Discord feels like a necessary evil in my life since so many communities are on it. Trying Element was worse UX in my experience, which is awful if you’re trying to get people to switch.

Discord is relatively fine right now and the worst part of the privacy policy is the risk of being acquired. That said, Facebook seemed pretty nice and cool before it became what we know it is today.

I used to love Discord and think it was a very good piece of corporate software, and I happily moved all my communications to it at one point. When I started to move to FOSS alternatives to most corporate social platforms I got rid of Discord too, then I tried to go back for the sake of my friendgroup, but when I went to make a new account, it decided it needed a phone number to verify me, because of my VPN. Then I got banned. Then I made a new account, and got banned again. I don’t have any more phone numbers and can’t really get back on Discord, and this seems like a massive flaw to me.

In addition to this, all sorts of group chats, message boards, forums, etc, have now been locked behind this wall. Projects and communities that used to have an IRC or a forum are now almost exclusively located on Discord. It’s like Facebook in this way.

It’s also just a shitty electron wrapper around a webpage, which I have Feelings^TM about.

Not to mention the MASSIVE problem Discord has with pedophiles and groomers.

My main thought about discord is that the UX doesn’t work well for me. It is primarily focused on “communities” which I’ve never had the desire to organize my life into. I have a “server” that we use for chat during games because everyone knows it but then I have to do a couple clicks to switch to my friends “server” to see a new message, then a couple clicks back. Having two conversions in different communities is incredibly painful. There is also just as much awkwardness if you want to swap between DMs as well.

For me I much prefer the Element, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp… approach where I just have rooms in a big long list (or sorted in a way that works for me). I don’t like this Discord, Slack forced 2-level hierarchy. I actually think Matrix+Element is killing it here with Spaces. Spaces provide a lot of the good parts of the Discord Server or Slack Workspace while still allowing you to get a big long list of rooms so that switching between a DM, room in one community and a room in a different one. You can even just link all of the rooms you are interested in to a private space to organize them however you want. I can’t wait for them to have a bit more time to polish the UX here.

I also don’t see the draw of separated voice and text channels. You always end up needing to share links or images anyways and have to awkwardly explain what channel you dumped it in. Eventually this leads to the #voice-spam channel which is effectively creating a voice+text channel with an awkward UX because the software doesn’t actually know that they are linked.

I also don’t get why people like doing a lot of communication in chat over things like websites and forms. Especially for communities like speedrunning where it is actually nice to have documentation on strategies. They end up getting asked the same question every day then get mad that people didn’t read the 8th pinned entry in the 3rd FAQ room (which of course isn’t visible to Google). I guess it does create a “friendlier” atmosphere in theory since everyone is constantly helping everyone, but again, not my preference.

But these are all UX arguments that don’t work for me. They appear to resonate well with a wide group of people so I guess it is me who is “wrong” here. Of course that doesn’t mean that I won’t continue to avoid it.

UX aside I don’t like that it is centralized. I definitely try to stick to decentralized services where possible so that I am not beholden to the whim of a single operator.

Most of the other complains I see don’t bother me:

• phone number requirement: IIUC this is up to the mods of a particular community. I’m 99% sure that Discord doesn’t have my number. I don’t blame Discord for providing the option. It is also hard to blame mods for using it when it clearly solves real problems that they have. (It significantly reduces spam)
• Pedos, MAPs, groomers, razor sharp edgy kids, cyberbullying etc: Meh, I’m a fan of free speech. These people are going to chat somewhere so I don’t see why it can’t be the same software that I use. It isn’t like discord is a single chat room where you need to see all of this stuff. Just don’t hang out in communities that allow this stuff.

I think the main upside is that it is easy enough to use that most people can’t figure it out quickly without any help. That is an important point for any popular service. Unfortunately Element Android is still about 50% unguided success rate from my experience. I hope they keep streamlining it.

I don’t like the wording that people use when discussing Discord. Things like, “I’m going to start a Discord server” when in fact they are not self-hosting the server. This makes Discord sound more decentralized than it actually is and it it give the users more of an illusion of control when in fact the creators of Discord have all the control. Stallman was right when he described people as being used and not users.

I fracking hate discord. People use it for everything now, not just gaming, for the convenience of an easy to use cross-platform application. Almost every message board on the internet has been deserted and moved to discord. And it makes it so difficult to find anything useful. Every time I want to find something there I feel as if no matter how much time I spend using the search I’m never going to find it. And when I ask I feel as if the same question has probably been asked hundreds of times before and makes me feel dumb for not being able to find the answer. If you read the messages as they arrive, with just a couple of servers that you follow, your day is gone and you can’t do anything else. Of course it makes it convenient not having to create an account for each website like before, but so does the fediverse. I won’t even go into the privacy concerns I have with so many people feeding their life into discord’s database.

I guess I’m in the minority on this but… feature wise, I think it’s fantastic. It’s got nearly everything I could ask for, and I love how easy it is to stream and watch videos with groups of people. I often steam Seinfeld and other TV shows/movies in a leftist Discord community that I’m in and it’s just so nice to be able to do it so easily, without having to walk non tech-savvy users through lengthy troubleshooting in order for things to work. Pretty much any issue I’ve encountered when it comes to streaming/watching content was resolved within a few minutes of Googling.

Privacy wise, I wish there was an open-source alternative to Discord that a) has the same features and b) is user-friendly enough to actually shift Discord users to it. Unfortunately, pitching open-source alternatives to Discord is very difficult because they just aren’t as easy for most users to use and because it’s pretty hard to shift a large amount of users from one program they’re very familiar with to one that they’re not familiar with.

I think tech-savvy people are generally more inclined to shift to open-source software, particularly in the early stages, because they’re not nearly as bothered by the tinkering/troubleshooting involved. I think it’s similar to why so few people use Linux compared to Windows. But what a lot of tech savvy people just can’t wrap their heads around is the simple fact that for the overwhelming majority of users, they don’t have the time/patience/interest to switch to new alternatives to programs/systems they’ve been using for years and are comfortable using. It’s like pitching a jacket that is superior in terms of heat retention, but most people just think the design is ugly. If you want people to wear the jacket, the simple fact is you’ve got to make it appealing to them instead of stubbornly insisting that it’s got superior heat retention and therefore it just makes logical sense to wear it over the colder but far more popular jacket that people prefer because it’s fashionable.

When I was younger, I was all about the tinkering/troubleshooting to delve into the world of open source software. As I get older, I just want my shit to work consistently and for troubleshooting to include a large user base so that the odds of there being a solution is high. I no longer have the time/patience/interest to spend hours/days troubleshooting. Communications software like Discord is especially challenging when it comes to pitching an open-source alternative, because without major advantages that most users can appreciate enough to make the leap, the open source alternative’s population will remain quite low because most users are wiling to sacrifice privacy for convenience/familiarity.

No doubt, this post will irk some people but… what can I say? Open source software has to revolve around convenience because that’s what most users value above all else. Pitching an app like Signal to friends/family was a breeze because of how relatively seamless the process of installing/using it as a primary app for texting via SMS and Signal messages. But pitching an app like an open source Discord alternative, it has unique challenges that I really think developers need to pay attention to.

Right now, I think an unfortunate amount of open source devs are of the mindset as Principal Skinner:

"Am I so out of touch??"

"No, it’s the users who are wrong."

A lot of open source software is like the fanny pack or cargo pants-- functionally useful but good luck pitching either product to most people. I think a lot of open source advocates don’t take into considerate the social aspect of pitching alternatives to proprietary software and instead just dismiss it as unimportant, but then they’re left sort of bitterly wondering why nobody’s using the fanny pack/cargo pants of software. I’ve always found this interesting, particularly when it comes to the animosity the tech community has for Apple products. It’s like an anti-social/awkward person just not at all understanding why charismatic, fashionable people tend to be attract more positive attention or they do understand and stubbornly insist on not even attempting to be more charismatic/fashionable.

I don’t like Discord, but it solves an issue for people that no one has solved as good as Discord has.

Discord is just a great all in one solution for everything a gamer would want and then just for communities in general. I don’t think Discord is gonna go anywhere until someone actually matches them in features and does it good.

Edit: and they have to make it where you can do all of those things without having to self host or pay for hosting.

https://stallman.org/discord.html

Discord is bad because it’s a proprietary centralized silo platform that is hostile to third party clients. I also don’t like how they redefine terms (e.g. referring to communities/groups as “servers” and emotes as “emoji” which is an annoying thing that has spread even to the fediverse). I don’t like the culture of Discord and Discord-related memes/jokes.

The worst thing about Discord, however, is how so many communities more or less force it on users. I don’t like Discord and would be a happier person if Discord disappeared off the face of the world tomorrow but I feel I am required to use it (with a libre third-party client) to participate in some communities and stay in touch with friends.

It is not FLOSS, not self-hostable, not federated and it does not have real security (E2EE).

https://stallman.org/discord.html

It’s ok for what it does right now, but it is only a question of time before the current funders will want their money back and then some… and they seem to have started to become quite greedy as even a quite large sum buy-out offer by Microsoft was declined recently. So it will probably not end nice.

Remember folks,If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product…

First things first, not FOSS, not federated, phone number requirement, VPN hostile, therefore bad. <insert RMS discord HTML page> Pedos, MAPs, groomers, razor sharp edgy kids.

Now we come to a more non ideological analysis.

• For my OSINT investigations, Discord is fantastic. This is simply because it is a mainstream platform, and mainstream platforms are necessary evils. This is a use case hardly anybody has or should have, as it is a risky and tactical task.
• The trifecta of Reddit, Discord and Telegram has pretty much taken over forums and boards, as it stands.
• Discord works as a public forum exactly the same way as Telegram does, except it is a massive honeypot. A little careful observation tells all media is stored on Google Cloud, when a message is deleted. Telegram is incomparably superior to Discord despite having similar stances on privacy, security and anonymity, simply due to track record.
• Discord is a public forum, therefore it is not meant to be private, secure or anonymous as far as message content or metadata goes. The privacy comes from how secretive a guild (“server”) itself is from masses, and what kind of content it hosts that will attract particular kind of users. The security comes from centralisation and 2FA via phone number, so impersonation attacks become insanely hard, unlike on pseudonymous, anonymous, or federated platforms.

Awful.

They’ve somehow managed to consolidate the communications of so many groups outside of its original gaming focus with a “slick” UI and apparent ease of access. They’re under the guise of being cool despite being closed-source software with zero regard for security and use outside of their Electron wrapper.

The sooner it collapses the better, and I really hope Matrix rises in popularity. Even though the Discord bridge exists it isn’t 1:1 and you need to be a mod on the Discord end in order to even allow it, and nobody does.

Do I like discord personally? No

Do I think discord is a necessary evil? Yes

You’re shooting yourself in the foot as a OSS project if you don’t use discord, same with not using github.

But, at least for me, I hate my feet :)

I find myself comparing Discord to Element/Matrix. In terms of features and in some cases usability Discord is light years ahead. However is lack of federation and it’s closed source nature make it an unappealing option.

The way it handles screen sharing and video chat is really nice. I hope that’s something that element or even Jitsi could eventually replicate.