this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Discord should be avoided as a communications platform. I don't see a single point that makes me want to use it.
It has no customization or designing flexibility, you are forced to stick to one design unless you pay for a stupeid & an expensive subscription. Otherwise you need to use potentially unsafe third party tools for it and even those go against Discord's ToS.
It is a non-private, non-secure and overtly commercialized product that should be put in the bin. But thanks to the virtual monopoly in creating a social platform (also thanks to the tech-illiterate influencers for promoting it) for more than just "Chatting for gamers", as it was originally intended for. Discord in its current state is nothing more than just a commercial market where you are the commodity. Its not a social platform.
I don't want to give out my data and message history for some company to sell to be able to discuss about your project on GitHub, or even be able to communicate with you.
The client is garbage as well unless you own a super expensive rig.
I abandoned Discord completely more than half an year ago with the vow of never registering again. I completely shifted my comms to Matrix & Signal. I have not been more at peace since.
If you manage a public project you wish for people to interact with. I request you to at least keep a mirror/bridge on XMPP, Matrix or even Revolt. Please choose something open source, private and secure for the sake of other people.
Counterpoint: it's free and easy to use.
So are the others I mentioned.
But no one uses them.
According to data dating June de 2022. Matrix had at least 64 Millon users.
That is not a small number. So yeah, people do use it. While it is significantly low compared to Discord. Keep in mind that Discord has had much more advertisement done for it than Matrix did.
Counterpoint: My friends don't use them (and won't switch)
Matrix allows bridging chats so you can set up a bot in your / your friends server(s) and it'll forward their messages to Matrix and yours back to Discord. As for DMs you need to set up channels for that afaik (Future me: It seems that some bots support it). The big drawback is that you need to disable Matrix' E2E-Encryption in the rooms you want to bridge your chats to.
Here's a link to the Discord bridge if you are interested. It's not that hard to set up imo.
As for voice chat, you can use Jitsi (works like zoom but without the need of an account) as long as your friends aren't too lazy to open a link in their browser to chat with you.
As for Matrix clients there's Element, FluffyChat, Cinny & others. Element & Cinny are closer to Discord's UI whilst FluffyChat feels more like WhatsApp Web or Telegram Web. Element has cool features like web widgets you can pin to rooms whilst Cinny & FluffyChat are simple (and have MUCH better custom emoji / sticker management)
That's great but this does not account for the dynamics of a Discord server.
Let's say 8 people are hanging out in Discord, playing games or whatever. Should I then message all 8 of them a link to join a separate voice chat? The response would be "no, just join Discord of you want to talk". That also requires me to know who are in the call (therefore already using Discord anyways), since if I just message one or two of them I would be splitting the party, which they won't do.
The whole "hanging out in Discord and whoever wants to join just joins" dynamic is difficult to replace with a zoom-type voice chat that requires you to initiate a call with a link.
I have already tried switching people to signal from Facebook messenger. Didn't work. All it takes is one person to not want to switch and the whole group will end up going back. And that's just a messaging service. Discord is way more complicated to switch from since it is more of an all-in-one thing.
I know what you mean. When Discord was new (2015/2016) I wanted my friends to switch over from Skype (yep, we skipped the Team Speak phase because I was the only one who downloaded it). And I really hated Skype for multiple reasons. So ironically I was begging them to join Discord, highlighting what it does better but it took me until 2019 to get them all on board and by that point, Discord was huge already so they didn't join because of me but because "everyone's already there". And I am aware that Discord does a lot of marketing and that a lot of Streamers & YouTubers are using it (which I regard as passive advertising). But in the first years, due to me hyping it up and prioritizing chatting there (with people who were eager to join me) over time I managed to win more and more of them over.
I was similarly hyping up Signal when WhatsApp became unbearable for me. And again, some people were switching over because I made arguments for the switch that ultimately made them rethink. And after about 1/2 had switched almost all of the others followed too because the "nobody's there" argument didn't work anymore and fomo started kicking in. Now, I was reluctant and some people went back after they distanced themselves from the friend group but others stayed.
(I admit that I was probably very lucky in that case).
And now with Matrix, I've become more careful. I do not dislike Signal and I don't want them to think I'd leave Signal for Matrix making them move back to WhatsApp or something. And I got the fear that I may have already used the "follow me because I want you too" Joker and that they might think of me as egocentric for doing the same thing over and over again. So I just mentioned that I'll be switching, my reasons for it and that if they want to come along I'd be happy but that it is also OK if they stayed. And unsurprisingly almost noone joined me - yet. But I'm fine with that. I set up a bridge to Discord and I could do the same for WhatsApp and Signal but since you need to disable encryption I haven't yet done it (hoping that maybe one day, bots & bridges will be working for encrypted channels - if that is technically possible)...
Well in the end, if you want them to switch, you need to be persistent without being annoying and probably you need friends who are at least a little bit open to new platforms. It starts to get better once a few people join you but it's hard to get there.
Regarding the Discord part. Of course it is more convenient to stick to Discord for voice chats - I'd be lying if I said I didn't. What I tried was to be the first one to be online and inviting the other members in the channel to my Jitsi room. (Jitsi rooms launched over Element usually stay open indefinitely, so the invite link never alters). The most annoying thing is that you can't peek at who is and how many users are sitting in the meeting but the rest is pretty cool, especially that features aren't locked behind a massive paywall. Element has got a nice web widget for Jitsi rooms so Element users don't need to open a browser. But in case my friends are already in Discord I naturally join their call.
But to me, moments like Discord's servers going down are valuable opportunities to establish acceptance at least.
Anyways, getting people to switch a platform is usually an enduring process (which we Fediverse users are at least somewhat used to) but I am willing to make the first steps to break the "nobody's on there" excuse for Newton's law of inertia.
I can attest that when it comes to complete migration, bridging is not a solution or at least not a good one. The only way is full adoption.
In my experience, bridging chats moves only a minute fraction of the userbase in the end. The network pull that a userbase migration would make w/o a bridge is highly reduced w/ a bridge and leads to inconvenience for all.
Considering 95% of communication has been text based in my experience, those who were convinced to move to, say, Matrix, moved to matrix but were still able to talk with users who weren't that convinced to move and stayed on Discord. This formed the middle ground to satisfy both sides but this barely did anything in terms of creating a secure line of communication and virtually stopped the transition and also reversed it because of the few inconveniences caused, primarily the inability to join VC sessions across and making DMs across. And of course as you said, sharing links is too much hassle compared to just a click. (Although this is not the case w/ Matrix as its main clients have in-house VC functionality.)
And yes, I agree that it is certainly difficult to move users as some platforms become too tied up with our lives that if you try to leave any of these sites anyway, you get the risk of isolation. I managed to balance it out to an extent so I have not faced such a situation but I certainly got more time to focus on work and other stuff.
At the end of the day it's still a long road till a more libre internet will be mainstream. At least by making small contributions we can still keep the idea alive.
Matrix Clients like Element, Schildichat & Fluffychat have Jitsi integrated into them for Room VOIP so making a separate account for a Jitsi instance is not necessary.
Doesnt work if theres a discord server youre in where the admins dont wanna add the bot
I mean, dude was talking about their friends so idk if their friends are super wary of them or something but at least mine would allow me to add the bot
it's just a circlejerk of gamers pointing to each other to justify why they won't take the miniscule effort of switching platforms
I've gone through this shit back in the days of MSN Messenger, ICQ, and AIM. I didn't exactly switch then, either. Instead I went with Trillian and later Pigin to just use all of them at the same time under one account. Same thing is happening now with everyone I know on different apps. Except there isn't anything like Trillian or Pigin for any of 'em.
Effort is not really a part of the equation for a lot of people. Usually it's just "I don't want to switch".
It's not a circlejerk. It's called the network effect and it's a legitimate phenomenon.
How is that going to change if you don't try using them?
I mean I can't try using messaging apps if there is no one there I want to message
What are you on about with this? Discord has its criticisms but this is stretching it.
This is not at all stretching it. Discord's client is very poorly optimized and bloated and it is known since a long time. I could never run it on my hardware with a comfortable experience. Even some of my friends would ask me to look for and provide them older versions of the app because each update would make it laggier for them to use. I don't live in a First or Second world country with a good paying job. Most electronics are imported here and cost a lot.
Ever look at it's resource usage? It's so bloated and resource heavy for nothing more than a chat client.
I don't deny discord comes with bloat. But the idea that discord needs a "super expensive rig" seems a bit hyperbolic. If you can browse this site, your hardware can probably deal with discord.
I can understand that «super expensive» will have a different meaning for different regions but for me it is the case.
I am using the Thunder Client on Android with some optimizations. But its resource usage is not comparable to Discord at all.
Regardless, Libre platforms like Lemmy and Matrix allow me to use different clients if one is too heavy for me. This is not the case with Discord.
Yeah, totally fair!
I have a 12 year old CPU and I can flawlessly stream video while I play games to my chat group. Discord is doing petty good.
Well, I have 9 years old laptop and when I play something demanding like Valheim, or Risk of Rain 2 with my friends, I have to run Discord on my phone because otherwise I get either performance lags, or network lags, or both. May also be an issue with a shitty network bandwidth, but the phone and laptop are both connected to the same network.
I yet have to find another platform that implements screen sharing with sound in group chats as good as discord does
As good as discord does? Then Microsoft Teams qualifies.
I mean discord's screensharing is good for windows users imo. Has good enough quality, sound and while the linux client is terrible there are unofficial clients that reintroduce the sound sharing, which is what I am using.
Have you tried Element via Matrix?
Last time I tried it didnt have this feature
I am not sure what you are referring to here.
I was talking about Element, a client for Matrix (i.e. app through which you can communicate on Matrix.) It has Jitsi integrated into it for group calls and you can easily screen share through it.
Yes yes I understood you correctly. Last time I tried calling someone I couldn't find a way to screenshare with audio, but I might have missed it, I'll try it later today
stares in debian
The one and only reason I use discord is because it's pretty ubiquitous in the tech industry, and I'm a union organizer at a tech company.
Then do better. If you're a Union organiser, you should know to push the better options rather than kneel to the "WELL MOST PEOPLE DO X" BS.
This is a very juvenile response. If you're trying to organize people, it's hard enough to get them to do one specific action, you don't add in a bunch of other steps that don't directly contribute to the goal. You want to remove every barrier.
For example, if you want people to sign a petition and you're going door to door, you bring a clipboard with the paper, pens, and supporting literature. You don't tell them to go to a website, or print out a document themselves. You definitely don't demand they move to a new neighborhood where the doors are closer together and all at street level.
Discord is bullshit, and I'd love to see everyone move away from it. But you've got to keep things in perspective and think about what your primary goals are.
Took the words right out of my mouth. We tried to migrate to signal, it was an abject failure.
It's more important to reach people, don't you think?
Although I agree a bridge would be the nice thing to do
I wish it was more simple.
The official matrix.org server is completely stripped down and removes a lot of features, and Element as a client is nowhere near as good as anything else.
Element X (with the sliding sync support) does fix the massive issue of absolutely horrifically slow syncing.
None of Matrix comes anywhere near the levels of usability Discord has and nor does Element, Discord's server-chat model is unbeatable in this aspect.
as much as i agree,
I use discord because my two friends use it when we talk every once in a while and its the tool they know and are comfortable with. They don't live at their computers and do not bother. I don't use it other than that.
I'm gonna look into matrix though. If no one adopts an alternative, it will never be standard. And matrix is a cool name.
same here with the friends situation i also do design commissions and I'm in a few small niche hobby servers. I do have Revolt just in case...
Gimme IRC "2.0" and I'll be happy.
Plenty of people still on IRC. Often through (matrix) bridges, but the terminal clients are still actively developed.
I can send messages, images, files, links, it supports youtube miniplayer for links, and I can start audio calls all in a singular app, and I can control which members of a channel see those messages or access that call very simply with roles. They also store that message history for years and years, idk what the limit is for channels but for DMs I can scroll back at least 5 years no problem. This works both on Desktop and Smartphones. I don't know of any other programs or apps that do all of that, please correct me if I'm wrong.
Well, it's the standard now. I don't like it either because of their gratuitous data storage, but what other choice do I have? All my friends and communities use it.