Technology

Whether or not it's a good change is likely mostly subjective. I'm guessing Discord made the switch to be more in line with other mainstream social media platforms, and to reduce confusion.

Personally, I kind of like the old way more. It means there could be 10000 different people with basically the same name. Other than paying for a specific number, there is no issue with a person grabbing a handle and then it not being available to anyone else. Otherwise, eventually, a lot of handles will be used up, maybe even dead, so people have to come up with increasingly creative ways to get a unique handle – or just settle on adding some numbers to the end.

I'd even go a step further myself and remove handles completely. Just use a random unique identifier, like a hash or GUID for the user – which a lot of platforms do under the hood anyway, since you can change your handle in many of them – and use invite codes, QR codes or similar to add friends. We don't need this username / handle rotting that just gets worse over time.

The issue with this change was, that someone who was previously named Mike for instance with a discriminator, has to now choose something else for instance: "Mike372". Discord claims this is a better and a less confusing system, when it really just boils down to the same thing. Making matter worse they claimed all Mike usernames are taken, so #0001 to #9999 which also later turned out to be false, it was just their site choosing a random discriminator, which when it was already taken told you: "This username is already taken.", when in reality there were still available discriminators.

Users are NOT happy

I was lucky enough to be a Discord early adopter, so I was able to keep my username. But not everyone else could. So right now there's a lot of people having to part with long-established handles and it kinda sucks.

I'm going to be standing up a Revolt instance, but I'm giving myself a break after spending days and nights getting my lemmy instance up.

Self-hostable but not federated. Still in construction though, specially doesn't have all the voice capabilities of Discord yet, but looks quite decent so far

Have you been able to get screensharing with audio to work on Element? I haven't been able to determine if it's in Element Desktop or not. My understanding is that it has worked on some browsers, but I'm not sure about the electron app.

Is it self-hostable? That's the thing I'm missing from the Mumble / Teamspeak days.