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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 youāre 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 feel like its WAY to invasive in my privacy. I have to use it for so many things, but I try to get folks to use Telegram instead. Telegram is much nicer UI. Discord is over bloated with crap and keeps asking me to spend money.
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 donāt have any more phone numbers and canāt 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. Itās like Facebook in this way.
Itās also just a shitty electron wrapper around a webpage, which I have FeelingsTM about.
Not to mention the MASSIVE problem Discord has with pedophiles and groomers.
I agree. Even though Discordās privacy policy is nowhere near as bad as Facebook. But the fact that everything has moved to Discord thus creating a monopoly for business communication is very bad. I hope there are some viable and ethical competitions.
Oh definitely.
I also dislike this as well from OP. I mean there is Matrix but it definitely doesnāt have the widespread popularity and ubiquitous nature of Discord. Then also I remember seeing a post somewhere wondering if Matrix is E2EE (which I remember it saying mostly but I donāt remember exactly where it was or possibly wasnāt).
I would be open to moving my own Discord server off of Discord and onto something like Matrix but the problem is that so many people use Discord that theyāre going to look at my link collection and when they donāt see Discord next to Twitter, Instagram, etc. theyāre not going to be able to connect with me. It goes back to that ubiquitous nature of Discord; a ton of people use it and know about it now, way beyond the gaming circles that you would expect to use Discord.
I donāt know if there is an answer to this issue at the moment.
My main thought about discord is that the UX doesnāt work well for me. It is primarily focused on ācommunitiesā which Iāve never had the desire to organize my life into. I have a āserverā 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 āserverā 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 donāt 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 canāt wait for them to have a bit more time to polish the UX here.
I also donāt 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 doesnāt actually know that they are linked.I also donāt 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 didnāt read the 8th pinned entry in the 3rd FAQ room (which of course isnāt visible to Google). I guess it does create a āfriendlierā atmosphere in theory since everyone is constantly helping everyone, but again, not my preference.
But these are all UX arguments that donāt work for me. They appear to resonate well with a wide group of people so I guess it is me who is āwrongā here. Of course that doesnāt mean that I wonāt continue to avoid it.
UX aside I donāt 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 donāt bother me:
I think the main upside is that it is easy enough to use that most people canāt 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 donāt like the wording that people use when discussing Discord. Things like, āIām going to start a Discord serverā 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.
To be honest. I think these days basically no one thinks of self-hosting or hardware when they hear āserverā. Discord has become popular enough that there are more people who hear āserverā and think ācommunityā without any implication how it is actually operated.
I agree. I understand why, I just donāt like it :P
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 Iām 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 canāt 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 wonāt even go into the privacy concerns I have with so many people feeding their life into discordās database.
While I donāt think message boards should move to it, Discord has a pretty good search feature, have you tried it?
Yeah, I would love something like the fediverse that is analogous of Discord as I would absolutely move to it in a heartbeat. But alas
I guess Iām in the minority on this but⦠feature wise, I think itās fantastic. Itās 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 Iām in and itās 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 Iāve 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 arenāt as easy for most users to use and because itās pretty hard to shift a large amount of users from one program theyāre very familiar with to one that theyāre not familiar with.
I think tech-savvy people are generally more inclined to shift to open-source software, particularly in the early stages, because theyāre not nearly as bothered by the tinkering/troubleshooting involved. I think itās similar to why so few people use Linux compared to Windows. But what a lot of tech savvy people just canāt wrap their heads around is the simple fact that for the overwhelming majority of users, they donāt have the time/patience/interest to switch to new alternatives to programs/systems theyāve been using for years and are comfortable using. Itās 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 youāve got to make it appealing to them instead of stubbornly insisting that itās 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 itās 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 alternativeās 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 thatās 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, itās 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 donāt take into considerate the social aspect of pitching alternatives to proprietary software and instead just dismiss it as unimportant, but then theyāre left sort of bitterly wondering why nobodyās using the fanny pack/cargo pants of software. Iāve always found this interesting, particularly when it comes to the animosity the tech community has for Apple products. Itās 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.
Says the pig being fattened up for slaughter /s
Of course it is going to look nice if you are being pampered with loads of money to lure you in. Discord is just a bit earlier in the inevitable progression than Reddit etc⦠why are you here now and not any longer on Reddit?
Because unlike Discord, I have a number of issues with reddit to the point of it creating an unpleasant experience. Switch from reddit to Lemmy didnāt have to involve convincing my friends to join Lemmy, as itās a website-- not communications software in the way Discord is.
The compromise of a small community on Lemmy is something I donāt mind, because it doesnāt really prevent conversations from happening. Whereas switching from Discord to an open source alternative that most of my friends arenāt going to use just leaves me with perhaps a better alternative to Discord in terms of functionality/privacy without anyone else using it.
Well, that is exactly my point. Sooner or later similar issues as with Reddit will crop up on Discord and it is likely to be worse as Discord has an even stronger user lock-in.
So then you pretty much answered your own question, I think. When Discord has enough fuckery for me to be annoyed with it, Iāll gladly hop to an alternative. Iām in a whopping two Discord communities and I donāt think the transition would be very difficult at that point.
How will you do it when as you say yourself all your friends are still on Discord?
Because if Discord starts having major issues that impact convenience, Iāll have an easy time pointing that out to my friends-- particularly if thereās an open source alternative that alleviates said issues.
Signal was pretty rough when it first came out but the moment they had support for Windows, OS X, iOS and Android, it was ridiculously easy to convince people to make the switch from whatever they were previously using to Signal.
I feel like youāre too concerned with playing devilās advocate than trying to figure this out for yourself by thinking in more nuanced terms that take social dynamics into account.
I donāt 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 donāt 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.
Guilded matches them in features and adds more gaming niched stuff like actual forums into your āserverā.
matching Discord, or even improving on it, doesnāt matter. Discord is already king. To dethrone the king, non-Discord users need to be the main target so Discord users are forced to use both, until all their contacts merge and slowly migrate to the second software over time due to more features and ease of use.
https://stallman.org/discord.html
Discord is bad because itās a proprietary centralized silo platform that is hostile to third party clients. I also donāt like how they redefine terms (e.g. referring to communities/groups as āserversā and emotes as āemojiā which is an annoying thing that has spread even to the fediverse). I donāt 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 donāt 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).
Is there something that is FLOSS, federated, E2EE, and would be user friendly like Discord is such that my friends would be willing to switch to it?
If a 8 years old child can use Matrix perfectly for their friends and is not a gifted child, your friends should be able to use it too.
However, I donāt know your friends.
Fair. Iām just unsure about how well they would take to wanting to move to Matrix. Also I have the issue of my own Discord server set up for my content creation. Iām not sure what I would do about that personally. I link to it from my other social media pages (that reminds me, I should link my Beacons page on Mastodon) and could ostensibly do something similar with a Matrix server (I donāt personally have any experience doing server management, but I wouldnāt necessarily be opposed to figuring it out with my Computer Science minor).
Discord Server != real server, it is just a community or space and you have spaces in Matrix too.
In the begining, you could bridge rooms between Matrix and Discord using https://t2bot.io.
Sorry about that, my apologies. Iāve been using Discord for like 6 years so Iāve gotten used to the terminology surrounding the platform.
I could looking into using a Bridge botā¦Iād wonder about self-hosting my own instance. I donāt necessarily need to host my own instance of Matrix, right? I suppose there are certain things that hosting my own instance of Matrix would allow me to do, Iām just not currently in the right mind to come up with those. Neither do I really have the experience with server hosting as I said before.
Yeah, you donāt need to selfhost your own server if you donāt what or you canāt.
About the bridge, it is not just a bot because it has puppeting for Discord.
It creates puppets which represent each user of your rooms in the other platform (either Matrix to Discord or Discord to Matrix).
Itās not that I wouldnāt want to or that I canāt; Iām sure I would be able to figure it out after reading some documentation. I have some very basic experience coding a Node.js server as well as other general-purpose coding experience, so I could probably figure it out eventually.
My main thing about hosting is that Iām not sure I would need to host my own instance because, at least in my head, the kinds of things that hosting my own instance would enable me to do I wouldnāt necessarily need since Iām just trying to create my own space for people to chat.
Although, I do enjoy the whole compartmentalizing part of Discord where I can go to one space to talk about movies, another to talk about music, and another for my D&D group to have our role-play and other session-related things. Is there a way to achieve something similar in Matrix?
That sounds really cool! Iāll definitely have to look into that tomorrow when itās not almost midnight. Also since this is for my content creation, I set limits for myself for how much I work to try and maintain some kind of work-life balance and Iāve kind of already hit todayās limit.
Itās probably best if you download element/schildichat and check it out yourself.
I have actually downloaded Element and started to play around with it, but the only communities I found to join were pretty empty, only flooded with join/leave messages, and I didnāt necessarily see the platform being used well (at least in my opinion, I will fully admit that I could be wrong there). Itās possible I just have the wrong community. Iām going to go try and find a lemmy or FOSS related community over there to join. I feel like something under those two would be more active.
https://stallman.org/discord.html
Itās 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, youāre not the customer; youāre the productā¦
To be fair Discord has a lot of monetization potential with Sever Boosts, the premium membership and paid emoji. Iām sure that they could coast and be profitable with those. Maybe adding a couple more paid features over time. Especially if they start charging companies for a better interface to customers via Discord (Iām not even talking about advertising, I mean support and pre-sales communication as well as community management features such as shared accounts so that the support team can talk behind the face of one company account).
Of course this wonāt happen. Investors will demand more and more profits until the service becomes unbearable and everyone moves off to the new VC-subsidised service.
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.
Awful.
Theyāve somehow managed to consolidate the communications of so many groups outside of its original gaming focus with a āslickā UI and apparent ease of access. Theyāre 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 isnāt 1:1 and you need to be a mod on the Discord end in order to even allow it, and nobody does.
Matrix has its own share of problems too, but yeah, it would be neat if it gained more popularity. Discord has some merit though, their UI, feature set and extreme ease of use is veeeery nice for common users.
Matrix is far from achieving that, but good work is being done for sure.
Do I like discord personally? No
Do I think discord is a necessary evil? Yes
Youāre shooting yourself in the foot as a OSS project if you donāt use discord, same with not using github.
But, at least for me, I hate my feet :)
Why couldnāt an Open source project use self-hosted Matrix and Self-hosted GitLab?
GitHub has network effects that makes it easy to attract users and contributors. You basically get some free marketing by hosting there. For established projects it doesnāt matter much, but when starting every bit of marketing can be incredibly valuable.
Yeah this, also consider that gitlab is not federated and people are not likely to make an account on your gitlab instance to contribute.
The same thing goes for discord, more people use it than matrix, and therfore you reach a larger audience
re @Echedenyan@lemmy.ml not sure what part you are talking about, Iām happy to shoot myself in the foot for my projects because I donāt expect much contributors nore feel a drive for a big star count
The third line was my focus.
There is no such thing as neccesary evil.
You can use different kind of IM solutions depending on the needs for managing a FLOSS project and these must be FLOSS if there is option (by now, always are).
Not every people need voice or video channels. To be exact, I donāt know a single FLOSS project which use them, just a daily videocall if they work with SCRUM for the Daily SCRUM which can be made in several platforms.
You can just do this with a group of Matrix rooms (with space or just name prefix like use to be made on IRC) and Jitsi.
As for the code hosting⦠Is there a problem with just mirroring?
If you use Git you must know that is decentralized and all you need is an account at the hosting service which could be just raw username and password (plus email verification sometimes) or you can just login/register with your account from other service.
All this does is make it harder for your contributors. Iām ok with it for my projects, but many are not. I have certainly skipped out on some drive by contributions because it would require the hassle of making an account.
I was mistaken for thinking that it was federated. I wonder why gitlab isnāt federated, it seems like it would be beneficial for code contributions for open source projects if it had federation.
It is being worked in a sepparate project.
I think Evan is being ironic in the last part.
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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 itās closed source nature make it an unappealing option.
The way it handles screen sharing and video chat is really nice. I hope thatās something that element or even Jitsi could eventually replicate.