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.
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
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?
The client is garbage as well unless you own a super expensive rig.
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.
Yeah, totally fair!
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.
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.
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
With audio and app specific sharing? As of 8 months ago I couldn’t do it but I might have missed it
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 doReach then educate then. Don’t settle, literally why Lemmy/Pub exists. I feel @Rockslayer isn’t a union organiser. Or if they are, they’re a very poor one with that attitude/mindset.
I feel @Rockslayer isn’t a union organiser. Or if they are, they’re a very poor one with that attitude/mindset.
Or maybe they know how to pick their battles? Yeah Discord isn’t ideal, but is it really so bad that it’s worth the significant effort it would take to try and get people to switch, compared to all the other things they could be spending their effort on?
That’s a decision only they can make for themselves. And your condescending attitude does nothing but reflect poorly on you.
Tell me, how do you simultaneously organize people and convince them to use foss? I’m genuinely asking, because we tried to migrate to an open platform and it didn’t work at all. We need to be where the people are so we can organize and form our union, not the other way around. The alternative to being where the people are is standing unmovingly on my principles and failing to successfully organize. Don’t point fingers if you’ve never tried it.
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.
as much as i agree,
- accessibility is usually pretty horrendous on most matrix clients, none i could find have full, proper reduced motion support, which i need to properly use pretty much any piece of software. discord is far from perfect in this regard, and getting worse and worse, but still miles ahead of most chat apps i’ve tried, especially proprietary ones. I have barely used revolt, and in my memory it’s far worse than discord, and i have yet to figure out how xmpp works…
- none of my friends are on it. while i could convince some to move, here discord is already a quite “niche” chat service, and as a student, i’m more or less required to be on any chat service whatever group project i need to do is organised. same with friend groups, i’m usually not a “group leader”, and join in friend groups that already exist, so it’s much harder to insist on moving anyone over to a new thing no one but me has ever used before
- ux isn’t great. it’s improving, but i’ve had quite a few “key exchange” issues with matrix especially… Also, i found most clients quite messy, but that’s more to personal taste!
yeah discord sucks
I only use it to pirate music
Good advice, I’d follow it
what’s wrong with it
if you mean the mobile one, it’s a pretty great upgradeOne of my favorite things about discord was the fact that your experience was similar on both mobile and desktop. I honestly thought it was fantastic from a UX perspective since your knowledge of the app transferred easily between platforms. The new update destroys that and tosses out a large amount of shared knowledge.
Another, more important, complaint is the changes to the colors/themes makes the accessibility significantly worse no matter what theme you use for anyone with eye issues. They changed the light mode font to gray??? They reduced the contrast on the other modes significantly making it genuinely difficult to read text on a MESSAGING APP.
To me this whole thing, and the earlier username changes, feel like changing for the sake of changing rather than actually improving anything. This is just for the shareholders and not because literally anyone asked for it.
Also why is dms it’s own tab I really liked that they were listed next to the servers!
Mobile apps aren’t supposed to work like desktop ones tho.
text is already impossible to read for me due to the font. idk every time i try to switch to the new react native version i go back because text takes me like 4-6 attempts to read.
It annoys me to no extent when there’s something I could do in 5 seconds on the desktop version of an app but I can’t find it on the mobile version because they hid things. Microsoft is soooo annoying with this (and many other things because fuck them)! Every version of each of their apps on every platform is an entirely different program with the same name that barely even does the same functions.
As for the text, this is a problem they could’ve solved! And instead they made it worse while also making the UX worse! Every update from discord recently has made the app more and more buggy and slow. I genuinely don’t understand how they manage it.
Seems very ok, did not give me any strong opinions after a minute.
u may use Aliucord
I also use aliucord and it helps but it’s against TOS so who knows our accounts could get banned any day
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