I have begrudgingly used discord for many years now. Mainly, I dislike the lack of privacy, but it's where many communities I like to be a part of gather these days online; it's kind of the...
I have begrudgingly used discord for many years now. Mainly, I dislike the lack of privacy, but it's where many communities I like to be a part of gather these days online; it's kind of the defacto communications platform for anything related gaming of any kind. I think this change may end up pushing me away from it entirely, while I don't know anything about the new CEO coming in, this bit has me very concerned:
Humam brings more than 15 years of experience in the gaming industry, including at Activision Blizzard where he served as Chief Strategy Officer helping guide franchises like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty.
I've been avoiding Activision Blizzard games for a while now because of how hostile they are to consumers. My prediction is that this will lead to enshitification as Discord tries to maximise shareholder value.
If they're bringing in someone new and talking about creating long term value, it almost certainly means changes. I agree enshitification seems imminent. A cynical read is they know the next phase...
If they're bringing in someone new and talking about creating long term value, it almost certainly means changes. I agree enshitification seems imminent.
A cynical read is they know the next phase won't be smooth (unpopular changes to UX//monetization at best, loss of market share at worst) and don't want to be the one responsible for it.
However, as I look at what is needed of Discord’s CEO over the next few years, I realize that it’s time for me to literally “hire myself out of a job.”
Also agree. Discord had a good run, but all the enshitification elements are showing up day by day, I suspect it's going to get worse and worst until it is indeed basically unusable. The annoying...
Also agree. Discord had a good run, but all the enshitification elements are showing up day by day, I suspect it's going to get worse and worst until it is indeed basically unusable.
The annoying thing is, it's going to take ages for the "next cool platform" to debut. And we might have a Facebook or Reddit problem on our hands here where the breakup of discord doesn't mean the userbase goes to one place, but fractures across many, and it's a fucking nightmare.
If my gaming friends end up on 3 different platforms that all do audio and video slightly differently, I'm going to scream.
I think it'll likely be a reddit situation, simply because convenience is king. It'll get progressively worse, but probably too gradually to prompt a mass exodus. Plus, there are competitors but...
I think it'll likely be a reddit situation, simply because convenience is king. It'll get progressively worse, but probably too gradually to prompt a mass exodus. Plus, there are competitors but none outside of Teamspeak that are that well known.
Discord will probably never die, in the same way reddit hasn't. I don't browse reddit at all anymore, but I'll still include "reddit" in my search queries because all those niche communities are still there. It'll probably be the same for Discord.
If only, I have several folders full of servers I have absolutely no interest in besides keeping up with the development of a game/app/plugin/etc. I have no idea how we ended up in this convoluted...
If only, I have several folders full of servers I have absolutely no interest in besides keeping up with the development of a game/app/plugin/etc. I have no idea how we ended up in this convoluted setup where Discord just hoards info that could be up on a forum.
Yeah it’s such a poor substitute for community forums. I’m disappointed nobody’s just made a modern version of PhPBB for creators to spin up without effort. Those large community discord servers...
Yeah it’s such a poor substitute for community forums. I’m disappointed nobody’s just made a modern version of PhPBB for creators to spin up without effort. Those large community discord servers are basically unusable because they’re just too darn active. Once your active participant count starts to get into the hundreds the pace is just too fast to keep up with as a conversation platform. It just fills up with low effort trolling and spam.
Yeah that does look pretty decent. This actually looks like exactly the solution I’ve been searching for to set up a shared database/chat service for my condo building. I was leaning towards using...
Yeah that does look pretty decent. This actually looks like exactly the solution I’ve been searching for to set up a shared database/chat service for my condo building. I was leaning towards using Slack and connecting it to a Notion instance formatted as a website but this seems to basically hit the “chat room + bulletin board + wiki for neighborhood resources and homeownership things” needs on its own.
Now the big challenge to crack is identity. I think what makes Reddit and Discord take off is that you login to one place and all the stuff is there. For some reason stuff like “Login with Google” or “Login with Apple” can’t seem to catch on widely enough, and the very fact of needing a “sign up” flow drops a lot of people off.
I personally don't use third party company login flows because I've been burned by the third parties in the past. Years ago I lost access to my Google account and Google's anti-phishing measures...
I personally don't use third party company login flows because I've been burned by the third parties in the past. Years ago I lost access to my Google account and Google's anti-phishing measures mostly seem to consist of making it completely impossible to speak a human that could ever help you. So now I avoid those kinds of things like the plague so that they don't manage to take all my other accounts with them when something bad happens. Well, that and I don't really want all my stuff connected. In fact, my biggest gripe with Discord is that I don't really want the same name connected between different online groups.
I'm not sure why they haven't really caught on more though as I don't think the average person really cares about either of those things.
Yeah back when Twitter was casting about for a reason to justify its existence I actually thought it had space to set itself up as a kind of “internet drivers’ license” where your Twitter account...
Yeah back when Twitter was casting about for a reason to justify its existence I actually thought it had space to set itself up as a kind of “internet drivers’ license” where your Twitter account can sort of affirm who you are with various paid tiers for more serious levels of authentication and verification. The microblogging service would have still been there but the real would be the account as a universal social account.
Does PhPBB support comment tree/threaded replies? The biggest problem with legacy style forums is that any level of off topic conversation or an argument between two people could make a thread...
Does PhPBB support comment tree/threaded replies? The biggest problem with legacy style forums is that any level of off topic conversation or an argument between two people could make a thread very difficult to follow. This is a definite weakness of Discord, too, but I just can't imagine going back to traditional forums with no comment trees.
I'm aware of nothing that really solves this problem, but at the same time I think there's several things people should have noticed by now when it comes to internet discussion and i'm shocked we...
I'm aware of nothing that really solves this problem, but at the same time I think there's several things people should have noticed by now when it comes to internet discussion and i'm shocked we haven't seen a product that helps handle that?
The "ideal" in my eyes is:
Forums for long term posting
Basic chat for quick discussions
On both, the ability to branch out from a discussion
The one i've never seen, the ability to RE GROUP a branch. Some common patterns are someone says X, and then 2-20 people ask followup questions/Many people have said multiple things that someone feels they can weigh in on. The ability to grab all these threads and group them to "hey here's the answers you were all asking about" without having to chase it down and answer everything would help conversation flow a lot, but it is something that would take some rethinking to visually display. Old forums kinda did this as they at least allowed easy multiquote, so you could quickly group all the questions you got, but things like discord or anything spawned off of reddit (like tildes) doesn't really support it.
Oh also every pattern and thing learned from twitter should probably die in a fire. I feel like it's literally an antipattern designed to cause confusion and waste time. This is great for "oooh look you happened to stay on the page longer, or misunderstood something and yelled, or whatever" but if you actually want to quickly display information there's basically nothing worse than what twitter has taught us.
It doesn’t, and I guess I never minded it as much but most PHPBB forums I was on were either too small for it to be an issue or had active moderation who would stop back-and-forth bickering if it...
It doesn’t, and I guess I never minded it as much but most PHPBB forums I was on were either too small for it to be an issue or had active moderation who would stop back-and-forth bickering if it started to get out of hand.
One cultural shift I’ve noticed online now is actually people’s attitudes towards being moderated. When I was moderating an old discussion forum it was pretty normal for mods to come in and be like “Hey shut up” and mute people for an hour or a day or more. And then they’d bitch about it when they came back for a bit and it’s back to normal. Sometimes there would be meltdowns over moderation that would wreck the whole community, but nowadays it often feels like the meltdown is the default outcome of any kind of mute.
On the response to moderation, I wonder if it's to do with most modern social media being viewed as a public town square, rather than somewhere private that someone actually owns, hosts, controls...
On the response to moderation, I wonder if it's to do with most modern social media being viewed as a public town square, rather than somewhere private that someone actually owns, hosts, controls and moderates and which you've been invited to participate in.
It connects to patreon so as creators have needed to have individual income streams offering community space as part of that has been really successful IME. Most of my servers are for one thing,...
It connects to patreon so as creators have needed to have individual income streams offering community space as part of that has been really successful IME. Most of my servers are for one thing, often for something with a patreon
Ok I was maybe being a little dramatic, I agree discord won't die, same with reddit and Facebook. They simply get so bad they fracture their userbase at somepoint. The sad thing about it is they...
Ok I was maybe being a little dramatic, I agree discord won't die, same with reddit and Facebook. They simply get so bad they fracture their userbase at somepoint.
The sad thing about it is they all get such huge market share and are great platforms, then sell out and it's a horrible cycle.
There's a parallel dimension where we have one social media platform and it doesn't suck.
Absolutely. The annoying store banners they've added over the last few months have been the hint that they were starting to head down this road. While I'm sympathetic for the need for funding...
My prediction is that this will lead to enshitification as Discord tries to maximise shareholder value.
Absolutely. The annoying store banners they've added over the last few months have been the hint that they were starting to head down this road. While I'm sympathetic for the need for funding (just hosting all of the stuff free users upload indefinitely can't be cheap), "notification" style ads are a huge annoyance for me.
These days, I rarely use any of the voice or video functionality. Instead, it's how my weekly D&D group communicates with one another outside of the game and has been the number one way I chat with my brother and, during work hours, my wife. (We used to use Google Hangouts, but then Google did the Google thing of killing it.) Discord has a lot of handy chat functionality that I appreciate.
Time to start shopping for a new chat platform, I guess. Ideally one my D&D group can upload images to.
So with the impending IPO and enshittification, does anyone have any hands-on experience with running (or just being in) a Matrix community at scale? The only Matrix spaces I've tried out where...
So with the impending IPO and enshittification, does anyone have any hands-on experience with running (or just being in) a Matrix community at scale?
The only Matrix spaces I've tried out where small and quite dead. No one ever uploaded media nor used the voice/video chatting. So I still don't know how ready it is for prime time.
I used Matrix for about two years as the primary location for the community for self-hosted software project I maintain. That community had about 100–150 users, maybe 20 of which were “active”. I...
I used Matrix for about two years as the primary location for the community for self-hosted software project I maintain. That community had about 100–150 users, maybe 20 of which were “active”. I really wanted to avoid building an open source community on top of a proprietary service like Discord, so I used Matrix (on the Gitter home server).
It ended up being untenable, unfortunately (and we are now on Discord). Here were the main things we ran into:
The flagship client app, Element, is very buggy.
It constantly rendered threads in the incorrect order, requiring a full restart of the app to resolve
Editing messages with formatting often removed the formatting
Trying to navigate to a message in a search result resulted in an error like 70% of the time
Etc, etc
Folks are just unfamiliar with it. Many members of the community didn't realize that there was a standalone app at all, and only used the Gitter web app on their desktop browser
End-to-end encrypted DMs by default is awesome — folks constantly losing access to those DMs because they (Element??) somehow lost their encryption keys is not so awesome.
Media upload basically works fine (I don't remember any issues with it, at least), and we never tried voice/video chatting, I don't think!
Tried to move my site’s paying subscribers to Matrix. It was frustrating. The e2ee is very confusing and we lost access to messages frequently when adding a new device or just using different...
Tried to move my site’s paying subscribers to Matrix. It was frustrating. The e2ee is very confusing and we lost access to messages frequently when adding a new device or just using different ones.
Element X, their new mobile app, is a step forward to fix this issue, but it’s weird to restrict usage to one app since Matrix is advertised as an open, use-your-preferred-app platform.
I really wish it were easier for regular folks. It’s not there yet.
How recent are these issues? I've been using Matrix for my personal messaging needs for a few years now. It was often buggy and messy for a while but in the last 6 months to a year I feel like...
How recent are these issues? I've been using Matrix for my personal messaging needs for a few years now. It was often buggy and messy for a while but in the last 6 months to a year I feel like it's been really solid.
Notably, this isn't actually an answer to "How long ago was this". I agree with parent that Matrix required patience earlier on, but has made very noticable progress over the last 6-12 months,...
Notably, this isn't actually an answer to "How long ago was this". I agree with parent that Matrix required patience earlier on, but has made very noticable progress over the last 6-12 months, with "Unable to Decrypt" errors becoming much less common, and on-boarding being more streamlined
I think matrix is the future even if it’s not a full replacement for discord today. I use it daily to interact with a few communities, and I think it’s a fine enough replacement for discord that I...
I think matrix is the future even if it’s not a full replacement for discord today. I use it daily to interact with a few communities, and I think it’s a fine enough replacement for discord that I could get my friends to live with it after discord shits the bed.
A request for everyone mentioning alternatives: can you please share links to them, and talk about your experiences with them and their features, especially if it's recent? I personally prefer...
A request for everyone mentioning alternatives: can you please share links to them, and talk about your experiences with them and their features, especially if it's recent? I personally prefer hearing directly from users about their experiences, since that can include details that won't be covered in the official marketing or old posts on reddit that may deal with outdated issues/features.
Sure thing! So my friend group (~20 people in one discord server) brought this up yesterday and we discussed a potential move, especially as we're trying to divest from US companies as much as...
Exemplary
Sure thing! So my friend group (~20 people in one discord server) brought this up yesterday and we discussed a potential move, especially as we're trying to divest from US companies as much as possible (we're in the EU), and this was our general experience trying all the relevant apps (that we know of):
By far the most similar to discord in terms of on-boarding, UI layout, server setup, functionality, etc. It's really trying to be a 1 to 1 discord clone.
We especially liked that we could freely use as many emotes as we wanted, animated or not, since we care a lot about that on our discord server.
Client was blazing fast. I have a potato PC and discord can be a lag machine but Revolt ran buttery smooth. On their github they mention they're rewriting the client in Tauri so that should make it even better.
Lack of video streaming was our only major gripe with it, and probably the biggest compromise when compared to discord.
There was some instability, the client crashed a few times for me, and in general it feels very "alpha"
Overall, we felt like this app was the easiest to get on board with coming from discord. It definitely feels like it's in its infancy but it seems usable if you're willing to put up with its growing pains.
Setup was a bit convoluted with the whole choosing a server thing and the encryption key thing. I was already familiar with it but my friends aren't.
How the actual server is structured wasn't super intuitive, it was hard to figure out what was what.
Lack of emotes and other fun functions was a big let down for casual users that just want to goof around.
It seems like group video calling and screen sharing isn't very stable yet
Overall, we felt like this was a more tech-oriented app that wasn't the best for casual users. Too much of a hassle to setup. Probably better if you self host it.
By far the best voice experience we had, which isn't surprising given the app is geared toward that.
Unfortunately the lack of proper text channel support meant it wasn't the one for us (by that I mean the text history isn't even saved if you logout and login). The app is clearly voice/video first.
It's also paid-only which we personally didn't mind but I'm sure some would.
Overall, while we felt it was awesome if all we cared about is voice and video calling, the ephemeral nature of its chat function was a non starter.
The biggest takeaway I and my friends got from this little discovery journey is that discord really nailed it in combining permanent group chat with channel/forum-like organization and audio/video calling. Having all those working smoothly in one app really puts it a cut above all of the competition and makes fostering a community incredibly easy, which in turn makes it very hard and frustrating to change. It's an everything app basically.
So everything else is a compromise, requiring you to use multiple different apps to attain the same functionality. Some might be ok with that, some might not, but it is the current situation I feel.
Sidenote, we were also aware of Guilded, which is a much more robust discord alternative, but it's A) US owned, and B) corporate owned, which means that sooner or later it will enshittify in the search for money, so we immediately discarded it. But I am leaving it here anyway for those curious.
Hope that gave some perspective! I'm sorry it's not a very technical breakdown but we're almost all casual users of the platform so.
Thanks for the input! Honestly I feel like hearing details from casual users can be even more helpful, since most people talking about the pros and cons of these sorts of apps will be more...
Thanks for the input! Honestly I feel like hearing details from casual users can be even more helpful, since most people talking about the pros and cons of these sorts of apps will be more tech-oriented. Given one of Discord's biggest appeals is the ease of accessibility for brand new users with minimal tech knowledge, it's an important consideration. Just hearing the struggles setting up Element and the lack of emotes have already made me eliminate that one as a potential substitute for the servers I run.
Was about to mention that. My friend group and I had a Mumble server for awhile to replace large Skype group calls. Discord is convenient but Mumble could make a comeback if Discord gets crappy
Was about to mention that. My friend group and I had a Mumble server for awhile to replace large Skype group calls.
Discord is convenient but Mumble could make a comeback if Discord gets crappy
I know that Mumble is still popular within the Eve Online community. Several of the big bloc alliances ("clans of clans") use it as their primary voice comms system. It was fine. Especially when...
I know that Mumble is still popular within the Eve Online community. Several of the big bloc alliances ("clans of clans") use it as their primary voice comms system. It was fine. Especially when you have fleet ops with hundreds of players and multiple commanders up in their channels, shouting down to the other channels to give orders. Rarely had any issues with stability or poor voice quality.
Guilded just looks like it's going to have the exact same Discord problem in 3-5 years. Revolt at least looks reasonably forkable, helping sidestep the platform degradation.
Guilded just looks like it's going to have the exact same Discord problem in 3-5 years. Revolt at least looks reasonably forkable, helping sidestep the platform degradation.
I actually made an account with them a long time ago... it's owned by Roblox which kinda gives me the ick, but I could poke it again and see where it's at now.
I actually made an account with them a long time ago... it's owned by Roblox which kinda gives me the ick, but I could poke it again and see where it's at now.
I'd be keen to learn how your experimentation goes. The only other platform I had looked at was Matrix and it was many years ago. It seemed fine for 1:1 IM conversations but not great for discord...
I'd be keen to learn how your experimentation goes. The only other platform I had looked at was Matrix and it was many years ago. It seemed fine for 1:1 IM conversations but not great for discord like servers/chats.
Went through the setup process tonight for Revolt. It's a bit barebones with a lot of the backend features missing compared to Discord. That being said, I don't mind it! They've even got the...
Went through the setup process tonight for Revolt. It's a bit barebones with a lot of the backend features missing compared to Discord.
That being said, I don't mind it! They've even got the android app that's in alpha/experimental right now, which I've been derping around with. So they've got room for improvement, but they're also filling that room with updates and features. :P
I'm hoping things like matrix/element wind up more adopted. It's mostly in tech circles right now, if discord is finally going to jump the shark I wouldn't mind something that isn't as borderline...
I'm hoping things like matrix/element wind up more adopted. It's mostly in tech circles right now, if discord is finally going to jump the shark I wouldn't mind something that isn't as borderline hostile.
I pay for Nitro. Because I want my emojis cross-server! But yeah, worrying that this is happening. I guess everyone knew it was coming eventually though. The one I've been watching a little is...
I pay for Nitro. Because I want my emojis cross-server! But yeah, worrying that this is happening. I guess everyone knew it was coming eventually though.
The one I've been watching a little is Teamspeak 6. My friends and I still use Teamspeak daily (we come from Planetside 2, where Teamspeak was used widely before Discord got big). We maintain a Discord server, but that's just for persistent text chat and streaming. Even if someone is streaming a game or a show and rest of us are watching, we'll still almost always using Teamspeak for separate voice comms.
Anyway, Teamspeak 6 is supposedly going to be very Discord-esque. Teamspeak 5 was already moving in that direction with, I think, at lest UI-wise. But my group never really adopted it, and I'm not sure if there was ever wide adoption. Teamspeak 3 is what we're using still. Version 6 will support streaming and all that. Which is a big deal.
Right now, I think the only way groups can try Teamspeak 6 is by renting a server from Teamspeak directly. But obviously the draw of Teamspeak (and Ventrilo and Mumble) is self-hosting and self-management. It's super cheap (I use a $7/mo Digital Ocean droplet for ours). Supposedly, Teamspeak 6 server will be unveiled for those who want to self-host.
My concern, however, is with bandwidth use while streaming. Discord is great since it's all on Discord's server and it's "free." But if I'm hosting a Teamspeak 6 server, in the cloud or even on my homelab, and someone is streaming a game for the rest of us to watch, how much bandwidth will that use? With my digital ocean droplet, how high will that bill be with TS6 handling the stream? I have 1GB up/down FIOS at home. If I'm hosting TS6 from my homelab server, how many streamers/viewers can we have before my home Internet connection is saturated?
I have begrudgingly used discord for many years now. Mainly, I dislike the lack of privacy, but it's where many communities I like to be a part of gather these days online; it's kind of the defacto communications platform for anything related gaming of any kind. I think this change may end up pushing me away from it entirely, while I don't know anything about the new CEO coming in, this bit has me very concerned:
I've been avoiding Activision Blizzard games for a while now because of how hostile they are to consumers. My prediction is that this will lead to enshitification as Discord tries to maximise shareholder value.
Couldn’t agree more - Having “chief strategy officer” of Activision Blizzard on your resume is not something I ever want to see.
If they're bringing in someone new and talking about creating long term value, it almost certainly means changes. I agree enshitification seems imminent.
A cynical read is they know the next phase won't be smooth (unpopular changes to UX//monetization at best, loss of market share at worst) and don't want to be the one responsible for it.
Edit: typos
Also agree. Discord had a good run, but all the enshitification elements are showing up day by day, I suspect it's going to get worse and worst until it is indeed basically unusable.
The annoying thing is, it's going to take ages for the "next cool platform" to debut. And we might have a Facebook or Reddit problem on our hands here where the breakup of discord doesn't mean the userbase goes to one place, but fractures across many, and it's a fucking nightmare.
If my gaming friends end up on 3 different platforms that all do audio and video slightly differently, I'm going to scream.
I think it'll likely be a reddit situation, simply because convenience is king. It'll get progressively worse, but probably too gradually to prompt a mass exodus. Plus, there are competitors but none outside of Teamspeak that are that well known.
Discord will probably never die, in the same way reddit hasn't. I don't browse reddit at all anymore, but I'll still include "reddit" in my search queries because all those niche communities are still there. It'll probably be the same for Discord.
If only, I have several folders full of servers I have absolutely no interest in besides keeping up with the development of a game/app/plugin/etc. I have no idea how we ended up in this convoluted setup where Discord just hoards info that could be up on a forum.
Yeah it’s such a poor substitute for community forums. I’m disappointed nobody’s just made a modern version of PhPBB for creators to spin up without effort. Those large community discord servers are basically unusable because they’re just too darn active. Once your active participant count starts to get into the hundreds the pace is just too fast to keep up with as a conversation platform. It just fills up with low effort trolling and spam.
I'm personally partial to Discourse as a modern forum. Still requires some care to get set up but it's pretty hands-off once it's configured.
Yeah that does look pretty decent. This actually looks like exactly the solution I’ve been searching for to set up a shared database/chat service for my condo building. I was leaning towards using Slack and connecting it to a Notion instance formatted as a website but this seems to basically hit the “chat room + bulletin board + wiki for neighborhood resources and homeownership things” needs on its own.
Now the big challenge to crack is identity. I think what makes Reddit and Discord take off is that you login to one place and all the stuff is there. For some reason stuff like “Login with Google” or “Login with Apple” can’t seem to catch on widely enough, and the very fact of needing a “sign up” flow drops a lot of people off.
I personally don't use third party company login flows because I've been burned by the third parties in the past. Years ago I lost access to my Google account and Google's anti-phishing measures mostly seem to consist of making it completely impossible to speak a human that could ever help you. So now I avoid those kinds of things like the plague so that they don't manage to take all my other accounts with them when something bad happens. Well, that and I don't really want all my stuff connected. In fact, my biggest gripe with Discord is that I don't really want the same name connected between different online groups.
I'm not sure why they haven't really caught on more though as I don't think the average person really cares about either of those things.
Yeah back when Twitter was casting about for a reason to justify its existence I actually thought it had space to set itself up as a kind of “internet drivers’ license” where your Twitter account can sort of affirm who you are with various paid tiers for more serious levels of authentication and verification. The microblogging service would have still been there but the real would be the account as a universal social account.
Alas, it was not to be.
Flarum is another option, similar to Discourse.
Does PhPBB support comment tree/threaded replies? The biggest problem with legacy style forums is that any level of off topic conversation or an argument between two people could make a thread very difficult to follow. This is a definite weakness of Discord, too, but I just can't imagine going back to traditional forums with no comment trees.
I'm aware of nothing that really solves this problem, but at the same time I think there's several things people should have noticed by now when it comes to internet discussion and i'm shocked we haven't seen a product that helps handle that?
The "ideal" in my eyes is:
Oh also every pattern and thing learned from twitter should probably die in a fire. I feel like it's literally an antipattern designed to cause confusion and waste time. This is great for "oooh look you happened to stay on the page longer, or misunderstood something and yelled, or whatever" but if you actually want to quickly display information there's basically nothing worse than what twitter has taught us.
It doesn’t, and I guess I never minded it as much but most PHPBB forums I was on were either too small for it to be an issue or had active moderation who would stop back-and-forth bickering if it started to get out of hand.
One cultural shift I’ve noticed online now is actually people’s attitudes towards being moderated. When I was moderating an old discussion forum it was pretty normal for mods to come in and be like “Hey shut up” and mute people for an hour or a day or more. And then they’d bitch about it when they came back for a bit and it’s back to normal. Sometimes there would be meltdowns over moderation that would wreck the whole community, but nowadays it often feels like the meltdown is the default outcome of any kind of mute.
On the response to moderation, I wonder if it's to do with most modern social media being viewed as a public town square, rather than somewhere private that someone actually owns, hosts, controls and moderates and which you've been invited to participate in.
It connects to patreon so as creators have needed to have individual income streams offering community space as part of that has been really successful IME. Most of my servers are for one thing, often for something with a patreon
Ok I was maybe being a little dramatic, I agree discord won't die, same with reddit and Facebook. They simply get so bad they fracture their userbase at somepoint.
The sad thing about it is they all get such huge market share and are great platforms, then sell out and it's a horrible cycle.
There's a parallel dimension where we have one social media platform and it doesn't suck.
Absolutely. The annoying store banners they've added over the last few months have been the hint that they were starting to head down this road. While I'm sympathetic for the need for funding (just hosting all of the stuff free users upload indefinitely can't be cheap), "notification" style ads are a huge annoyance for me.
These days, I rarely use any of the voice or video functionality. Instead, it's how my weekly D&D group communicates with one another outside of the game and has been the number one way I chat with my brother and, during work hours, my wife. (We used to use Google Hangouts, but then Google did the Google thing of killing it.) Discord has a lot of handy chat functionality that I appreciate.
Time to start shopping for a new chat platform, I guess. Ideally one my D&D group can upload images to.
So with the impending IPO and enshittification, does anyone have any hands-on experience with running (or just being in) a Matrix community at scale?
The only Matrix spaces I've tried out where small and quite dead. No one ever uploaded media nor used the voice/video chatting. So I still don't know how ready it is for prime time.
I used Matrix for about two years as the primary location for the community for self-hosted software project I maintain. That community had about 100–150 users, maybe 20 of which were “active”. I really wanted to avoid building an open source community on top of a proprietary service like Discord, so I used Matrix (on the Gitter home server).
It ended up being untenable, unfortunately (and we are now on Discord). Here were the main things we ran into:
Media upload basically works fine (I don't remember any issues with it, at least), and we never tried voice/video chatting, I don't think!
Tried to move my site’s paying subscribers to Matrix. It was frustrating. The e2ee is very confusing and we lost access to messages frequently when adding a new device or just using different ones.
Element X, their new mobile app, is a step forward to fix this issue, but it’s weird to restrict usage to one app since Matrix is advertised as an open, use-your-preferred-app platform.
I really wish it were easier for regular folks. It’s not there yet.
How recent are these issues? I've been using Matrix for my personal messaging needs for a few years now. It was often buggy and messy for a while but in the last 6 months to a year I feel like it's been really solid.
Notably, this isn't actually an answer to "How long ago was this". I agree with parent that Matrix required patience earlier on, but has made very noticable progress over the last 6-12 months, with "Unable to Decrypt" errors becoming much less common, and on-boarding being more streamlined
There's no reason to be so aggressive.
I think matrix is the future even if it’s not a full replacement for discord today. I use it daily to interact with a few communities, and I think it’s a fine enough replacement for discord that I could get my friends to live with it after discord shits the bed.
A request for everyone mentioning alternatives: can you please share links to them, and talk about your experiences with them and their features, especially if it's recent? I personally prefer hearing directly from users about their experiences, since that can include details that won't be covered in the official marketing or old posts on reddit that may deal with outdated issues/features.
Sure thing! So my friend group (~20 people in one discord server) brought this up yesterday and we discussed a potential move, especially as we're trying to divest from US companies as much as possible (we're in the EU), and this was our general experience trying all the relevant apps (that we know of):
Revolt
Element (matrix)
Teamspeak
The biggest takeaway I and my friends got from this little discovery journey is that discord really nailed it in combining permanent group chat with channel/forum-like organization and audio/video calling. Having all those working smoothly in one app really puts it a cut above all of the competition and makes fostering a community incredibly easy, which in turn makes it very hard and frustrating to change. It's an everything app basically.
So everything else is a compromise, requiring you to use multiple different apps to attain the same functionality. Some might be ok with that, some might not, but it is the current situation I feel.
Sidenote, we were also aware of Guilded, which is a much more robust discord alternative, but it's A) US owned, and B) corporate owned, which means that sooner or later it will enshittify in the search for money, so we immediately discarded it. But I am leaving it here anyway for those curious.
Hope that gave some perspective! I'm sorry it's not a very technical breakdown but we're almost all casual users of the platform so.
Thanks for the input! Honestly I feel like hearing details from casual users can be even more helpful, since most people talking about the pros and cons of these sorts of apps will be more tech-oriented. Given one of Discord's biggest appeals is the ease of accessibility for brand new users with minimal tech knowledge, it's an important consideration. Just hearing the struggles setting up Element and the lack of emotes have already made me eliminate that one as a potential substitute for the servers I run.
I'm going to be giving TeamSpeak and Revolt a try over the weekend. Any other alternatives anyone can think of that I should try while I'm at it?
Mumble still kicks ass, and is open source.
Was about to mention that. My friend group and I had a Mumble server for awhile to replace large Skype group calls.
Discord is convenient but Mumble could make a comeback if Discord gets crappy
I'm surprised Mumble is still around. Mumble getting shitty is what made me go to Discord like 10 years ago. It's gotten better?
I know that Mumble is still popular within the Eve Online community. Several of the big bloc alliances ("clans of clans") use it as their primary voice comms system. It was fine. Especially when you have fleet ops with hundreds of players and multiple commanders up in their channels, shouting down to the other channels to give orders. Rarely had any issues with stability or poor voice quality.
Element was pretty cool
A more gaming focused alternative is Guilded, it's in the same vein as Revolt in that it essentially clones Discord UI.
Guilded just looks like it's going to have the exact same Discord problem in 3-5 years. Revolt at least looks reasonably forkable, helping sidestep the platform degradation.
I actually made an account with them a long time ago... it's owned by Roblox which kinda gives me the ick, but I could poke it again and see where it's at now.
I'd be keen to learn how your experimentation goes. The only other platform I had looked at was Matrix and it was many years ago. It seemed fine for 1:1 IM conversations but not great for discord like servers/chats.
Went through the setup process tonight for Revolt. It's a bit barebones with a lot of the backend features missing compared to Discord.
That being said, I don't mind it! They've even got the android app that's in alpha/experimental right now, which I've been derping around with. So they've got room for improvement, but they're also filling that room with updates and features. :P
I'm hoping things like matrix/element wind up more adopted. It's mostly in tech circles right now, if discord is finally going to jump the shark I wouldn't mind something that isn't as borderline hostile.
I pay for Nitro. Because I want my emojis cross-server! But yeah, worrying that this is happening. I guess everyone knew it was coming eventually though.
The one I've been watching a little is Teamspeak 6. My friends and I still use Teamspeak daily (we come from Planetside 2, where Teamspeak was used widely before Discord got big). We maintain a Discord server, but that's just for persistent text chat and streaming. Even if someone is streaming a game or a show and rest of us are watching, we'll still almost always using Teamspeak for separate voice comms.
Anyway, Teamspeak 6 is supposedly going to be very Discord-esque. Teamspeak 5 was already moving in that direction with, I think, at lest UI-wise. But my group never really adopted it, and I'm not sure if there was ever wide adoption. Teamspeak 3 is what we're using still. Version 6 will support streaming and all that. Which is a big deal.
Right now, I think the only way groups can try Teamspeak 6 is by renting a server from Teamspeak directly. But obviously the draw of Teamspeak (and Ventrilo and Mumble) is self-hosting and self-management. It's super cheap (I use a $7/mo Digital Ocean droplet for ours). Supposedly, Teamspeak 6 server will be unveiled for those who want to self-host.
My concern, however, is with bandwidth use while streaming. Discord is great since it's all on Discord's server and it's "free." But if I'm hosting a Teamspeak 6 server, in the cloud or even on my homelab, and someone is streaming a game for the rest of us to watch, how much bandwidth will that use? With my digital ocean droplet, how high will that bill be with TS6 handling the stream? I have 1GB up/down FIOS at home. If I'm hosting TS6 from my homelab server, how many streamers/viewers can we have before my home Internet connection is saturated?
So we'll see.