Lame. Discord has already been dipping their toes into the enshitification pond the last few years, so I imagine it’s going to get worse as they move closer to going public and moreso afterwards.
Discord was great for chatting with friends during games.
It was shit for everything else, so hopefully this move kills it off and we can stop having to join a discord to find information on topics in temporary chat logs.
The amount of people who spam messages in the boards is absolutely fucking insane. They’ll do that thing where they make it seem like they’re taking pauses or whatever when they’re putting breaks. Example:
Did you guys know?
That when you need to refill your characters ammo
You can reload by pressing R?
And other shit like that, but way worse and even shorter messages each time. I only use discord to keep up to date with early access games, or some communities that I’m a part of (YouTubers, and multiplayer communities like Project Zomboid servers). My job also uses discord to communicate (we’re a small company but with people around the country).
You’ve renewed my idea for setting up a Discord server that literally bans zero-effort Twitch style chat messages. Each time someone hits enter, they must be conveying a human thought. Exceptions provided for reactions, which are a specific feature, but that’s it.
Sigh. Guess that means it’s time to start looking for a new platform. Not that Discord has been excellent in a while, but products always go to shit when they’re beholden to shareholders.
Mumble, or maybe TeamSpeak 6 (they skipped 4, had 5 in beta, which now is 6 in beta, oh well).
Depends on what you want. We’ve been using a TeamSpeak (3) server I’m hosting for years, it works as well as ever (they added a couple of QoL features to the TeamSpeak 3 client during the pandemic as well).
TeamSpeak 6 supports persistent chat via the Matrix protocol and you can register to any server and use that to login to any server using federation (as it uses Matrix under the hood). They now added screen sharing so you got the features covered that most users would want. They unfortunately didn’t release self-hostable TS6 server yet (but they say they’re working on it) so you can either use an experimental TS5 server (uses Matrix but doesn’t support screen sharing) or TS3 server, which doesn’t support any of the new stuff. The TS6 client is backwards compatible though.
I just don’t think they actually know where they want to go with it yet. They seem to be advertising the whole decentralized thing as that’s clearly a differentiating factor from Discord, but on the other hand they didn’t exactly prioritize putting out easy-to-setup server software yet. The TS6 client pretty much fully supports TS3 servers including administration, but as far as I know TS6 servers are quite a bit different. There’s also “communities” that work with TS6 servers in some way. So it’s all a bit of a messy mix between legacy support and their attempt at creating a decentralized Discord.
I hope they get it together and release TS6 server software, find a good way to monetize their efforts and get people to use it.
Some people will say that you could just use Matrix directly instead, but if they manage to make TS6 easy to use and understand, allow easy creation of a server (as a service) and also allow full-featured self-hosting it could turn out well. Plus they have the brand recognition, at least with folks that aren’t that young anymore. This might help with adoption. Sure, it’s proprietary still, but it’s decentralized and uses open protocols (Matrix). You can apparently already join TeamSpeak community chats from your own Matrix server, so they aren’t artificially blocking “vanilla” Matrix servers from federating.
If you data wasn’t being stolen and sold up until now, it 100% will be after this lol. I wonder how much worse they can make discord. Speed run anyone?
Bad idea. Matrix is incredibly costly to run by design. The eventual consistency model replicates everything to all servers which is wasteful, slow, & isn’t going to scale. Many medium-sized servers have shut down for storage & CPU+RAM costs—which causes refugees to seek more centralized nodes. Hell, we saw it a couple weeks ago Matrix begging for money since they can’t even afford to run their own servers anymore. You should put your money into a protocol that doesn’t treat chat like a blockchain & is efficient enough to reasonably self-host.
For the chat part: IRCv3, XMPP, Jami, maybe SimpleX.
As it stands for VoIP: Mumble, Jitsi (XMPP), Jami, maybe Movim (XMPP) in the near-ish future.
IRC & Mumble is centralized but super lightweight so you can spin up a server on any old hardware & can be fine for ‘clans’. Clients are efficient too. They aren’t encrypted other than TLS but are good enough for its largely-room-based goals.
XMPP is a generalized, decentralized protocol for presence & messaging. It has multiple FOSS servers that require a potato for hardware that you can spin up in a bedroom to join other bedroom servers where you can control your own data (same as Matrix, but a lot less resources & more mature). Chat can be encrypted (most clients support PGP & OMEMO). Some clients can do voice/video calls, many are working on multi-user call at present. It is the protocol behind WhatsApps, Zoom, Fortnite, League of Legends, & more.
Jami is P2P IIRC, but I haven’t used it—so I won’t comment.
It’s obviously not great for the type of community that’s about knowledge sharing and learning, and it does suck that a lot of communities went there.
But it’s a great platform for simple social servers that are just about communicating. It’s super easy to sign up and set up a server. A lot of it just works well for chat.
Them going public probably puts a timer on the service though, so if it happens Discord probably just will get worse.
Mumble is a terrific VOIP program. It’s audio quality and reliability are WAY better than discord. But it does not nearly have enough features to be a good replacement. It’s missing features like being able to stream in-app, share videos, keep and pin messages in different channels, pinging system for people and groups… The list goes on. These are features that groups and communities have come to rely on.
An analogy would be like comparing an incredibly good tent to a shitty house. While the tent is probably comfier to sleep in, eventually you’re going to want things like outlets, kitchen appliances, toilets, and showers which make the shitty house the better long-term choice.
Doesn’t have a cup holder either! Why does ever alternative need to have every feature or it can’t be called an alternative? Does your VoIP app need the ability to send videos? Can you not use something else in tandem to do the more social side? Sometimes it’s better to focus on one thing & do it well—especially under-resourced like free software often is. You could argue just as easily these other features as bloat if you don’t want or use them.
That’s the point, discord isn’t just a VoIP app. It has all that other stuff too. 90% of my discord usage is text based. But IRC is dead now, so it is what it is. I was just as pissed about it when discord initially came around as I am now, but this is what we’re stuck with until something new takes over
But you can use a chat service for chat & a VoIP service for VoIP & that can be fine. A kitchen sink isn’t always the best approach.
But if you are looking to keep tabs on something, Movim is very much focused on multi-user jingle & is something you could deploy & have decentralized users join from their own servers.
I shouldn’t have to explain the network effect to you on Lemmy of all places. You go make all the specific communities that I need switch over, and I’ll be right there with them.
So you are saying we should all use Reddit, Discord, Meta WhatsApp, & Microsoft GitHub since more folks are there? The only way to buck those trends is to be the change you want to see & slowly move what groups you can away. You don’t have to get everything to buy in at once & there are mirrors / gateways that you can use as a transition. Make a clan homepage & say the VoIP is here & the chat is there… now you aren’t beholden to one specific tool going to shit or waiting 10 years for something to have literally every feature you want. If 2 applications is a barrier, maybe that someone isn’t the right fit for your group anyhow.
K. Have fun doing nothing & sticking to your shitty networks that give you no control or freedom—as opposed to trying literally anything to change the situation.
I highly disagree. I am in a group chat on XMPP that uses a IRC bridge and many of the users in that group chat are using that bridge.
And now to other stuff that I want to mention related to the discussion in this thread.
Services that does not meet modern standards like Mumble and XMPP, are not widly used because they “lack many important features”. I say “bah, humbug” to that!
If MSN and ICQ worked flawlessly when those services was active, Mumble and XMPP works very well today, too. People are too spoiled by today’s technology.
Here’s an example.
I use my self-hosted Jitsi Meet server when communicating with people that refuses to talk to me unless there’s video calls and screen sharing. Otherwise, I gladly use Mumble 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, every year! And for file sharing other than images? XMPP, baby!
A friend of mine invited a Discord loving person to my Jitsi Meet server few weeks ago. He/she said “it looks just like Discord, I’m sold!” My friend (also a Discord lover) agreed and does not hesitate for 1 second to join me on Jitsi Meet. My friend’s Discord friend said he/she gladly join us more times.
I’m happy you are able to find niche use cases for it, but that’s obviously not what I’m talking about.
The fact of the matter is this: if I want to engage with any of the hundreds of broad communities I frequent, I am not able to do that on IRC anymore. They are just not there.
Last time I used IRC (which was 1-3 years ago), I found over 4 servers that each had over 15 users. And since I am communicating with 5+ IRC users through XMPP, IRC is not dead. It’s more dead today compared to 20 years ago, yes, but it is not dead-dead.
It really looks like you’re being intentionally obtuse here.
I’m in hundreds of discord servers, most of which have 10,000 to 300,000 thousand users each.
I do still use IRC, and I rarely find a server with more than 1000 users, most of which are bots, or users who only send bot commands. A typical ‘active’ channel has less than 10 active chatters over a week. IRC is dead.
No, I’m not. All I am saying is that people are still using IRC. IRC is therefore not dead. But if you want to compare Discord with IRC, then yes, IRC is dead. But not dead-dead since people are still using it and can still recover. I know people that wants to start using IRC again.
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