Discord is easily accessible text/image and voice chat that just works for the majority. If you want people to switch off it then you're going to need Matrix to catch up in basic features and accessibility at the very least.
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I mean honestly has matrix not caught up? It's been perfectly usable and honestly more responsive than discord so far. The only real pain point was the most baseline effort that goes into e2e encryption but even then that wasn't really.. difficult?
Does it have voice chat built in and is it as easy to use and accessible as Discord?
Last time I looked this was not the case. No point lecturing people until Matrix or a viable alternative catches up at least.
Yeah it has voice chat, video calls, and screen sharing. I haven't tested any of them yet personally (soon™) but they are stated features. Element in particular is rolling out video rooms right now, still in beta, which operate identically to voice channels in discord from a UX perspective. So all said not too bad.
I see that it has 8 person voip.. but does it have an actual voice chat like Discord?
Voip is a voice chat, so your question doesn't make much sense. You can voice chat in voice rooms identically to discord, as I said above.
There is no longer an eight person limit on video or voice calls. There is a limit depending on your server.
The best that I could find was that there was an 8 person limit and that it wasn't as straightforward as Discord at all.
It's still nice to see them trying and hopefully one day it'll be a viable alternative to Discord itself.
The best that you could find?
I am personally unconvinced it's not a viable alternative to dsicord already. But yes it will always be improving and it will be good to see how far it continues to improve.
Serious question, can you join multiple homeservers yet? Having an account tied to one server is a massive drawback compared to Discord. I tried Cinny earlier and currently use Element with my friends but I don't think that feature exists.
@Umbrias @Jamoke is that even planned for ActivityPub? I think the cross communication is so that you can participate without necessarily making accounts Mastodon, Peertube, Lemmy, Misskey, etc.
If you need main features you'd likely need a account, similar to getting access to post creation and upvote/downvote on Lemmy sites.
Hey, those are supposed to be sarcastic!
anybody else old enough to remember hopping from chat program to chat program? When I first started gaming it was teamspeak in the majority with other programs like ventrillo in the minority. Then when teamspeak got shit everybody moved to Skype. Then when Skype got shit we moved to Discord. I will say it's shocking Discord has lasted this long honestly, but I'm not surprised if another one turns up whenever Discord gets inevitably too shit for the majority of people to handle.
Yes, I remember ICQ.
Those all-in-one chat programs like Trillian, Adium, and Pidgin were what I ended up using.
Roger wilco? 🤣 I remember seeing an advertisement for Roger wilco in a program installer and was so jazzed about the idea of talking with my friends over voice while playing games lol
The boys and I went from Roger Wilco > Teamspeak > Ventrillo > Mumble > Teamspeak > Discord. I still think Mumble was the best of them all, but we've all gotten so old none of us want to maintain a server for it for just the 20 of us.
Discord is Gen Z Facebook now. I want to leave it so bad but at this point I would miss 95% of my friends(both online and irl), plus the communities that are not tech savvy enough to build a Matrix bridge.
I can't remember what Discord did at the time, but there was a decent push to try and move to a different platform. We tried out Guilded, but we had a pretty hard time getting adoption from the users on our Discord server and ended up dropping the transition.
I didn't think I'd ever say this again, but TeamSpeak 5 is actually looking like it could be the solution we're looking for. I still need to figure out how I can host a server compatible with version 5 though.
How does Teamspeak differ from Discord in terms of ownership? Bc it seems like the functionality is pretty similar
My understanding is that while Teamspeak does provide some public servers that you can connect to, most servers are privately hosted.
People either subscribe to hosting services or host it on their own hardware which gives you complete control of the server and the content.
I know I'm planning on trying to host my community server on my hardware, but I'm not too sure about how the "Homebase" comes into play with TS5
What about element/matrix?
I only just learned about that combination yesterday. Sounds like I should look into it a bit more?
Absolutely, it's fantastic and I highly recommend it.
I use community.rs if you're in NA it's pretty good.
Does Matrix have an equivalent to "servers" on Discord? Like, I can join one and it comes with a bunch of chat rooms owned and moderated by the same community? Because that's the biggest thing I used Discord for is following and interacting with communities I'm in; and I just fired up Element and I see nothing that hints that it would be possible...
I still need to figure out how I can host a server compatible with version 5 though.
You can't. Only trusted vendors at the moment can host v5. You can only host v3 and v5 clients can still connect.
Long live IRC!!!
Let's be real here for a second: Companies are NEVER your friend. NEVER EVER. But if you keep looking for it, you will find something that makes you leave every company behind. You'll end up in the woods. Some ignorance is needed to live a decent life. You can act if a company gets to a point where it's too much.
Okay, but on the other hand Discord is basically IRC but worse, and I hate it every time I need to use that stupid site. The fact that its evil is really just rubbing salt in the wound. For me anyway.
I don't see the punch line.
I honestly wouldn't mind seeing an extension to the IRC spec to bring in reasonable discord-like functionality to some servers. It's time we start moving back to open standards from walled gardens.
Let's move to xmpp. Matrix is bloated
Why do you find Matrix bloated?
You can get banned for third party clients? I've been using BetterDiscord for years now with no issues. I hate the direction of Discord though, I agree with everything else.
Here's an old post from the Discord support forum talking about this. Not sure if Discord is still handing out bans for third-party clients, but it's definitely a possibility.
I gotcha. I think currently, you'd only get banned if they found out (which they can't currently). If the app ever becomes more invasive client side, I'm certain it would cause a ban wave (and maybe a small riot) but for now, it's not that risky.
Nooo let me live in blissful ignorance
Sadly I couldn't get away. All my irl friends are in Discord.
I literally only use discord to voice chat with my friends once a year when we are gaming.
Do people use it for other stuff?
Yes, some developers use Discord to provide technical/product support - this is where the "Yes please search our chat archive for answers to your question. it will certainly remain up forever and not get deleted when the shareholders realize it’s not profitable" comes from. It's honestly really annoying, since I don't really want to add yet another Discord server to my existing clutter just to get an answer that may not even be there.
I really only like using Discord as a parallel community, like the Discord guild for Beehaw or the ones I used to be on which were associated with other forums/subreddits/etc. Making it a privileged channel for getting important announcements, support, or other information feels like stretching it beyond what it's good for, on top of the fact that it's still corporate and stuff could (and does) happen to it without user input.
There are social communities there who don't gather elsewhere
Is Revolt chat worth checking out? Just the fact that its open source makes it really appealing.
I'm all down for Discord being the next service people flee from, the enshittification has really been catching up.
I personally believe in Matrix long-term though I know people who like Revolt.
I still have a Twitter account.
I haven’t used it in a long while, but there may be something I want to say in front of as many interactors as possible… so there may be a personal value to it for me, at some point… when I get my shit together in a presentable form.
But Twitter wouldn’t be where my stuff “lived,” it would be a mass mailing type of carpet bomb to attract people to “my place,” where they could dig into what I was saying with me.
I have YouTube for the same reason.
Discord seems the same to me. No, it’s not the place to set up your personal camp. But it can be a place to interact with a novelish audience, with the intent to fully interact with those so inclined elsewhere.
!lostlemmings
i just use discord for one group my friend made called 'omies and its just like 5 of us from highschool and maybe 15 others from around the world we've added over the years. its mostly just for us to have a place to voice chat while we game. I don't use discord for anything else.
Maybe try Revolt Chat. Open source and appears to be like the old Discord. I really only use chat to play games with friends though. Consider Discord communities a pain in the ass to navigate and use.
I get that Discord isn't great, but really I don't mind too much. It's used for communication for streamers I moderate for, and streams I'm just a viewer of to provide updates. Became friends with fellow mods talking there, and I call my girlfriend on there so we can chat while watching things together. I guess like all social media it depends what you share on it. If there was a FOSS alternative that people actually used I would be there, but there isn't.