If Discord just.. cloned everything and make a "work" version they'd make a ton of money. Use the same tech, most of the same code - just strip out the gamer stuff. It's so much better than...
If Discord just.. cloned everything and make a "work" version they'd make a ton of money. Use the same tech, most of the same code - just strip out the gamer stuff. It's so much better than Microsoft Teams.
Has Slack gotten a lot worse in the last couple of years? I last used it in mid 2023 in a corporate environment, and at that time I thought it offered a much less cluttered interface than discord....
Has Slack gotten a lot worse in the last couple of years? I last used it in mid 2023 in a corporate environment, and at that time I thought it offered a much less cluttered interface than discord. Though that may just be because I subscribe to way too many discord channels to keep it all tidy. 🤷♂️
I find it somewhat maze-like. There’s several different ways to access any given message and none are “right”, and any channel/person you haven’t pinned can be annoying to hunt down. As hinted at...
I find it somewhat maze-like. There’s several different ways to access any given message and none are “right”, and any channel/person you haven’t pinned can be annoying to hunt down. As hinted at earlier they’ve also been trying to compete with Notion among other things, which I don’t care for at all. Slack only needs to be chat.
One thing that really bugs me about Discord is the search. I often want to search for a specific word or phrase and Discord always treats it as a fuzzy input and returns a bunch of messages that...
One thing that really bugs me about Discord is the search. I often want to search for a specific word or phrase and Discord always treats it as a fuzzy input and returns a bunch of messages that are completely not what I'm looking for. I never really had that experience with Slack, so maybe that contributed to my opinion that it is more organized.
It's fine, probably a little bloated but it still works for its core functionality really well. I think companies get way too caught up in adding stupid useless features that no one actually uses...
It's fine, probably a little bloated but it still works for its core functionality really well. I think companies get way too caught up in adding stupid useless features that no one actually uses and it ends up making their products worse, but compared to some of the alternatives, slack at least still functions well at its core.
It has indeed. I knew it would as soon as Saleforce bought them, but it took about a year before they started pulling that crap. I moved our company to using Matrix for that exact reason.
It has indeed. I knew it would as soon as Saleforce bought them, but it took about a year before they started pulling that crap. I moved our company to using Matrix for that exact reason.
As we've already gone over elsewhere, teams isn't going anywhere because it's the "good enough" tool that covers multiple avenues, and one of those is files and apps, which discord does not/is...
As we've already gone over elsewhere, teams isn't going anywhere because it's the "good enough" tool that covers multiple avenues, and one of those is files and apps, which discord does not/is terrible at.
Slack is popular and Zoom is popular. Both are more expensive compared to Microsoft Teams - but have massive adoption. We also see people using GSuite, etc.. So clearly there is space for an...
Slack is popular and Zoom is popular. Both are more expensive compared to Microsoft Teams - but have massive adoption. We also see people using GSuite, etc..
So clearly there is space for an alternative to Microsoft Teams. I would argue that Discord is better than Slack and nearly as good as Zoom for smaller group meetings. Not every company is Microsoft centric.
I'm not disagreeing, I'm just pointing out that you're comparing apples to oranges. Teams is not trying to be better at being slack than slack is. It's not trying to be better than zoom than zoom...
I'm not disagreeing, I'm just pointing out that you're comparing apples to oranges. Teams is not trying to be better at being slack than slack is. It's not trying to be better than zoom than zoom is (although I'd argue in my experience it actually has been by far).
Gsuite is probably the only office software I've used that I dislike MORE than MS, but again it fits the needs of many smaller environments.
Teams is trying to be a part of the MS suite which solves a small to midsize business issue of managing all this stuff along with almost certainly having some sort of cloud instance. In theory "one" vendor, "one" product, and everything "just integrates". Heavy use of quotes because i'm intimately familiar with how badly that actually pans out, but that niche isn't going anywhere.
If Microsoft Teams wasn't bundled with Office 365 / Microsoft Office - adoption would drop. I firmly believe that. The only reason my company is using Microsoft Teams is because it is included in...
If Microsoft Teams wasn't bundled with Office 365 / Microsoft Office - adoption would drop. I firmly believe that. The only reason my company is using Microsoft Teams is because it is included in the cost of Office. We were already paying for it.
We didn't switch to teams because it was connected to active directory, onedrive, or was some sort of "all in one solution". We switched because it was cheaper - I was involved in the decision to switch. Slack is WAY more expensive by comparison.
My work switched from Slack to Teams and I miss Slack every day. Sure it wasn’t great, and it had its problems, but the layout of it just seemed much nicer and it was significantly easier to...
My work switched from Slack to Teams and I miss Slack every day.
Sure it wasn’t great, and it had its problems, but the layout of it just seemed much nicer and it was significantly easier to navigate than teams.
Not disagreeing with that either. Edit- Or rather to be clear, not disagreeing with bundling being a huge factor. Of course it is. I do think people underestimate how useful it can be if properly...
Not disagreeing with that either.
Edit-
Or rather to be clear, not disagreeing with bundling being a huge factor. Of course it is. I do think people underestimate how useful it can be if properly configured, but that's another problem of the MS office suite, in that it basically assumes you've got someone (or more often, many someone's), who know how to configure, deploy, and maintain it. More than you should need.
Funny enough, the fact that it is bundled is why we don't use it. Our small org has zero need for O365. That being said, I do not like Teams at all and am glad the bundling makes it easy to...
Funny enough, the fact that it is bundled is why we don't use it. Our small org has zero need for O365. That being said, I do not like Teams at all and am glad the bundling makes it easy to dismiss to management.
Sorry to say, while teams is bundled with all of the M365 business plans, there is also a standalone option at $4/user/month. That pricing is a little outrageous for a messaging app, but its still...
Sorry to say, while teams is bundled with all of the M365 business plans, there is also a standalone option at $4/user/month.
That pricing is a little outrageous for a messaging app, but its still significantly cheaper than slack, which is $15 per user user per month for the business+ license, the absolute cheapest license they have which meets the acceptable minimum standards for business software (SSO integration).
I was not aware of that stand alone price point, but I am glad it didn't interrupt our move off of Slack. We ditched Slack before it hit that price point, but it was already far too high for a...
I was not aware of that stand alone price point, but I am glad it didn't interrupt our move off of Slack.
We ditched Slack before it hit that price point, but it was already far too high for a product we did not like and had very frequent (mostly minor) issues. I had been eyeing Matrix for a long while and waiting for it to hit a threshold of usability. Slack started to get really annoying the last year we used it so we pulled the trigger. I have used Teams with our partner companies as they are Windows only shops, and it is miserable IMO. It just feels like a continuation of Skype in all the worst ways, just with more MS-centric tie ins.
Zoom kinda sucks TBH, the only real reason it took off is that it's the only product that can handle large scale video conferencing since google meet wasn't really set up for it before hand.
Zoom kinda sucks TBH, the only real reason it took off is that it's the only product that can handle large scale video conferencing since google meet wasn't really set up for it before hand.
Haven't used Teams, but up until recently, Discord required a user to enter a title per thread. Actually, that requirement was different depending on if you were on mobile or desktop. It's a pain...
Haven't used Teams, but up until recently, Discord required a user to enter a title per thread. Actually, that requirement was different depending on if you were on mobile or desktop. It's a pain as a gamer, but it's a non-starter for a work environment where threads are practically a requirement to not gum up a channel. Discord doesn't have it in their DNA to be a corporate product.
This is primarily an issue for how you organize. My work barely uses the "Teams" side of Microsoft Teams. We primarily use group chats with purpose specific names. Artifacts/documents are stored...
This is primarily an issue for how you organize. My work barely uses the "Teams" side of Microsoft Teams. We primarily use group chats with purpose specific names. Artifacts/documents are stored in Confluence.
We use Teams as an ephemeral chat service for pseudo-realtime communication - not as a knowledge repository.
Yeah I always hear people talking shit on Teams and it works great for my small 4 man team. We don't touch the Teams side and have 3 group chats. One general yapping group chat (with some other...
Yeah I always hear people talking shit on Teams and it works great for my small 4 man team. We don't touch the Teams side and have 3 group chats. One general yapping group chat (with some other members in it), one for the main software product we maintain, and a third for video game related yapping. It works great. Voice calls / screen shares seem to always work. Much better than skype used to.
How large of a company, if you don't mind me asking? How do other teams reach out to your team when they have questions if your team is primarily in a group chat?
How large of a company, if you don't mind me asking? How do other teams reach out to your team when they have questions if your team is primarily in a group chat?
300+ people, multiple countries, multiple time zones. Team contact points are listed in Confluence documents. It's pretty rare for one team to actually need to communicate with another team. Most...
300+ people, multiple countries, multiple time zones. Team contact points are listed in Confluence documents. It's pretty rare for one team to actually need to communicate with another team. Most teams also have a distribution list associated which can be used for email communication. Most communication is contained within a department and most teams are fully functional independent units.
Gotcha, thanks for the insight. I've never used Slack with less than 1k people, but I've also never worked somewhere with distribution lists. We reach out to other teams pretty often and I usually...
Gotcha, thanks for the insight. I've never used Slack with less than 1k people, but I've also never worked somewhere with distribution lists. We reach out to other teams pretty often and I usually get some answers through lurking in channels/search. Our Confluence pages are a mix of pretty great and "stale because the one person maintaining it left years ago".
This is the most truth I've read today. I remember having the same issues with company wikis in the past. It takes a ton of effort to keep documentation updated.
Our Confluence pages are a mix of pretty great and "stale because the one person maintaining it left years ago".
This is the most truth I've read today. I remember having the same issues with company wikis in the past. It takes a ton of effort to keep documentation updated.
It might be better than Teams, but Teams being a MS product and part of Office 365 gives it a huge advantage. Why would a company pay extra for something like Discord when they can get Teams...
It might be better than Teams, but Teams being a MS product and part of Office 365 gives it a huge advantage.
Why would a company pay extra for something like Discord when they can get Teams already bundled as part of their O365 subscription?
Efficiency, employee satisfaction? It is hard to compete with "free". I would argue the EU is on the right track going after Microsoft for antitrust in this area. If Teams hand to stand on it's...
Efficiency, employee satisfaction? It is hard to compete with "free". I would argue the EU is on the right track going after Microsoft for antitrust in this area. If Teams hand to stand on it's merits instead of just being bundled with O365 - it would rarely win.
It's still pretty cheap versus its competitors, even with its standalone license. I think a lot of the hate against teams comes down to familiarity and personal preference. Personally I detest...
It's still pretty cheap versus its competitors, even with its standalone license. I think a lot of the hate against teams comes down to familiarity and personal preference. Personally I detest slack, and wouldn't want my org to use it even if it were significantly cheaper than teams.
Discord's UI is also kinda meh to me. Not that I love Teams or anything, but I don't see a significant difference in objective performance between it and Discord.
I don’t think that’d be true. There’s a lot of competition in that space. Even slack is being crowded out. It’s also harder than you’d think - for companies to use it, you need things like HIPPA...
I don’t think that’d be true. There’s a lot of competition in that space. Even slack is being crowded out. It’s also harder than you’d think - for companies to use it, you need things like HIPPA certifications and a lot more admin control over spaces.
A lot of companies fall into the trap of trying to be too general, rather than being really good at one thing. That’s something discord has done well imo - they never spread themselves thin trying to be slack.
archive link https://web.archive.org/web/20250306203933/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/discord-ipo.html Not thrilled if they do, but I suppose it is inevitable. Hopefully they're...
Not thrilled if they do, but I suppose it is inevitable. Hopefully they're slow with the enshittification because teamspeak v5/v6 doesn't have server files yet because its super beta.
I hate how comfortable discord is too, it provides an unrivaled experience. I sit every day in vc with friends just streaming whatever I'm playing, or sometimes watch podcasts with my brother. It's going to be a great loss if/when it really does kill itself. So many communities use it for everything. I've been paying for nitro for some time to hope I could help scare this end off, but it's got way too many users for me to even make a dent.
Matrix/Element and friends might be the place to go for text based discussion moving forward, however it's unlikely it'll fill the niche that discord had for games/voice/streaming. Honestly...
Matrix/Element and friends might be the place to go for text based discussion moving forward, however it's unlikely it'll fill the niche that discord had for games/voice/streaming.
Honestly discord has always frustrated the hell out of me over simple things. I run better discord just because I can't make the damn window small enough or hide channels otherwise, and I don't need my chat window monopolizing 1/3rd of my screen 90% of the time.
It is a shame to see it go private, as yes it's likely it'll go off a cliff and I do think they did a great job threading the needle though of making a useful product that didn't require payment, but still allowed those who wanted to to pay in and help support server costs and development.
Vanilla Discord recently introduced channel hiding, iirc, though the minimum window size still exists and is still annoying. Lately I've been using Vencord instead of BD though, has fewer mods but...
Vanilla Discord recently introduced channel hiding, iirc, though the minimum window size still exists and is still annoying. Lately I've been using Vencord instead of BD though, has fewer mods but they cover my needs and the overall experience feels smoother.
Ooh good to know. Better disord has been inconsistent and choking lately (seems to randomly not let me hide channels) so something else to test would be nice. Edit- I misspoke. When I said channel...
Ooh good to know. Better disord has been inconsistent and choking lately (seems to randomly not let me hide channels) so something else to test would be nice.
Edit-
I misspoke. When I said channel hiding I meant "collapse the entire list and let me get my screen space back".
I mostly navigate channels through the various hotkeys and search, and so it's dead space to me that I only sometimes want to pull up. Sadly this is not a vencord feature as far as I can tell, so better discord it is.
My group tried Matrix/Riot(Element) in like 2017 and it was rough. I assume it might be better now. We consistently didn't get notifications on mobile which was a deal breaker for a communications...
My group tried Matrix/Riot(Element) in like 2017 and it was rough. I assume it might be better now. We consistently didn't get notifications on mobile which was a deal breaker for a communications app. And the self-hosting of it was not good and we couldn't get it to work at the time. Again I assume that is hopefully better. For sure may be something to look into.
I just got into it a week or two ago and it seemed pretty slick, but I also don't care about the mobile element of it. Sounds like it's gotten better but I can't confirm that section of it.
I just got into it a week or two ago and it seemed pretty slick, but I also don't care about the mobile element of it. Sounds like it's gotten better but I can't confirm that section of it.
Honest question, what's an alternative? Even tildes isn't magically safe from enshittification, it can happen here and anywhere else. I enjoy discord, I even run a moderately sized server (6500...
Honest question, what's an alternative? Even tildes isn't magically safe from enshittification, it can happen here and anywhere else. I enjoy discord, I even run a moderately sized server (6500 members), but if it gets to be a crappy service like reddit or Facebook or whatever else, I'll happily leave and find something new that isn't garbage.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Has tildes ever enshittified, or shown the slightest hint that it would enshittify? I’ve been here since nearly the beginning and never caught a...
Even tildes isn't magically safe from enshittification
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Has tildes ever enshittified, or shown the slightest hint that it would enshittify? I’ve been here since nearly the beginning and never caught a whiff of that.
Don't think it's extraordinary to claim that at all. Tildes lives and dies on the beliefs and behaviors of one person. If deimos says "fuck it, i'm out" and sells then yeah, that's how it happens.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Don't think it's extraordinary to claim that at all. Tildes lives and dies on the beliefs and behaviors of one person. If deimos says "fuck it, i'm out" and sells then yeah, that's how it happens.
It's actually crazy to consider how enshittified Discord already is when an IPO hasn't even been in the cards yet. It's all downhill from here and I already really dislike Discord.
It's actually crazy to consider how enshittified Discord already is when an IPO hasn't even been in the cards yet. It's all downhill from here and I already really dislike Discord.
Personally I've learned my lesson long ago, but my friend group is not willing to go back to the pain of mumble for gaming, and Matrix really is not where it needs to be in terms of usability....
Personally I've learned my lesson long ago, but my friend group is not willing to go back to the pain of mumble for gaming, and Matrix really is not where it needs to be in terms of usability.
Discord won out a long time ago, and trying to fight that tide was just completely pointless. I've been mostly fine letting venture capital fund the server time used by my video game voice chat. That said, I don't give control of my social life to any platform, that would be absolutely insane.
If Discord went bankrupt tomorrow, it really wouldn't affect my life at all besides having to spend an hour spinning up a mumble server and some other group chat platform and giving the details to my friends so we can continue sharing memes and playing games together.
People who's entire lives revolve around discord are in just as an awful position of people who's entire lives revolve around IRC or Matrix or Telegram. People are not bound to platforms. If the platform becomes obviously abusive, it shouldn't be too much trouble to find a new one.
I was trying to get friends to use XMPP back in 2009. It turns out that people will give up a lot for some convenience and polish. Honestly, it's depressing just how right the doomsayers have...
I was trying to get friends to use XMPP back in 2009. It turns out that people will give up a lot for some convenience and polish.
Honestly, it's depressing just how right the doomsayers have turned out to be. What Elon Musk has done to Twitter in particular is beyond what I thought was possible in the near future.
If Discord just.. cloned everything and make a "work" version they'd make a ton of money. Use the same tech, most of the same code - just strip out the gamer stuff. It's so much better than Microsoft Teams.
Better than Slack, too, and it doesn’t push new stuff added in pursuit of becoming an “everything tool” in my face nearly as often as Slack does.
Has Slack gotten a lot worse in the last couple of years? I last used it in mid 2023 in a corporate environment, and at that time I thought it offered a much less cluttered interface than discord. Though that may just be because I subscribe to way too many discord channels to keep it all tidy. 🤷♂️
I find it somewhat maze-like. There’s several different ways to access any given message and none are “right”, and any channel/person you haven’t pinned can be annoying to hunt down. As hinted at earlier they’ve also been trying to compete with Notion among other things, which I don’t care for at all. Slack only needs to be chat.
One thing that really bugs me about Discord is the search. I often want to search for a specific word or phrase and Discord always treats it as a fuzzy input and returns a bunch of messages that are completely not what I'm looking for. I never really had that experience with Slack, so maybe that contributed to my opinion that it is more organized.
Search is among Discord’s weakest points, no argument there.
Ah yes, the SharePoint strategy. Integrate with as much as you can and add as many features as possible while none of them work well.
It's fine, probably a little bloated but it still works for its core functionality really well. I think companies get way too caught up in adding stupid useless features that no one actually uses and it ends up making their products worse, but compared to some of the alternatives, slack at least still functions well at its core.
It has indeed. I knew it would as soon as Saleforce bought them, but it took about a year before they started pulling that crap. I moved our company to using Matrix for that exact reason.
As we've already gone over elsewhere, teams isn't going anywhere because it's the "good enough" tool that covers multiple avenues, and one of those is files and apps, which discord does not/is terrible at.
Slack is popular and Zoom is popular. Both are more expensive compared to Microsoft Teams - but have massive adoption. We also see people using GSuite, etc..
So clearly there is space for an alternative to Microsoft Teams. I would argue that Discord is better than Slack and nearly as good as Zoom for smaller group meetings. Not every company is Microsoft centric.
I'm not disagreeing, I'm just pointing out that you're comparing apples to oranges. Teams is not trying to be better at being slack than slack is. It's not trying to be better than zoom than zoom is (although I'd argue in my experience it actually has been by far).
Gsuite is probably the only office software I've used that I dislike MORE than MS, but again it fits the needs of many smaller environments.
Teams is trying to be a part of the MS suite which solves a small to midsize business issue of managing all this stuff along with almost certainly having some sort of cloud instance. In theory "one" vendor, "one" product, and everything "just integrates". Heavy use of quotes because i'm intimately familiar with how badly that actually pans out, but that niche isn't going anywhere.
If Microsoft Teams wasn't bundled with Office 365 / Microsoft Office - adoption would drop. I firmly believe that. The only reason my company is using Microsoft Teams is because it is included in the cost of Office. We were already paying for it.
We didn't switch to teams because it was connected to active directory, onedrive, or was some sort of "all in one solution". We switched because it was cheaper - I was involved in the decision to switch. Slack is WAY more expensive by comparison.
My work switched from Slack to Teams and I miss Slack every day.
Sure it wasn’t great, and it had its problems, but the layout of it just seemed much nicer and it was significantly easier to navigate than teams.
Not disagreeing with that either.
Edit-
Or rather to be clear, not disagreeing with bundling being a huge factor. Of course it is. I do think people underestimate how useful it can be if properly configured, but that's another problem of the MS office suite, in that it basically assumes you've got someone (or more often, many someone's), who know how to configure, deploy, and maintain it. More than you should need.
Funny enough, the fact that it is bundled is why we don't use it. Our small org has zero need for O365. That being said, I do not like Teams at all and am glad the bundling makes it easy to dismiss to management.
Sorry to say, while teams is bundled with all of the M365 business plans, there is also a standalone option at $4/user/month.
That pricing is a little outrageous for a messaging app, but its still significantly cheaper than slack, which is $15 per user user per month for the business+ license, the absolute cheapest license they have which meets the acceptable minimum standards for business software (SSO integration).
Does teams integrate with SSO, not including Microsoft exchange?
Decently sure the answer is yes, although i've not worked with the standalone teams.
I was not aware of that stand alone price point, but I am glad it didn't interrupt our move off of Slack.
We ditched Slack before it hit that price point, but it was already far too high for a product we did not like and had very frequent (mostly minor) issues. I had been eyeing Matrix for a long while and waiting for it to hit a threshold of usability. Slack started to get really annoying the last year we used it so we pulled the trigger. I have used Teams with our partner companies as they are Windows only shops, and it is miserable IMO. It just feels like a continuation of Skype in all the worst ways, just with more MS-centric tie ins.
Zoom kinda sucks TBH, the only real reason it took off is that it's the only product that can handle large scale video conferencing since google meet wasn't really set up for it before hand.
Haven't used Teams, but up until recently, Discord required a user to enter a title per thread. Actually, that requirement was different depending on if you were on mobile or desktop. It's a pain as a gamer, but it's a non-starter for a work environment where threads are practically a requirement to not gum up a channel. Discord doesn't have it in their DNA to be a corporate product.
This is primarily an issue for how you organize. My work barely uses the "Teams" side of Microsoft Teams. We primarily use group chats with purpose specific names. Artifacts/documents are stored in Confluence.
We use Teams as an ephemeral chat service for pseudo-realtime communication - not as a knowledge repository.
Yeah I always hear people talking shit on Teams and it works great for my small 4 man team. We don't touch the Teams side and have 3 group chats. One general yapping group chat (with some other members in it), one for the main software product we maintain, and a third for video game related yapping. It works great. Voice calls / screen shares seem to always work. Much better than skype used to.
How large of a company, if you don't mind me asking? How do other teams reach out to your team when they have questions if your team is primarily in a group chat?
300+ people, multiple countries, multiple time zones. Team contact points are listed in Confluence documents. It's pretty rare for one team to actually need to communicate with another team. Most teams also have a distribution list associated which can be used for email communication. Most communication is contained within a department and most teams are fully functional independent units.
Gotcha, thanks for the insight. I've never used Slack with less than 1k people, but I've also never worked somewhere with distribution lists. We reach out to other teams pretty often and I usually get some answers through lurking in channels/search. Our Confluence pages are a mix of pretty great and "stale because the one person maintaining it left years ago".
This is the most truth I've read today. I remember having the same issues with company wikis in the past. It takes a ton of effort to keep documentation updated.
It might be better than Teams, but Teams being a MS product and part of Office 365 gives it a huge advantage.
Why would a company pay extra for something like Discord when they can get Teams already bundled as part of their O365 subscription?
Efficiency, employee satisfaction? It is hard to compete with "free". I would argue the EU is on the right track going after Microsoft for antitrust in this area. If Teams hand to stand on it's merits instead of just being bundled with O365 - it would rarely win.
It's still pretty cheap versus its competitors, even with its standalone license. I think a lot of the hate against teams comes down to familiarity and personal preference. Personally I detest slack, and wouldn't want my org to use it even if it were significantly cheaper than teams.
Discord's UI is also kinda meh to me. Not that I love Teams or anything, but I don't see a significant difference in objective performance between it and Discord.
I don’t think that’d be true. There’s a lot of competition in that space. Even slack is being crowded out. It’s also harder than you’d think - for companies to use it, you need things like HIPPA certifications and a lot more admin control over spaces.
A lot of companies fall into the trap of trying to be too general, rather than being really good at one thing. That’s something discord has done well imo - they never spread themselves thin trying to be slack.
archive link https://web.archive.org/web/20250306203933/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/discord-ipo.html
Not thrilled if they do, but I suppose it is inevitable. Hopefully they're slow with the enshittification because teamspeak v5/v6 doesn't have server files yet because its super beta.
I hate how comfortable discord is too, it provides an unrivaled experience. I sit every day in vc with friends just streaming whatever I'm playing, or sometimes watch podcasts with my brother. It's going to be a great loss if/when it really does kill itself. So many communities use it for everything. I've been paying for nitro for some time to hope I could help scare this end off, but it's got way too many users for me to even make a dent.
Matrix/Element and friends might be the place to go for text based discussion moving forward, however it's unlikely it'll fill the niche that discord had for games/voice/streaming.
Honestly discord has always frustrated the hell out of me over simple things. I run better discord just because I can't make the damn window small enough or hide channels otherwise, and I don't need my chat window monopolizing 1/3rd of my screen 90% of the time.
It is a shame to see it go private, as yes it's likely it'll go off a cliff and I do think they did a great job threading the needle though of making a useful product that didn't require payment, but still allowed those who wanted to to pay in and help support server costs and development.
Vanilla Discord recently introduced channel hiding, iirc, though the minimum window size still exists and is still annoying. Lately I've been using Vencord instead of BD though, has fewer mods but they cover my needs and the overall experience feels smoother.
Ooh good to know. Better disord has been inconsistent and choking lately (seems to randomly not let me hide channels) so something else to test would be nice.
Edit-
I misspoke. When I said channel hiding I meant "collapse the entire list and let me get my screen space back".
I mostly navigate channels through the various hotkeys and search, and so it's dead space to me that I only sometimes want to pull up. Sadly this is not a vencord feature as far as I can tell, so better discord it is.
My group tried Matrix/Riot(Element) in like 2017 and it was rough. I assume it might be better now. We consistently didn't get notifications on mobile which was a deal breaker for a communications app. And the self-hosting of it was not good and we couldn't get it to work at the time. Again I assume that is hopefully better. For sure may be something to look into.
I just got into it a week or two ago and it seemed pretty slick, but I also don't care about the mobile element of it. Sounds like it's gotten better but I can't confirm that section of it.
Mirror: https://archive.is/wwkt1
Oh boy, I can't wait for the enshittification of yet another service that we gave control of our social lives due to convenience and complacency!
Honest question, what's an alternative? Even tildes isn't magically safe from enshittification, it can happen here and anywhere else. I enjoy discord, I even run a moderately sized server (6500 members), but if it gets to be a crappy service like reddit or Facebook or whatever else, I'll happily leave and find something new that isn't garbage.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Has tildes ever enshittified, or shown the slightest hint that it would enshittify? I’ve been here since nearly the beginning and never caught a whiff of that.
Don't think it's extraordinary to claim that at all. Tildes lives and dies on the beliefs and behaviors of one person. If deimos says "fuck it, i'm out" and sells then yeah, that's how it happens.
It's actually crazy to consider how enshittified Discord already is when an IPO hasn't even been in the cards yet. It's all downhill from here and I already really dislike Discord.
This isn't directed at you, but is in the same vein as your comment:
So... when are y'all going to learn your lesson then?
Personally I've learned my lesson long ago, but my friend group is not willing to go back to the pain of mumble for gaming, and Matrix really is not where it needs to be in terms of usability.
Discord won out a long time ago, and trying to fight that tide was just completely pointless. I've been mostly fine letting venture capital fund the server time used by my video game voice chat. That said, I don't give control of my social life to any platform, that would be absolutely insane.
If Discord went bankrupt tomorrow, it really wouldn't affect my life at all besides having to spend an hour spinning up a mumble server and some other group chat platform and giving the details to my friends so we can continue sharing memes and playing games together.
People who's entire lives revolve around discord are in just as an awful position of people who's entire lives revolve around IRC or Matrix or Telegram. People are not bound to platforms. If the platform becomes obviously abusive, it shouldn't be too much trouble to find a new one.
I was trying to get friends to use XMPP back in 2009. It turns out that people will give up a lot for some convenience and polish.
Honestly, it's depressing just how right the doomsayers have turned out to be. What Elon Musk has done to Twitter in particular is beyond what I thought was possible in the near future.