Co-founder Jason Citron is stepping down, but will remain with the company as a member of the board of directors.
im on a year paid sub but ill be cancelling that shit
Great time to plug that https://revolt.chat/ is coming along nicely! The Android app is being reworked and is in rough shape at the moment, but the biggest feature missing from the desktop app (where I figure it matters most) is screen sharing. Otherwise it’s an entirely serviceable Discord clone that is FOSS and would benefit greatly from additional support. I, for one, will be taking the money that was paying for my Nitro and donating it to Revolt instead.
How is this app supposed to ensure its continued existence? I see no mention of donations, federation, or advertisement
The desktop app has a donation button in the settings. There’s also links to their donation pages on their github, but I do think in both instances they should have their donation link more front and center; it’s proven to work out well for multiple other FOSS projects.
if revolt puts out a ppa repository they’ll already be better than discord
It’s not an official packaging, but it is on Flathub, so maybe they have somewhere?
Fuck you, byeeeeeeeeee
My friends and I can always find 50 other apps for voice chatting, texting and screen sharing. What pisses me off royally is the thousands of companies/groups that decided instead of making forums or websites or GitHub pages, they would just host EVERYTHING from within Discord’s walled garden.
The thing is that discord has fostered fantastic communities in the way that forums never could have. I have personally witnessed no less than 5 communities that are thriving due to primarily using discord. Their forums were an utter shit show.
The fact that you can’t seem to understand why people have done this means that you do not understand the fundamental issue at hand.
It’s joever fellas 😔
A former Activision CEO. Can you announce “hostility to our users” any louder, Discord?
And so the hell-loop continues. Matrix seems like the closest successor, but having used it for awhile I would describe the experience as janky-but-workable. Signal’s good, but requires a phone number. I hear that Mumble’s good, but it’s overly focused on VoIP. Hopefully the alternatives polish themselves up before the enshittification gets too bad.
I use Matrix, but like a lot of the Fediverse (I know it’s technically a different protocol, but still), it’s not normie friendly. If it were more plug n play it might take off. I just don’t look forward to when they’ll have ads or start making us pay. It’s so tiring shuffling from platform to platform because of some greedy CEO.
There’s a huge opportunity not just for Matrix, but also for other open source or distributed players here, if they can move quickly enough.
They won’t, though.
You can nowadays create a signal account without a phone number, you’ll get a user name instead
Oh? When did they change that?
I also thought you could create an account without your phone number nowadays, but since I already have a phone-connected account, I haven’t tested. Only thing I found in their blog was this: https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/
Until now, someone needed to know your phone number to reach you on Signal. Now, you can connect on Signal without needing to hand out your phone number. (You will still need a phone number to register for Signal.) This is where usernames come in.
There are some newer post about other changes, but I haven’t checked them in detail.
Pretty recently I think
Well, that’s that ruined then.
I apologize for sounding ignorant but what do people use discord for exactly?
It could be that I don’t enough friends on it to replace text messaging.
I tried to join a bunch of communities to replace Reddit with discord but the stream of consciousness design of the channel posts kinda muddles everything since you can’t really separate the replies from the submissions.
I guess I should be happy I didn’t get invested in something that looks like it’s changing for the worse but kinda curious when I see people get really upset about change and wonder what I missed out on haha
what do people use discord for exactly?
Too much.
It’s a chat platform geared towards gamers, with voice chat, screen sharing, and streaming options… that’s been coopted by vloggers… but most unsettlingly, it’s being used for customer support and documentation.
A lot of knowledge bases are buried in the walled garden of servers, and a labyrinth of chat rooms.
im in a bunch of twitch streamer communities
For me, the huge value-add of Discord is for gaming (and is what Discord was created for). In college, my friends and I were originally using Skype calls when we’d play League together, but it was super annoying; essentially in order to not have to create a new call and add everyone who happened to be playing every time we just had one giant call with everyone we’d “redial” when playing. The downside is that if you were on Skype but not part of the game (in class or something) you’d get the Skype call invitation and have to decline it.
Switching to Discord was fantastic. We’d just have a persistent voice channel for different games, and you could chill in there to indicate it’s what you were playing or wanted to play, and if someone wanted to join they just jump on the call. It was also nice for organizing our text chats into different subjects (using different text channels), so if you were trying to ask if anyone had any advice for a certain class, you wouldn’t have your messages drowned out by people talking about news about a upcoming game. We just have a “games” text channels and a “classes” text channels and a “weekend plans” text channel, etc. This became particularly important as the server grew from friends to friends of friends and would’ve been overwhelming to have everyone stuck in one chat.
That’s pretty much been the extent of my Discord use, and I’m continually amazed to hear how others have been using it. I’ve seen the “join us on Discord, X, Facebook, etc.” for different games coming out, but never thought much of it or ever considered doing that.
Personally? The vast bulk of my interactions with people online. Voice chat, DMs, servers for pretty much everything. Being involved in roleplaying communities in DayZ and Conan, the vast majority of the behind-the-scenes stuff is taking place on discord. Servers for particular game servers as well as groups make up a pretty big portion of my list, along with smaller private discord servers of networks of players from various other servers. It’s how I stay connected with dozens of people I’ve known for years.
I’m also in quite a few discords related to modding and game development. Nearly every modder has their own discord, which is extremely useful if you’re running your own game servers and need to be in contact with them or if you make mods yourself and want to seek advice or information for compatibility. The same is true of a lot of other non-gaming software, with many developers having their own servers where they post updates and where you can find advice or post suggestions.
I’ve got a few queer community servers on my list, which were particularly helpful when I was early in my transition before I really had gotten around to rebuilding my social network and finding accepting people. There’s even a discord for a group of animators I used to spend a lot of time with back in the mid 00s; back then we were using forums and IRC mostly, and a little bit of Skype, but these days it’s been a good way to keep in touch.
If I’m home and on my computer, I’m almost always in a discord voice chat. It’s basically the modern equivalent of AIM or ICQ or Facebook, but with loads of added features and without Meta being involved. I even use it for note taking and storing images and screencaps.
Even something like Matrix, at the moment, doesn’t really cover all the voice and video chat features that Discord does. It’s close, but it’s missing essential components like push-to-talk, and it requires workarounds to enable things like screen sharing.
Discord turning to shit would be a real pain in the ass.
So glad I never got into that thing.
Just doesn’t understand why so many people prefer Discord over forums. In terms of information preservation Discord sucks!
It’s even become mandatory by communities in some games, which is something I hate with passion. For instance, many MMORPG communities are on Discord these days (e.g. Guild Wars 2, more specifically the raiding scene).
So I subscribed to these communities and started using Discord. I still don’t get the appeal, it’s a cluttered mess all over the place and it doesn’t feel intuitive to use. Maybe I’m getting old…
I hate how discord has replaced this forum culture in many places for this reason, but overall it’s incredibly good for participating in communities in real-time, especially smaller ones. I agree with the forum part, but aside from that it has also replaced IRC, Skype/MSN/ICQ, TeamSpeak, etc. all in one place, while even expanding on their features. It’s unbeaten for friend groups or smaller communities to create a space just for themselves that features text chat, voice chat, screen/video sharing etc.
Unfortunately though the open source alternatives, even the ones trying to be fully compatible with discord, have not yet reached this featureset and usability level. Also one big issue with communications tools like this is they rely heavily on adoption. Doesn’t help me when I can convince my closest friends to switch to Matrix for example, when there’s so many more people that I interact with on a daily basis through discord who I have no control over. Especially when the alternative just doesn’t cut it for all these normies who don’t understand the implications of big companies controlling such exclusive spaces.
I think the main thing is that it’s the lowest friction for just sending a message, making a “post” gives people pause, but sending a message people will do no problem, so small communities get more activity in Discord than anywhere else
Hey, listen I know it’s bad and all but discord makes it really easy to create your own channel, customize it however you want and organize study/gaming with friends.
Since it’s convenient and easy to setup and use, people use it for things they really shouldn’t.
To bring back forums we need another equally easy to setup and host forums system that modernizes the bbs.
Modern BBSes aren’t an issue – they’re out there, and they’re pretty good these days – but the lack of VC funding that lets them fund massive user growth isn’t there, so the level of friction re: setting up your own remains high.
Discord’s advantage is that it’s not just easy to set up, but also free. You’re not going to get that in the forum space anymore. ProBoards isn’t going to invest the money into making them sexy anytime soon.
This whole “spend a ton of money to get your foothold, take over a market, then enshittify to bilk the users” shtik is getting very very old.
Might finally open the doors for viable alternatives. If Spacebar (former fosscord) garners tractions for example due to mismanagement by discord they might make the transition over from discord to an open source, decentralized alternative for the everyday discord user viable. Although I haven’t tried Matrix in a while… But convincing users to switch to a completely separate service is way more difficult.
That’s tech companies for you.
Why else would they make all this for free?
That’s Jason Citron for you.
Small note on Revolt: You can’t chat with other people which are on other servers. Revolt does not federate and is not encrypted!
I can’t tell for sure, but it doesn’t look like Revolt has voice chat yet? Which was what attracted my friend group to Discord initially.
Yeah, sadly most open source alternatives to discord either cannot do voice/video chat or cannot do it as well or seamlessly as discord did, partially because federated voice/video chat is not really a solved issue and partially because of money. Though even most of the centralised ones don’t really have voice/video chat that works well except for a few like Signal because they have the resources.
Another problem is it’s based on p2p a lot of the time, whereas I think things like discord partially use their servers to facilitate it, I’ll check on this though.
Discord routes over their own servers and uses a private I3Dnet backbone to spread the signals across the world. The latter is one of the reasons why discord video is very good.
If discord did any p2p there would be stories all over of people getting ddos-ed after joining a voice call / screenshare.
In general, discords tech is pretty solid overall. The platform itself is just getting shittier.
Thanks for the info!
Yeah, sadly.
Matrix could’ve implemented it with classic TURNS for a while now so the feature at least is there for those needing it, but they dug their own hole instead and focused so hard on their idea of a protocol they created software that hardly can do anything, and what is should be able to do it does really badly. Also for some reasons it was more important to throw away he concepts of “Communities” and build… “Places”. Now Element is a convoluted mess that <Error Decrypting Second Part of this Message>
Yeah, the people behind it always seemed to be more interested in getting corporate funding and thus gave corporations more what they wanted/needed instead of typical users and mods. This is part of the reason why I’m no longer interested in matrix main and more hard forks of it.
Matrix uses TURN, and the Matrix protocol is not used for carrying voice/video.
Element is an independent client developed by Element, and not part of the Matrix protocol.
To my understanding they’re pushing those TURN connections through your home instance though? Wasn’t that the whole reason it takes so phenomenally long?
Otherwise implementing WebRCT with TURN would be rather easy, there are ready-to-use modules and frameworks to do so in basically any language. Whatever it is that’s wrong with the teams behind Matrix, it causes Matrix (especially when used with Element) to be just awful and buggy.
The legacy jitsi-based rtc used turn, and so does matrixrtc I believe. I haven’t tried it myself, though.
Jitsi
Jitsi doesn’t have e2ee except in a few situations and they don’t seem interested in bringing e2ee to all platforms, or they can’t. It also is somewhat buggy with disconnects etc. Also it’s meant for one off calls or meetings compared to discord, but yeah, it’s okay for some situations.
I’m not sure, either. I haven’t used it yet, though that might come sooner than later after this announcement.
I’ve got 2 gaming Discords I want to bridge with Matrix (and maybe Revolt too?) can you suggest an instance? one is for Deus Ex Randomizer, and the other is for The 7th Guest fan club
Note that when you join a Space, you are not automatically joining all the rooms inside it.
this is going to be a bit painful for people who are used to Discord
you can search public rooms but not public Spaces? how do you find Spaces? they should’ve copied the good parts about Discord lol (EDIT: I found the way to search public Spaces, I guess it can’t search across instances though which is a shame, it probably wouldn’t require much disk space to index the name and description of every Matrix Space)
I don’t even see rooms linking back to their Space?
tchncs.de has a lot of public spaces, I created my account using my Google but it just assumed my username :(
Three, before there was Discord there was TeamSpeak and they’re still fighting
Ventrilo would like a word as well
Have they had any recent developments?
TeamSpeak has been working on a new TeamSpeak 6 client and server that allows users to set up effectively their own personal federation of gaming servers with text, voice, and video chat rooms in a modern cross platform client that supports Windows, Mac, Linux and mobile operating systems.
They’ve also built up their own infrastructure so less technical folks can directly rent servers from them rather than needing to buy through a third party.
Never heard of Revolt before, nice.
As a community I’d use Revolt if my game/mod/whatever is built upon extensive bot functionality, and Matrix if not.
Well it was nice for a while there.
No it wasn’t
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Everyone loves Activision and what they’ve done for gaming. There no way this could go wrong.
How the fuck are blizzard execs still getting fucking jobs?!?!! Jesus Christ people, could you find a worse person to run the company?
Because he “has experience managing a public company” and in his portfolio only focuses on cherry-picked KPIs and no mention of any negatives at all.
I hate that our society encourages failing up and instead of punishment because of poor management skills and decisions, they do mass layoffs and give themselves fat bonuses because of “cost savings”.
Frankly, if a company fails, they will ruin other companies; it’s never their fault because of “complicated reasons”.
Probably the point, honestly. If they lose money from it, at least they made it worse for the cattle who stuck with it!
