I don’t think people on this sub use it, but it’s great news for us. The worse it gets the likelier people move on.
Good. Maybe people will finally move on to something else.
Time to move to Matrix then, and I’m not even joking. Ads are Aids.
Why not Mumble and IRC or XMPP?
Which of them support e2e in group chats by default?
XMPP with OMEMO.
Yeah god forbid anyone pay for the shit they use, just keep hopping around to suck the life out of every ‘free’ service there is. Nitro is right there.
If it wasn’t a privacy nightmare maybe I will consider paying, but data theft + ads? Naaaah.
Ah right, so it’s fine if it’s a privacy nightmare but combined with ads, woah there. If you’re right, they already have your data. If you don’t use it, why even complain?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen discord get a positive mention on this sub. I’ve never used it so I don’t really have a horse in this race.
I don’t know what people use it for, but I’ve seen all the negative memes about open source software devs using it and that causing people to skip on the software though. Never seen it get any praise around here.
I haven’t scraped the terms of service to see exactly what kind of data they collect but I’m not extremely worried about it. I don’t put sensitive information into it beyond my payment information for Nitro. I’m sure everyone here on Lemmy, a self-host and open source site/software, is against programs like Discord because they’re proprietary but I personally just enjoy it and don’t find it very limiting.
- Your IP address will be logged as soon as you login.
- They store everything you send in plain text on an encrypted storage unit.
- They store if your microphone and/or camera is on or off + more of what settings you have made in your own device.
- They force you to give them your phone number in order to identify you.
Source: https://discord.com/privacy
Discord is a privacy nightmare, but not as much as for an example Spotify. Spotify even logs how you hold your device and how fast you move it! Source: https://www.spotify.com/uk/legal/privacy-policy/
- Everything everywhere I connect to has my IP, oh no.
- It’s not plaintext if it’s encrypted…
- So like cookies but for an application, not that intrusive imo.
- “You may be required to verify your account with a phone number” - I provided a phone number once and they’ve never, at any point, sent me anything or asked me to use it. You could easily use a burner phone.
Even thinking about a company like Google seems like more of a privacy nightmare. This is relatively tame compared to most everything else.
Because I’m free to complain about things I don’t like.
Many of my friends use Discord but I also use Matrix and I prefer that. This is a Signal/WhatsApp like situation.
If Discord starts shoving them ads maybe I can bring some people over to a more secure platform easily.
Yeah, sure, complain about it if you want to, it just doesn’t make sense if you’ve already given them the data. I like Signal for privacy but it doesn’t have any customization, no personalization, no personality, it’s nearly sterile. It does it’s job and that’s it. Great for people who want privacy for like… work but for just talking to friends Discord seems more enjoyable.
Nitro is right there… and yet… these changes happened.
Because of people… like you… who provide nothing to a free service besides costing bandwidth… leeches to a free internet… vampires to charity…
I only use it to play games with 4 other people regularly and another 2-3 people sporadically. When it becomes a pain to use, well move on just like we did with AOL Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Team Speak, and however many others we’ve used in the past. Something else will come along. It works great for now, but we aren’t loyal to it. We’re loyal to playing online with each other. I would honestly pay $5 a month for a decent program, should no free one be available, but I’m already cutting out multiple streaming services, satellite radio, and all sorts of other shit because commercials are too annoying.
I’m on the verge of quitting after dealing with fucking groomers and nazis in ever server. I’ve already pulled out of every server and have remained DM-only. As I lose my last few friends my incentives to stay are going to be severely tested by having to deal with advertisements.
Looking at all those companies that moved their support to Discord.
But I thought we cold have free support in realtime with security updates for free forever?
It would’ve been very smart of them to have this ad change only affect business ownedchannels, and then open up a fee option for businesses to no longer have ads on their channel
I truly don’t have a problem with ads being in a free service. My anger will be based on how annoying they are when they roll out.
people do pay for discord though. that was the entire justification for Nitro and Server Boosts. they made $440 million in revenue in 2022. they aren’t publicly traded so there’s no way to compare that with expenses, but i’d be pretty surprised if they weren’t turning a significant profit.
The problem is that no o.e will just serve a static PNG banner ad anymore. Ads these days inherently come with all the BS that makes blocking them mandatory
The ads will become increasingly annoying snd intrusive over time based on every other website and app that has gone from free to supported by ads.
Even if they aren’t too bad at first, they will get worse. Just like the nitro ads that are already in discord.
I wish I had enough time and knowledge to combine mumble and revolt… That would be the perfect discord replacement.
Actually, I just want 1) gaming voice chat with 2) a shared music bot which 3) my non-tech friends would want to use
And thus begins the enshittification of Discord
It has always sucked. From the beginning it was privacy-invasive, had no real business model, has had crappy Electron apps and has been proprietary.
More like half way down the road
Discord can do shit like this because they know many won’t ever try to use an alternative. You need more than just “open source” “privacy” or “FOSS” to convince people.
To be fair, there was a time before Discord. People once used MSN, Skype, Teamspeak, IRC, etc.
They shouldn’t get too comfortable with the idea that people won’t just up and leave.
There has to be something to leave for
Matrix
Closest I know is Revolt.
Discord has real advantages over many of those, and communities are slow to pick up and move. It’ll take either a verybafd decision from discord or a good competitor. I want that competitor to be Matrix, but it’s far from perfect.
Well, adding ads could easily be that very bad decision, if anything can position itself as an attractive alternative fast enough
I don’t think it will take just one of those, it will take both.
This. Open source apps are generally awful at presenting themselves to a broader audience.
Even for me, who’s technical enough, an app being FOSS is not enough to even bother checking out. Yes, I’ve said it. Sorry, tinfoils, but I do put features above else. And, want it or not, general public does the same: if the featureset is not clear enough at first glance, and an app doesn’t explicitly provide clarity on what it does and how it is better than competition, most people aren’t even checking it out.
It’s an unpopular opinion but I completely agree. I’ve tried Matrix, not only could I not get more than 2% of my community to try it, but it’s horribly unintuitive and limited for server owners. Shut it down after a few months.
I have a rocket chat server going now, some similar issues, but at least it has more control than Matrix. Still only a fraction of my Discord and Telegram user base has joined, but it’s similar enough that people are at least willing to try.
FOSS alone is not enough, the wider public doesn’t care, they just want something easy and convenient.
Curious, what didn’t you like about Matrix specifically? I’m in the process of evaluating it for my friends. With the Element client, so far it seems pretty dang similar? Space = server, room = channel, there are also access controls. Seems like there’s voice and video chats too.
Speed was a big thing. Switching channels could take a few seconds to over a minute to load, on good hardware.
The biggest issue, and a huge glaring oversight imo, is that users can create their own channels, encrypt them, and instance owners have no way to know what goes on in there. Some of the channel names alone were enough to make your skin crawl.
Oh, and you want to ban somebody? Cool, just ban them individually from every channel, because there is no global instance-wide ban. Moderation is horrendous.
That sounds laughable. Gross. No thanks.
did you host your own matrix homeserver or use matrix.org? that can change how fast it feels massively and yeah built in moderation tools are pretty much nonexistant https://github.com/the-draupnir-project/Draupnir is the only moderation bot that you can run to ban users from all rooms at once if they break your rules and lets you subscribe to banlists so if a user spams in other rooms that have write access and gets added they’ll be banned from your rooms as well
if the featureset is not clear enough at first glance
My experience as someone who has barely dabbled in Matrix, tried comparing clients, and knows a lot of people who stick to Discord: a lot of Discord users heavily use custom emotes, voice chat, and screen sharing. It’s not even easy to figure out which Matrix clients support each of those features without installing everything and trying it out. There’s a clients comparison on matrix.org that mentions Voip but not stickers or video.
For stickers alone:
- Element is widely considered the go-to Matrix client but uses a strange integration system for predefined sticker packs instead of the MSC2545 stickers that more closely resemble what users coming from Discord would want.
- Cinny seems to have the best support for stickers/emotes but its site doesn’t mention them at all. It supports uploading and managing sticker packs at either a channel or user level, provides a nice picker UI to send any picture from those packs as either a large “sticker” or a small inline “emoji”, and allows using them for reactions.
- FluffyChat mentions stickers on its site and has the second best sticker support, with all of those except reactions and a graphical sticker picker for inline emoji (need to type them as shortcode).
- SchildiChat, Nheko, and NeoChat have some sort of limited support for custom stickers/emoji. NeoChat is the only one of those that advertises stickers on its main site. Nheko mentions them in a GitHub readme.
Being able to freely use custom emotes without paying for a Discord Nitro subscription nor server boosts would be a great selling point but it’s not something most users would be able to figure out before signing up. The limited client support isn’t great; e.g. Fluffy is the only Android client that supports sending custom stickers but some people may dislike the chat bubbles style UI.
We need to fix people. This proprietary shit is dystopian.
Make the apps pretty, sure, but long term; fix people.
More, you need to convince the that this shit being inevitable is why you need FOSS.
Ads are not enough reason to stop using it for the majority. You need to offer more than just ad-free. You need to offer the same or better adoption, features, and overall user experience. Discord has these all nailed.
Discord has literally like one feature matrix doesn’t; stickers. And it kinda has those. Stop talking shit and try it out with some friends. This is so much more important than just chat, and the hour is getting late as fuck.
The big thing is the network effect. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
I’m not leaving my communities for yet another app. When they migrate I will too.
Dude. You can install multiple apps on your phone. I’m pretty sure.
Steam supports direct voice chat. My friends use it for gaming.
Also, teamspeak.
Steam doesn’t let me make my own survers with categorized groups and stuff
mumble is free and open source.
So is Matrix and it includes self-hosting and end-to-end encryption enabled by default.
Did they rewrite that crappy Python server in something with better performance by now? I tried self-hosting Matrix a few years ago and gave up after the one room I joined hadn’t finished syncing after a whole day (admittedly it was their main matrix chat room with lots of members but still).
It depends on your skillset. If you can self host services in docker, matrix should not be an issue anymore. Its still nowhere ready for everyone at this point but is constantly improving.
Docker changes nothing about the performance characteristics of a service. If anything back then a full server dedicated to it wouldn’t have been enough.
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/servers/
There are multiple options for homeservers and the Python one is just one of several implementations. There are others written in C++, Rust, Go!, etc.
Just don’t make a new install with Dendrite - it’s not really supported anymore. And no automated automation for us who do have Dendrite servers …
Synapse if you plan to go large, otherwise Conduit, would be my recommendation.
That hasn’t been an issue for a year if you’ve enabled sliding sync. It is very fast nowadays. Look into element-x https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-android
Sliding sync doesn’t make joining Matrix HQ any faster. This is depending on your hardware and whether or not you have any workers configured. For most users it isn’t worth joining that room anyway.
Why not? I’m not in mhq but why is it different than other rooms?
It’s the amount of users and servers in the room. When you join it on a new server it needs to process and verify the state of the room and agree it with all the servers. As the state is massive in this room it can take a very long time to join it.
If you want to learn more read this: https://matrix.org/docs/older/stateres-v2/
Thx. So the first time the server joins the room it’s slow. Any subsequent joins are faster
Element X is a client.
Isn’t Mumble just a voice chat software? I don’t think that is the main use case for Discord for most people.
Yeah, discord is for running a community not just chatting in voice.
Idk, me and all my friends use discord for vc, plus screenshots and memes while we chat. You can do that in mumble. Not sure about broadcasting or anything (I started a server yesterday after the news broke), maybe there are extensions. Discord is just a means to an end for us.
And no one uses it. The last time I used mumble was over a decade ago and its use was short lived.
Goddamn I wish it wasn’t so hard to convince friends that discord sucks. I’d rather just send SMS than use discord to communicate with my social circle.
SMS? You mean the paid, vendor lock-in, MITMable traffic? Possibly one of the only options that is actually worse than Discord
I don’t always force my friends to use Discord alternatives, but when I do I force them to use Signal.
Took fucking years but i dragged them to signal kicking and screaming, people are such little bitches
Enshittyfication as normal
Is this april fools or for real
Sadly this one’s real, their April Fool’s joke was a lootbox that gave avatar/pfp decorations and stuff
The news broke yesterday sooooo
Oh no.
Mr Kool-aid man, but with a discord logo on him OHH YEAHHHHH!
If you don’t use Discord for voice much, Matrix has a pretty solid bridges you can use.
Hosting your own Matrix server is suprisingly way easier than I though - got a VM on hertzner for like 5$ a month, and there is an Ansible script that takes care of the setup for you. It’s also one of those rare cases where someone made an Ansible script that actually works, instead of you getting stuck in dependency-hell (seriously, fuck npm. Not a single docker or ansible tool that has used it ever worked for me out of the box. Python can get simillarly annoying).
They have a pretty easy to follow guide, and the whole setup took me like 20 minutes. I only edited a few options in config.yml (mostly to add Messenger and Discord bridge), and ran the ansible, and it worked at first try.
So I could at least ditch both messenger and discord apps from my PC and phone, without having to convince anyone to quit their poison - with only issue being that you can’t use Discord voice. And that the messenger bridge is still unreliable sometimes, but those are still minor inconviniences in comparison to my deep-seated hate for Meta.
Of course - Meta still gets my chat data and content, same as Discord. But at least they don’t get anything else from my phone or PC.
Matrix bridges are nice until you realize that you have to be a mod in the server to add the bridge, you need to do it not only for every Discord server you want to use on matrix, but every channel as well. It’s a huge chore. And ofc it doesn’t work with Discord DMs.
Not blaming Matrix or the matrix bridge developers here because it’s not their fault. But let’s be honest: matrix bridges are a pain to set up for Discord and for a majority of people aren’t worth the hassle. Moving to Matrix would be the better choice if at all possible
you need to do it not only for every Discord server you want to use on matrix, but every channel as well. It’s a huge chore. And ofc it doesn’t work with Discord DMs.
This wasn’t my experience at all - all I had to do was message the Matrix bot with servers I want to join (I’m not a mod on any of them), and it bridged all channels in that server. Also, Discord DMs are working fine.
I’m using the mautrix bridge, which doesn’t use a bot or anything like that, but uses your Discord session instead.
Is there any alternative with screen share feature and music bots?
