So, yes, you are right about the disconnect between "what experienced people want" and "what beginners want", but even in this case it would make sense if most project managers used real-time chat platforms only for initial inquiries and triage, but used this inflow to produce long-term content in a structured document or wiki.
This seems like a reasonable approach when all actors are being paid to contribute.
I think where discord actually ends up helping is for community projects where everyone is basically a volunteer. It works because it lowers the barrier to helping.
The official documentation of your favorite programming language or highly popular library or framework is probably pretty locked down with a semi high quality bar for contributions. This is a good thing, those docs are consumed by lots of people and the documentation has no context for what the person is trying to do so making sure they are clear, concise, and easy to understand creates a high quality bar.
A lot of projects end up with enthusiastic helpers who probably aren’t going to dedicate the time and energy it takes to become a core maintainer. You can either leave these people and their possible helpfulness on the table or you can harness it with a discord server.
People that might not be the right fit for writing an in-depth general purpose getting started guide are still pretty great at answering peoples questions when given context and the ability to discuss it back and forth. That’s what projects are actually taking advantage of, a large group of people that are willing to help others learn how to use the programming language / library / framework.
The people they help end up having a good time with the friendly helpful community and hang out and help others. If you do it right you get this virtuous cycle where people using the thing you made help each other be successful making the thing you made even more popular.
RTFM, is ok in a corporate environment when part of your paycheck is for RTFMing. But for the last 70 years people that know how stuff works have been shouting RTFM at people wanting to learn how stuff works. But some people just aren’t good at RTFM or plain don’t want to. Discord, and other chat platforms, end up facilitating their learning models.
I feel like another good point is that discord servers are generally very easy and low-rent to set up, compared to setting up and properly moderating a technical forum where everything is supposed to be well-organized. Lots of smaller open source projects would have to take away time they'd actually use to develop their tools, in order to set up a forum and keep it running. In those cases, they're better off just using a discord server, and then hosting a quickstart guide or a commonly asked questions thing, and you can put either of those basically anywhere.
Remember the emails from 2015? The plan was to have a platform, that just works. No bullshit, no issues, just functional features.
Even when Nitro was originally added, it was 5 bucks to optional support, if you'd like to help the company. Now the same sub is 10 a month, and half of the client is unusable without it.
Not to mention all the paid account banners and borders they're selling for an egregious amount of money
Everyone is optimistically altruistic until the corporate greed comes a-knockin'
The best approach to "free" things is to understand that it's never sustainable. Eventually it will have to become a paid subscription or ad supported or both.
And regardless, you're going to end up being the product if they can discern anything marketable about you from your use of the "free" product.
But just be ready to jump to the next free product.
(Obviously it's possible for there to be FOSS but that comes with some challenges as well.)
The 3rd option is FOSS with donations... But everyone expects everything on the internet to be free (as in beer) these days
Nothing is truly free/gratis...
It all comes down to capabilities, and expectations. Under current circumstances, they fail to meet the expectations, but vastly exceeded their capabilities, by trying to chase the hype, rather than provide what the users needed. It costs them next to nothing to create a new profile border, but fixing issues from 2019 takes engineer hours
It will become enshittified unless that new service is open source and "free as in beer". With no profit motive, it can grow gradually and be supported by it's users. Like Lemmy/ kbin / Mastodon.
Lemmy's development is to a large part subsidized by some kind of OSS fund.
a word to rebut this claim: Wikipedia.
I don't get why micro transaction are never micro transactions. If a cosmetic item/feature in a game or sth. like discord would be 50ct up to a Euro, I would here and there buy sth. But they always want 5-15€ and that isn't money I'm willing to spend. Take Signal for example 5 € for a badge for 30 days is just stupid. I recently donated 20 euros still 30 days. The thing is I don't care for the badge but I think it could be beneficial to promote the ability to donate via the badge but the system they use, is really stupid.
I think the reason they’re not micro has to do with whales. I bet the whales outbuy normies at a rate that means companies make more selling 1/10th the volume, for 20x the price. The whales go hard. Did you hear that some games will task an artist with creating game-skins for a single person, because they know they can get that person to buy even at a really high price
it's also about sustainable income. 50c one time purchases are garbage for the bottom line, subscriptions look amazing to investors because it's effectively guaranteed income that you can assume a current subscriber will remain subscribed until the service shuts down.
Think you’re right.
Founders get told:
Raise your prices. Push them up 2-3x or something, and lose 10% of your customers. Those you lose are generally your worst ones. Huge net win.
a big part of the issue with micro-transactions are the payment processors.
visa and MasterCard basically own it, at some part of the process.
Genuine question, but what's unusable without Nitro? I don't use Discord very often, and the only thing that I've seen Nitro pushed for is reactions from other communities, and that's pointless anyway.
video calls and screensharing is very, very rough (locked to 480/low frame rates) without nitro, for one. the file sharing limits are also extremely restrictive.
its actually locked to 720p/30fps w/o nitro
with some of the worst realtime compression i have ever seen
i agree, but you cant just lie to make a point
Fair enough. I tried video calling with it at the beginning of the first lockdown, and it was fine for what I needed, but most of the video calling programs were a bit rubbish then.
I very rarely share files with people outside of an already set up organisation, so I haven't had a reason to try their file sharing.
Vencord is pretty decent as an alternative to nitro if you haven’t heard of it. It pretty much is a modded client that unlocks most of the nitro locked features
I use Vesktop for other mods. Not touching the paywalled stuff because I don't want to put my account at risk more, than I need to
.. and open source projects continue to list discord as a community option to discuss items about their project.
Considering it is free to use, with streaming, voice/video calling , it surprises me that the enshitification didn't start earlier.
Deffo waiting for lots of people to be on it before turning up that dial.
Seems to be the standard silicon valley business model these days. The old "drug dealer outside school giving away free samples to get you hooked" we all heard about but never saw.
But they also have monetization streams. Nitro. Boosts. Paying for servers. In essence a small number of users pay the costs to keep a server going.
They tried their best to make Nitro succeed first before turning to other methods of making money.
The paradoxical demand of ever growing profits made this unavoidable anyways.
To a degree, yes. But a non-public company doesn't usually have that "obligation" for ever-growing profit. Unfortunately, Discord's goal does seem to be to eventually get an IPO.
I personally don't like it and I don't use it too much, but since its features, I don't see how we can complain: nothing is free, they sure have costs
This may actually push users into thinking about modding discord, or even better, switching to matrix
Good move discord, I like it
I never stopped using irc (I know I'm old). There is matrix to irc connectors that are awesome. One of the benefits of open source is a lot of the protocols work well together.
Can you recommend any IRC channels for techies please? I like infosec, Linux, and Mac topics but I can't find any communities that aren't turbo-clicky or dead. Most channels I've found are like ham radio: a bunch of old grumpy people ragchewing. I'd like an actual conversation I can contribute to.
Not Rizon - Linux. I asked them a noob question and they banned me. Kind of irked me because I was just asking for help or opinion. I don't even remember what I asked.
ah, that vintage linux community experience.
"RTFM" but the manual has been out of date for years? Hell yeah keep it old school.
I'd like to know as well. I'd love to join a good community or older techies.
Discord runs just fine in Firefox with uBO.
The way they sound like they're implementing ads, it's not going to be a simple banner or anything but rather a part of the UI that promotes some kind of streaming challenge. It's not likely to be blockable if they make the ads a base part of the container.
If it's downloaded onto your machine, it can be blocked. It's impossible to prevent a dedicated enough community from blocking ads. YouTube hasn't even been able to keep users from doing it; they've had to resort to changing their platform (Chrome) to make it harder, but that just means people have to use other platforms.
It's your machine, and you have admin rights on it. That means you control the data and display of that machine; ad block blocking is Quixotic at best, and neurotic at worst. Which YouTube has discovered.
Will filtering elements not work?
Wait, there are mods for discord?
Yeah, check out Vesktop/Vencord. The plugins are great.
I use webcord, hopefully they'll integrate an adblocker
Between a corpo job only using teams and email and international folks all using WhatsApp I kinda want to just go back to irc and stay there forever. Everything that came after it has just been worse.
https://xkcd.com/1782/
Yup, also my experience. Maybe Jabber. Jabber was great.
I still have a copy of my irc bot setup somewhere....
What is up with WhatsApp all over the place? It's a demonstrably inferior experience to damn near any alternative at this point.
It was one of the first and now no one wants to move, quite simple.
my main gripe with irc is the lack of history
So they're still showing ads to paying users. This shit should be illegal.
I’m shocked they’re moving to ads when I’ve been paying them $4/month for Discord Nitro for several years now. Surely, that revenue is enough for their upkeep???
It's never enough. Growth must be un-ending. Also gotta pump them numbers up for an IPO so they can bail with a pocket full of cash.
Gotta follow that Reddit formula… 🤦♀️
I assume that's sarcasm, but no, they almost certainly aren't anywhere near probably from nitro subscriptions. I don't know how many employees they have, but they surely have a lot of developers working on all their features. And that cloud server time isn't cheap either, especially when you're handling video.
They could have stopped adding features years ago.
There's some weird corporate obsession with always constantly "innovating" and "improving". Adding complexity for the sake of complexity. Completely blind and oblivious to the fact that most consumers actually want something consistent that just does what they ask it to without much fuss, not just additional complexity.
Discord has added probably a hundred features since I started using it- ultimately, the only things I ever touch in the app are the same set of 5 that existed back in 2015 when I switched. Text, voice, basic file and image sharing, group servers, and (after they added it) video+screen sharing. Literally everything else is total fluff.
Yup, it's sometimes called box-checking. "Look boss, I did a thing."
Often a thing nobody wanted or asked for.
Streaming, especially video, is quite challenging and expensive. The fact that discord's video streaming was so cheap was always somewhat suspicious.
$4 is probably way more than enough to cover the cost of your account, but the problem is what percentage of people are paying. If it's 1 in 100 or 1,000 and $4 covers 75 average accounts they might be in a bind.
I never ever understood and still doesn't understand why people like Discord. It's not indexed, it's a constant background noise. It's absolutely not user-friendly. You can do better with IRC.
Discord is remarkable. It has seamless video streaming from your desktop or apps to any number of watchers, with multiple peopld being able to stream at once. Paired with voice chat, it's perfect for group gaming sessions, movie showings, desktop troubleshooting, video chat, etc. Besides some issues with input devices, it's always worked flawlessly for me. Plus, obviously, a persistent server for chat.
And the fact that it's fast, resource-light, and free are just the icing on the cake.
Some people are downvoting you but you're right. No other application is this all in one package. My only issues with input devices have been Windows' fault, too. I don't like Discord's closed ecosystem and data privacy concerns, but the feature set is unmatched, especially at the amount of polish they have and their price.
Side note, people please stop using it as an alternative to a proper forum.
Thanks for the point about the forums. I get why people use Discord: the things it is designed for it does reasonably well. The problem is people using it in ways it isn't made for, like forums or wikis. If your documentation, issue tracking, or patch notes are done via Discord, please stop for fuck's sake. There are much better options for this and you can even webhook them into Discord if you insist on it, but stop using Discord to replace forums.
Also also the voice codec is (or at least was) a noticable improvement over anything that was available for free.
As far as I understand, the sole reason is "everyone else is using it". Which also seems to be the justification for using Messenger, WhatsApp, X, Instagram et al despite knowing better. It's hard to be outside of the walled garden if everybody else is inside.
I don't know anyone who's used IRC in the last fifteen years at least.
At least back when I used IRC, it wasn't indexed either. It was just an alternative to AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo Chat.
I still use it occasionally. It's primarily used for smaller, more private communities, but Wikipedia also hosts official IRC rooms, too. I don't know of any other major companies that use IRC in an official capacity, though.
The alternatives at the time were steam voice chat or Skype, and both were awful to use.
The reason why gamers pivoted to discord is it was irc, team speak, and Skype in one platform that just worked
Unless IRC has changed drastically in recent years, or maybe people are using proprietary extensions, it only supports a fraction of the features discord does.
IRC doesn't have sub-channels AFAIK. Also no image support, search, video-conferencing, etc.
The sheer amount of features and stability.
They also are forcing US users into arbitration unless you opt out by May 15th by emailing arbitration-opt-out@discord.com, so you can't sue them. This is similar to LG with their compressor fiasco in their fridges where they put arbitration agreement crap on the box.
I am so happy there is no other country where this bullshit is legal
What should I put in the opt out email?
"get fucked! Best regards "
Wait what? Can I get a link to read more about this?
https://www.pcgamer.com/discords-tos-update-forbids-lawsuits-against-it-but-you-can-opt-out/
I'm afraid that every generation runs into this and learns the hard way. Discord isn't the first and won't be the last. The moment someone wants to become profitable, all bets are off.
I guess that with discord (and many other non-foss free projects) the problem is that they start as free and then wanted to start to make money at a later stage.
For-profit software and companies are not necessarily bad, but they are bad when they take their existing software and start radically changing it for the sake of making more money.
If for example discord always had some features just for Nitro users and others for everyone, and those features (and the nitro price) would have always stayed the same it would have been much better
Every free service is built on the back of free money given out by the fed over the last 20 years in terms of near-zero percent central bank interest rates. Interest rates are up which means the VC faucets are closed. Users now need to pick up the massive debt tabs and they're gonna get ass fucked ten ways from Sunday to do it.
Just a reminder that FOSS and for-profit are not mutually exclusive. Your FOSS product can be free (as in free speech, not free beer), but cost money to acquire (although once bought, you could redistribute it as much as you like, for any price you like).
Yep it happened to Skype and slack.
And team speak too…
Teamspeak never died. It's always had a fairly dedicated core userbase, but it's inability to video chat/screenshare and the need to self host puts off most everyday users from getting onto it.
it's arguably WAY better for actual video game voice chat though. faster, higher quality, less resource intensive.
And I thought Discord was initially launched to destroy Skype.
It was only ever launched to take over their position, not destroy their program design. Greed eventually consumes all.
Has Discord ever been remotely profitable though? I can't imagine enough people put money into it that they haven't just been bleeding cash for 10 years. It's hard for me to exactly call it greed if they're just trying to get back to even. I could imagine it being completely enshittified in the name of profit in the future though.
We have no clue if they're profitable since they're private... but given they've laid off quite a few employees and are now scrabbling for pennies through these ads, we can only assume they've been, at best, net zero, and likely running a deficit ever since their inception. And interest rates have turned off the VC faucets.
bro, they employ literally like 200 people, most of those aren't devs, based on the sheer amount of people that pay for nitro there is zero way discord isn't profitable.
I mean they're almost certainly VC funded, the entire strategy is grow big, fast, burn a lot of money doing so, but establish such an aggressive market spot that you can 10x the profit and nobody moves anywhere. You're telling me we aren't in the latter part of that scale?
They would probably be fairing better in terms of profitability if they didn't have to host every instance themselves, but apparently that's too difficult to conjure up. Or if they implemented actual features, but whatever.
Neo, Matrix is calling
Every day, we inch closer to “drink a verification can” reality.
Please yes, pump it full of ads, discord can't die fast enougb, reddit and youtube too.
Discord has a really good reputation and the users are invested, it will take a long time to die even with enshitification. Remember that most people are used to ads and won't care as long as it starts with videogame ads.
Yeah take a look at something like Twitch and how many ads they shove down your throat. Yet 100,000's of people keep coming back again and again.
Sincerely hope this will be the beginning of a D-Exodus, and that all those open source projects who made the choice to only use Discord for community communication will move to something which is search engine friendly for searching for answers.
This!
Discord was great and I'm pretty sure that some projects will take its place (like Revolt maybe that others are mentioning) but PLEASE FOSS PROJECT JUST USE AN INDEXABLE FORUM like Discourse, so that people don't have to signup and enter a server for each project they use!
mmmm, i hate discord, anybody have any good self hosted recommendations? Preferably, fully featured, or featureful, and not some random garb.
Flirting with matrix, the concept fucks. I just haven't gotten around to doing anything with it yet. I know there area few others, like revolt, which is kind of a mess, and various others in the same category.
TeamSpeak 3 now has a UI similar to discord.
Kinda surprised TS is still around. It’s all we used in the ‘00s for gaming, but slowly lost relevance thanks to in-game VoIP and other popular solutions like discord.
hmm, interesting. Teamspeak was never really something i've bothered looking into. Might give it a look, though to be clear, im not interface picky, i hate discord, through and through, it's awful.
Needs a license for larger concurrent user counts, which is probably why it fell off in favour of Mumble and then Discord.
Mumble is better
Soumds like revolt might be interesting to you.
i've messed with it, i know you can technically self host, but last i checked that's docker only, which is not what im looking for. I want something more stable than revolt, with more features. And i'm not married to the discord UI personally, so anything that does a better job is welcome lol.
IRC.
In 2022, Discord had a revenue of $445 million. Maybe if they were a private company that would be enough.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/discord-statistics/
I haven't given Discord a dime from the start because I knew this was going to happen.
The entire premise of Discord's free service was to gobble up the market from TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, and Mumble and capture the ecosystem using a ton of venture capital. In any sane world it would be an illegal mode of operation to provide "free service" based on venture capital like that.
TeamSpeak did manage to react but their reaction has been slow (I think they're a much smaller team and still a private company). Their new client is fairly feature complete but still not out of beta (AFAIK).
Mumble is an open source project and is still ticking as a result as well (though obviously it's received much less love since Discord stole the spotlight).
If I'm not mistaken, they are a private company.
Granted, they're a private company with a goal of getting an IPO soon, though.
Revenue is not the same as income. Maintaining cross-platform apps and hosting nearly a decade of messages and media attachments is gonna eat into that. Also, Discord is in fact a private company.
Correct. I did not locate a source for their expenses or profit margin. If someone can provide, I would be happy to update.
I'm down to distributed social networks and irc.
I still need to backup and cleanse Reddit but I'm just old man declaring everything turned to shit, yelling at clouds nowadays it seems.
Well, most clouds suck these days.
I'm kinda sad to see it enshittify, for gamers and for those who find it fits their actual collaboration use case, but I also really hate the number forum-format communities that Discord has displaced or prevented from coalescing. Discoverability on Discord is terrible, as is having help available long term, as well as older advice and other content that helps newbies get the culture of a community. Even where the functionality exists, the general "real time" transitory feel of it reduces the quality of content and encourages people to be dicks, since it will all scroll by or be forgotten (if streaming) in a few moments anyway.
Horses for courses, and my old-ass X-ennial self thinks Discord has been pressed into service on a lot of courses where it's terrible.
This is the future!
10 years from now....
I needed to go 💩 poop and I had to wait for a Home Depot ad before I could open the lid. I flushed but I had to learn about Spandex hot pants before the water rushed down.
Lol. I've seen a video in China of something like this. It's a public restroom that requires you to watch an ad accessed by QR code in order to get toilet paper. The future!
Imagine using discord without Vencord, I'm sure someone will add a plug-in to remove all its crap at least I hope so, it already has some really good ones that give you access to free nitro bs.
Is that similar to betterdiscord? I'm not the most tech literate but I've used that with plugins for tabs and whatnot. If there's a plugin for universal emojis I'd be sold
Pretty much yes, the plug-in you are looking for is called FakeNitro and it will give you the quality streams and the emotes for free.
At worst, I could just use Discord in Firefox and block the ads.
Until they stop supporting Firefox, because who uses Firefox /s
I've been keeping an eye on Matrix if discord keeps getting worse. It is awful trying to look up guides or important info in discord's format.
There's also Element which feels a lot like discord. The problem though isn't moving to a new platform, it's convincing the masses to do the same.
Just today I learned about Cinny which would make so much more sense to use for people who need the discord/slack experience but want to use matrix
Thing is, people don't need the Discord experience. People need the people and servers that are on Discord.
Matrix messaging is great but voice is still quite janky.
Haven't tried calling using Matrix.
In the past month I noticed ads inside Viber desktop (it's used a lot here, instead of WhatsApp)
Later I got a call from a friend that his windows defender picked up a trojan in Viber files.. Next day I got it too.
I shit you not, they let out an update with malware, on a popular chat app. I uninstalled and got the next update, with blind trust, I can't migrate atm...
I find it hard to believe viber isn't some IoT connected sex toy name.
It is possible it was a false positive, though I am not familiar with Viber and its recent history in terms of malware incidents.
Still any platform that serves up ads needs to secure them.... and as none bother I simply block all ads.
Not related to the article itself, but I'm curious why use of archive.is has become so popular around here considering that they refuse to provide DNS replies without edns personal information attached? I'm not familiar with the politics involved, but a lot of DNS providers are getting blocked by archive.is for not providing that info, including my own home DNS server and cloud flare 1.1.1.1 and many others, so I'm surprised to see it gaining popularity on Lemmy.
I use the .is link for everything because it's the only way to reliably get into most of the paywalled articles form sites like WSJ. The other archive sites have already been blacklisted and get served a paywalled copy or blank "please enable javascript" page.
I knew nothing of it's DNS funkiness.
Do you have an alternative that it would be reasonable for people to know about?
Well, that's what you get for letting a private company replace and open protocol with a proprietary solution because it's easier to use and has some cute emojis.
I dono what people expected. Discord costs money to develop and run. It was always just a matter of time before it cost money.
how do you get more money out of a product once you reach a point where anyone who will ever use it is already using it?
less money out, more money in, which is to say you make it shittier and more expensive. Remember, you're only as good as your most recent revenue change.
It was either that or they start charging. They're gonna piss people of either way but at least it's still free.
They do charge for some features.
Yeah, I always assumed the free version was the loss leader and they made it back with people buying the paid version.
Yeah apparently not enough return on that for Amazon. I'm hoping my pihole will deal with the majority of the ads. Prime video ads are served from the same domain as the main content so I can't block them with this method.
Been happily off discord ever since the CEO's disastrous, anti-encryption speech at the "Protecting Children Online" hearing. Evil little dude, that guy is.
https://revolt.chat/ Cope, but would be good for this to become a thing.
https://github.com/revoltchat
I just noticed this today.. I barely even use discord. Now I really don't like it.
Anyone got a recommendation for an open source alternative to discord? Basically just need voice, text, and screen sharing for a group of friends of like, 5-6 at most on at any time.
Even if I gotta pay to host a server, I’d rather do that than pay discord extortion money to avoid ads while still getting my data stolen.
I know it's still in development, but check out Revolt . It's basically Discord, but open source.
i looked into revolt and pretty concerned with these two stances of the project
ref
ref
like, to me it seems they want to get communities invested and then later monetize in ways those communities don't yet know about?? idk that sounds extremely sus. especially when competing instances will fight against network effects with no federation.
1st. implementing activitypub or any other federation protocol is quite a task. also in my opinion it does not need to be federated. there are basically no benefits, except convenience for the users.
2nd. it's open source. if you don't like the way it's monetized, fork it and make your own. it' not foss.
that's all very fair, i guess i was just hoping federation was at least on a long term roadmap
I can sort of see why a chat client wouldn't have a use for activitypub/federation, with the possible exception of identity sharing once that starts to take off.
yeah, i agree that i don't think federation of something like this would be through ActivityPub (matrix has its own). i guess it just feels unfortunate that if users want to access communities across multiple instances, users will have to have separate logins and identities for each one.
Yeah, identity is a real problem, but someone posted a proposal to solve for that that looks perfect for this sort of thing. Wish I remembered what it was called, but basically each account could attest for the others via export of encryption keys/signatures so while you has multiple 'accounts' there was only one identity which was pointed to in the signature blob.
The tricky part would be getting everyone (matrix, lemmy/kbin/mbin, pixel fed, and masto) to conform to a single identity standard. If one existed, I could see them implementing it, but we're not there yet.
Entrenchment is the LotR 'One Ring' for Enshittification.
I personally use Matrix. I haven't gotten very far into using it but it does have groups, text, calls, and encrypted messaging so I'd say check it out.
Element/Matrix
Spacebar, Revolt, Matrix in ascending order of completeness and descending order of Discord-likeness
Mattermost used to be the go-to alternative, not sure why it is not mentioned yet. Then it looks like Revolt is getting traction now.
Vote with your feet. Have to leave the platform if you want to stick it to them.
Easier said than done. All your friends on discord? Can't leave.
Fair enough.
Maybe everyone agrees it sucks and all change?
Turn it into a group 'stick it to the man' effort?
I don't have friends,.no problem for me 😋
Also,.I'm old and just text my friends!
This is why I set my server up to mirror to a Revolt server (we're an rp server)
Eventually, folks will want to move, some will say, "But all our posts", and I can go, "Good news!"
Is revolt a client or a seperate app from discord?
Separate app. There is a bridge bot. It's effectively part of a Fediverse of chat programs
Oooh
I’ve just been using vencord for a couple months which is just discord with added features
Ranging from additional functionality to totally legitimate real nitro
Discord is a sack of shit anyways…I don’t get the obsession?
this thread is making me realize I'm clearly missing something. How do people actually use discord? Me and my friends basically use it as semi-permanent group chat. A few different topic areas, and no stupid android/ios compatibility issues. I'm also in two servers for some small clubs. Do people really use it the way they would lemmy/reddit?
A few open-source projects I follow use it as their main community tool and it sucks.
I don't mind my friend groups using it because it's just for ephemeral chats and gaming anyway, but I want to know why these other communities think it's appropriate.
Edit: tldr: I think I probably could've saved myself a lot of time by just saying that discord is like slack but for friends/fun.
I didn't think people use it like lemmy/Reddit. People use it like IRC. That's the analogous tech. IRC is better in almost every way, but not in the most important ways: ease of use, and voice chat.
I know only a handful of people who could set up a server for IRC, but in discord, it's a one-button process. Sure, you can use a public IRC server, but then your channels are harder to organize and you don't have as much moderation control. I dn't think
I would vastly prefer IRC, but even if it was easy to set up, I would still need something for voice chat, and, sure, there are plenty of voice chat tools, but not ones that integrate with text chat so well.
I think a lot of people like the API and the bots built from it, tho personally that's not something I use much.
I'm in probably ~50 servers: groups of friends, video game guilds, tech chat (eg HTMX, Lit, Svelte), random interests (eg mechanical keyboards), and community servers for video games (eg a couple of LFG servers, a couple servers where I can ask questions to tryhards, streamers' communities, etc).
I would vastly prefer to use something FOSS, but there just isn't something that does it so well and so easily -- and even then, I'd probably have to use discord for a bunch of these things.
Let's say it's like Slack + Zoom, but it ends up used for things that would have made way more sense as a Lemmy/Reddit/old school forum. You can't find anything old without pausing the scroll, the interaction is piss poor because nothing is visibly sticky for more than a couple of hours even on a slow channel, and then because people (rightly) feel that it's more like a chat, the feed fills up with low effort nonsense and dick-baggery.
In my company, Slack is useful because we're all stuck in front of it for 8hours+ per day, we're all incentivized to be on our best behavior, groups are mostly manageable in size, and to the extent there's a social aspect, it is to replace "water cooler talk" which was always light and ephemeral anyway. It works... fine. I don't love it, but it works fine. Zoom too.
Discord is also fine for what it is, but it's terrible when it's the only public facing option for sharing information and fielding questions about a project or topic.
For sure. Look, I hate Stack Overflow as much as the next guy but you gotta admit, for the big picture, long term, best practice for the future of software development, that's the correct format: one question, focused discussion, end.
Discord's failure to make its history available is really going to put a big hole in the middle of our cultural wisdom.
Every single entertainer (YouTuber, Twitch Streamer, etc.), community game server, some Open Source projects, Indie game developers and anyone who gets public support through Patreon uses Discord as the sole public hub. Colleges, Universities, Online courses also rely heavily on Discord. It's a social network they can advertise, some servers are for subscribers only and is seen as a reward to get access to that. I'm part of a dozen or so servers for online things of interest to me, even though I hate the platform. It's all silenced and without notifications, else I would go crazy, and I never chat with anyone there. But unfortunately there are several events, opportunities and activities that are exclusively communicated via the Discord server. It's like cancer. Just like Instagram and WhatsApp, I have them not because I like it, but because if I remove them entirely or too aggressively it will take my social life with it.
I like to watch twitch streams and play modded videogames (minecraft, lethal company, valheim). Every single twitch streamer has their own discord. Fine I guess, they want control over their space and it's full of cat pics and tattoos anyway. But the mod makers do the same, patch notes on discord, feature discussion on discord, some even close their githubs and want bugs on discord. I don't want to be part of your shitty community, I want to know which recolored slime is killing me through walls so I can disable it in the configs. And because the discord search is garbage, I still have to sift through racist memes and wildly outdated info to find what I need.
This is basically how I use it as well. I am in a few game jam channels, but i only use them when the jams are running.
After however many years I finally joined two discord instances for some niche topics where community was hard to find elsewhere.
I haven't used IRC in a few years I admit, but I'm a few months in with discord, and so far it has never stopped feeling like IRC with a confusing interface, a gaudy new coat of paint, and emojis everywhere.
I have no idea why it's seemingly the ONLY place anyone wants to create an interactive community anymore for so many things.
Because its zero-effort to make a functional forum (no hosting or backend to be set up) and you have almost full control over the space / it's isolated from other communities (unlike reddit)
EDIT: I don't like discord either, but I can see why content creators and the likes would prefer it to other forums
It's decent for voice chat in games.
I'm not sure why it became the open source world's documentation platform of choice.
Investors, who made Discord possible, want to earn money. It's totally understandable.
I would rather say it’s “predictable”, rather than “understandable”. Perhaps even, “no better than we can expect”. Calling this “understandable” tends to normalize greed for greed’s sake.
The users (the people generating the profit for iNvEsToRs) deserve better.
I honestly don't understand why the people who do bugger all for services should be catered to just because they have shares or whatever.
I get so tired of this "servers are expensive" cycle. Anyone know of a good P2P alternative? No servers, no ads, no subscriptions.
Skype was P2P for voice, video and files- only text chat and user discovery had any major server usage so users could receive chats while offline. Microsoft still sought to centralize & monetize it, they actively removed a lot of the P2P networking to "improve user experience". Any service owned by any profit seeking corporation will have the same end result regardless of the underlying tech; their excuses will just change forms.
Yes, and that will always be the case. But I feel like P2P software tends to get shittier slower. There are probably some open-source solutions out there right now, waiting to be adopted.
Quick search turned this up, but I’m on mobile, so not in a great place to dig into how viable it is. A Reddit post indicated it’s in some sort of alpha/beta stage, but I think it is something you can use today
Edit: Forgot the link like a fool https://positive-intentions.com/
Thanks! Worth a look!
Briar, Jami, SimpleX and Tox are all semi similar to what you might be looking for.
Thank you!
Anyone tried revolt.chat?
On a glance it seemed to work well enough.
There's also Matrix chat, which is federated.
Yeah, functionally it's much more similar to Discord. It's a shame it isn't federated.
we probably need to build it ourselves.
A federated, decentralized system that you can either self-host or join the servers of others, even better if we can offer to donate bandwidth, hosting, and processing power to servers we join in order to distribute the operational strain.
This is the path I was hoping to see Matrix go, but so far I haven't run across a method of joining servers, or if there is one, I also haven't actually seen any multi-server groups anywhere. Not that I have much experience with Matrix, so there certainly could be groups like that already?
The closest thing to a Discord server Matrix-wise are Spaces, which basically are groups of Rooms that people can join by invite (and maybe by link? But not sure)
I see in Matrix as a protocol great potential but it needs some more projects that will focus on the different aspects of communication.
Element cannot aim to be both a WhatsApp replacement, a Slack replacement and a Discord replacement, but for sure 3 different alternatives for those services can be built all using the Matrix protocol
Maybe this move by Discord will be an incentive for others to just in and start coding new services to fill the gaps. We can only hope...
Maybe you want to take a look at Spacebar, a FOSS Discord reimplementation with its own client and server for self-hosting in development
Same as it ever was.
*its free
"free"
Makes me miss Xfire. Feature-rich, customizeable, great quality, overlay feature that didn't suck, no bullshit. It was orders of magnitude better than Discord ever was.
...but not popular outside of gaming; and ofc the other big tech companies litigated the fuck out of it, so it never really took off and now it's gone. Boooooooo
What do the Lemmings recommend as a replacement for discord?
I'm happy to revert back to teamspeak if need be, I heard it's app recently got an overhaul (or at the very least a facelift).
I'm disgusted (though not shocked, I fucking called it years ago), that discord would go down this rabbit hole being that their main demographic is gamers. The stats are in, gamers (among every other living being) hates ads.
In fact, I pay for YT music because I think it's good value, but ive never once had YT premium, and I haven't seen an ad on their site for close to a decade now. (Still no pihole, that's likely next).
To circle back, if possible Lemmings, I would like to find a discord replacement that my folks would be willing to install/try out. I've got a couple people who have said "hey man, find a better spot and we'll tag along", however I have yet to find a suitable replacement on my own time.
I'd say Matrix / Elements is a good alternative.
It's based on an open and interoperable protocol, similar to the fediverse. So it doesn't matter the client, as long as your friends are on something that support Matrix they'll be able to join the group.
As an added bonus, if elements start going down the enshittification path you can just drop them. Also, you can host your server just like teamspeak
Appreciate the response, I'll give matrix and elements a look-see.
Unfortunately I'm the only among the group that interacts with(or even knows of) the fediverse and it's associated softwares, so I expect there to be some drama involved, hopefully I can be the salesman they need.
Mattermost used to be the go-to alternative, not sure why it is not mentioned yet. Then it looks like Revolt is getting traction now.
Matrix.org has some Discord Clones that you can even self-host if that is what gets you off. Personally I'm planning to use their "Bridge" software to move everything from my old Discord channel to a private database but I have never maintained a database so it is currently safely on the backburner.
Matrix works pretty good.
At least it is not "Enshittification Continues: Lemmy to begin showing advertisements on it's fediverse platform"
Well I am finally ahead of the curve. I mostly stopped using discord after I learned of their horrible privacy practices and braindead statements on e2e encryption.
Long live Matrix!