Online software development life cycle in a nutshell:
Startup - Geeks are in charge and you’re creating a cool communications platform.
Mature - Accountants are in charge and you’re gamifying ad clicks.I admittedly haven’t looked very hard for an alternative. But I fully expect to be forced to move elsewhere in the next year or two due to their increasingly belligerent chasing of profits.
If you’re after text, there are a number of options. If you’re after group voice, there are a number of options. You could mix and match both, but “where everyone else is” will also likely be a factor in that kind of decision.
If you want both together, then there’s probably just Element (Matrix + voice)? Not sure of other options that aren’t centralised, where you’re the product, or otherwise at obvious risk of enshittifying. (And Element has the smell of the latter to me, but that’s another topic).
I’ve prepared for Discord’s inevitable “final straw” moment by setting up a Matrix room and maintaining a self-hosted Mumble server in Docker for my gaming buddies. It’s worked when Discord has been down, so I know it works. Yet to convince them to test Element…
Same. I just hope my friend group and by some extension the gaming community chooses something that won’t fall into the same pitfal of closed source for profit organizations.
I hope the transition is towards matrix, or something like it.
Hopefully, I would love a discord alternative that does the same thing but is open sourced similar to the fediverse.
something that won’t fall into the same pitfal
What exists that cannot be sold to a high enough bidder? Even Lemmy isn’t magically immune. If the admins of .world got handed checks for a couple million dollars in exchange for the rights to operate the servers, what would discourage them from cashing out?
The internet is fundamentally a privatized system that exists to generate profit for investors. There is no true public domain. Its all just turf up for sale, some of which hasn’t gone to a notable bidder yet. If you do manage to improve a patch of digital real estate to the point where someone will pay you enormous sums to divest, you’d be a fool not to take the money.
Even Lemmy isn’t magically immune. If the admins of .world got handed checks for a couple million dollars in exchange for the rights to operate the servers, what would discourage them from cashing out?
Nothing, but it would be far less disastrous than say some billionaire buying the town square of the internet.
Because it’s federated, everyone can just leave. There is nothing stopping people from ditching .world and moving on.
Because it’s federated, everyone can just leave.
Because of the networking effect, people don’t leave. People have stubbornly clung to Twitter and Facebook and YouTube in the face of enshittification.
This notion that everyone’s just going to pick up and leave Lemmy hasn’t even worked on Reddit, the OG thing everyone was supposed to pick up and leave after it went to shit.
Because of the networking effect, people don’t leave.
Federation is strong specifically because of how it gets around the networking effect. You don’t need a .world account to see content from it. That doesn’t apply for Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube without shenanigans.
This notion that everyone’s just going to pick up and leave Lemmy
You don’t need to leave lemmy. It takes 10 minutes to set up a new account somewhere else, with zero downsides.
If you control the main server, breaking federation is not a problem.
Federation is strong specifically because of how it gets around the networking effect.
Federation doesn’t get around the networking effect. It inhibits the network’s growth by allowing the community to fracture along instances, depending on the whims of the admins. But when one community outstrips the rest, its meaningless.
Federating mitigates the flaws of OG Mastadon, as it allows individual users to stack threads from multiple participating instances. But as soon as their native instance goes to shit, they’ve got to pick up a new account somewhere else and rebuild their profiles. And people - by and large - don’t like doing that repeatedly.
It takes 10 minutes to set up a new account somewhere else
“It takes 10 minutes to set up an account in App X” is the same line I’ve heard explaining why people would leave Twitter or Facebook or Reddit.
Why doesn’t BlueSky have all of Twitter’s business if it’s so easy?
If I care about my account, it would suck. Can’t migrate unless server allows me to
Not immune, but let’s say resistant. Due to federation, they couldn’t lock down existing federated content; due to open source they couldn’t lock down the user experience; and due to those two, nobody’s going to offer them a check for a couple million dollars.
The replacement is matrix.
Yikes, hope matrix really improves soon.
Matrix 2.0 is class they just need to get spaces support
Not really. The network is currently undergoing massive attacks of spammers who flood people’s servers, rooms and dms with child porn and videos of animals being tortured. Maintaining a public matrix room or homeserver is a nightmare and the Matrix foundation has only now come up with a solution. But these servers are slow to release and many people have been left with no choice but to leave Matrix all together. Discord is a shithole but we need to make sure people are aware that the alternatives have their own set of issues too
Not had any spammers in my server. To handle that sort of stuff on discord I have a bot that removes messages based on regexs I’ve set and restrict new members from media,urls, etc til they get their first 10 posts in the server.
What genuinely confuses me is who they’re finding to buy this shit to begin with.
I’ve seen so many of these failed “Join our club to score points to get tokens to buy virtual dongles that you can use to get into our more-elite clubs with better points and color tokens” schemes over the last ten years. It’s like everyone wants to be Chuck-E-Cheese, nevermind that the company went bankrupt five years ago.
Even if all you care about is profit, it seems like this is an abysmal means of generating it.
Oh it’s undoubtedly going to fail, but it should milk enough money out of their users to keep them going while their investors cash out
ah yes, seeing deepweb market-esque exit scams on the surface web is a sign of a healthy system
Microsoft had a check ready for $10B.
I can’t imagine how a new flavor of Buttcoin could compete with that.
It is a bit baffling. I think it’s more ethical than the alternative though: pay gating useful functionality. Offering paid pallete swaps doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, someone who would never pay for that, but it does at least mean I can just ignore it. If they were to, say, restrict voice calls to a paid subscription, suddenly I’m in a position where either I’m paying for the service or ditching it entirely.
They already do pay-gate useful functionality, this is just an alternative revenue stream
increasingly belligerent chasing of profits.
The word you’re looking for is enshittification.
I thought it was called capitalism.
Enshittificaiton is a uniquely capitalist thing, so…
They are the same thing.
enshittification is a part of capitalism, but capitalism also has other things going on
Keep an eye on Revolt.
Is it open-source? Sounds like it does exactly what I want. Maybe I’ll create a shadow group there and make the permanent jump once discord becomes untenable.
It is open source. But from what I can tell the accounts are largely still hosted centrally, and it isnt federated in any way, which isn’t great. Anybody can host an instance or server.
So ultimately it looks like a massive step up from Discord, with some small issues here and there.
https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html
https://github.com/revoltchat/documentation/blob/master/docs/faq/instances.md
Oh well. Matrix it is, then.
(I prefer XMPP but no group chats kinda ruins it if it’s a feature you expect)
I believe there was talk of opening it up to the fediverse but not sure where they landed on it
Edit: From the linked FAQ actually
Does Revolt have federation
As of right now, Revolt does not feature any federation and it is not in our feature roadmap.
However, this does not necessarily mean federation is off the table, possible avenues are:
- Implement our own federation protocol
- Implement a promising up and coming federation protocol, polyproto
- Implement the Matrix protocol (unlikely, obtuse and unstable)
- Implement the XMPP protocol (battle-tested and stable)
Any federation that is implemented MUST exercise caution in:
- Preventing spam and abuse: moderators should be able to block malicious actors
- Protecting user data: users should be able to redact all of their information and messages
deleted by creator
It feels like literally the entire open source and games communities are on discord. Will they move too? I care about that even more than my DMs.
They were on IRC before and on a number of other chats systems before that.
They will move as soon as something better will come out, for various definitions of better
You read my mind
Slack does the same thing as discord i believe
How in the hell has that app gone so far down? This must be a record in enshittification.
Yeah, di$cord has definitely been speedrunning the deterioration of their platform.
It’s a shame because they started as a darling of the gaming community with a lot of loyalty when people were switching to micro$hit like $lack and team$.
I guess capitalism and endless growth don’t actual translate to improved products for the rest of us. Go figure.
It’ll be nice when our species moves to decentralized platforms like Matrix, but every day we wait is another day I don’t get to enjoy it.
Well they changed CEOs a month ago
It’s over
We’ve never reached levels of Joever this high and Biden stopped being President in January, so you know its bad.
Mark my words, any free service that hosts images is on the cycle. I saw it happen to Reddit and Imgur
Promising to host everyone’s data for free forever is a promise that only a devil at a crossroads can make
Don’t forget to tip your instance admins!
I warned my friends that Discord is looking to go public. Just wait, it’s going to get a lot worse.
I don’t know if you saw the news last month but Discord just replaced a founder with a former Activision-Blizzard exec as CEO.
Well that fucking sucks.
You know, I’ve seen this image at least 15 years ago and thought it was a joke.
Now that I’m older now, I’m guessing this is an actual diagram for implementing and perhaps patenting interactive commercials?
We literally reward people in our society for being as shitty as possible. Can we stop doing that?
Yes, this is real.
🤢🤮
I’m waiting for the day we get the Black Mirror technology where the ad stops playing when you look away and doesn’t start again until you look back at it, forcing you to watch the entire ad all the way through
And the ad is like my dead mom selling me dick pills
The end is coming
What a funny coincidence that I’ve heard about this discord alternative in a post just a couple before this one in feed.
What’s the exchange rate of Discord Orbs to Stanley Nickels?
It has to be one of those ‘Limx as X approaches 0’ Calculus things where X is the value of Discord Orbs.
How do I bot this so I don’t see the ads and get free nitro so ads are removed?
No need, use discord canary.
discord orbs
Oooh yeah, dust off the hotline auto clickers.
The lesson of Pay-To-Surf will keep being taught by reality until it gets taught in business school.
americans LOVE enshittifications.
They truly have zero clue how users actually use their software. Not a single person is going to use this just like every other stupid gimmick feature they’ve added in the past and then promptly removed.
You couldn’t be more wrong.
People actually use the shop. they are spending $10-20 on a profile picture border. Now you are telling them that they can get them for “free”? You bet people will do it. Paid cosmetics have poisoned minds.
Ehhhh I see people with Nitro-included cosmetics but not a lot that have the individually-purchased cosmetics. They exist, sure, but not even close to as many.
I mod a server with 40,000 users and I’m scrolling through the member list as I type this. Majority are either unsubbed accounts or they have the cheap basic Nitro. A lot of the cosmetics I am seeing are the free ones they’ve given away in recent events. Not many users have full Nitro and have their profiles all decked out with additional cosmetics.
I have the “touch grass” one from April Fool’s day. It’s pretty funny.
I paid $30 for a year of Nitro basic. I don’t think I’ll do it again. All the actually useful features for me (longer messages and bigger uploads) are behind the more expensive one, and it’s not worth it.
The only feature I would care about with nitro is using emojis everywhere but that feature isn’t worth any amount of money let alone whatever discord is charging for it
I see some servers with hardly any, some with lots, the cat ears are popular. It depends on the communities you look in. Obviously the majority use Discord completely free, but there’s a significant amount of Nitro subscribers and a good portion of them are also buying things in the shop.
Yeah, Discord whales exist. Some people are REALLY proud of their profiles.
I always lose respect for someone when I see they gave money to discord.
The thing is I’d much rather they do things like this, where the ads are opt in and the monetized features are mostly just extra for if you are enjoying the platform, than something like introducing ads you have to pay to remove or locking core features behind a paywall.
Users on reddit and lemmy always seem to think ad-based stuff is going to fail, and then it turns out people in the real world are depressingly accepting of ads. I would bet that this program is more likely to be expanded than canceled.
I told my sister she can use an adblock to block ads while she’s browsing. She said “why would i want to do that, ads show me what to buy” she loves personalised ads and the idea that all her interests are being track so she can be served relevant ads.
I’m obsessed with this xkcd because it eloquently explains something I’ve been trying to explain to my techs (I’m a director of IT) and my more techy friends.
Its not that most people like the ads (although personalized ads are really nice), it’s that most people legitimately don’t give a shit. Nobody really cares that PC gaming is “better”, or Linux is “better”, or building your own PC is “better” except the turbo nerds like us (and yes, im including you kind reader as you are on Lemmy)
Part of that is because ads that are enjoyable and for things people enjoy often don’t even register as ads to people. When people think of ads they typically think of unwanted distractions for things they don’t want. They don’t necessarily think of something like a free sticker for their favorite video game given to them at s convention. They may even put it on something like a laptop or water bottle. The same people may say they “hate ads”.
I’m not trying to throw shade on those people, I think pretty much everyone is going to be accepting of at least some type of hypothetical thing that’s enjoyable and/or useful to them. A prime exam is having a business listed in a directory. Someone mentioned that as an alternative to advertising as if companies don’t pay to put their names in those directories.
None of this is meant to be any sort of criticism against anyone based on what they do or don’t view as an ad, I’m just trying to help explain why, at least some of the time, it seems “people in the real world are depressingly accepting of ads.”
I swear they are soulless NPCs put on this earth by demons to torture us.
I close every popup, ad, and whatnot. Read nothing, join my voice channel and talk with friends.
Discord has no features imo but voice and text. Everything else is useless and not needed. I will never give them a dime. No point.
The bigger servers i am in always have someone “boosting” it.
Fuck this shit.
how good of an alternative is matrix to discord?
Not as feature rich, quite buggy, inherently more private but also less usable.
The above compounds when trying to get the non-techies to use it, because sometimes it doesn’t just work
Started running a homeserver recently, trying to get non-techy friends to join, can confirm this is difficult (the main one right now being people using old software on their phones, one friend was running iOS 14 for crying out loud)
Once set up I find it OK as a user
Unfortunately, the official desktop app is essentially unusable.
Fractal is pretty good but less features.
Not great. It’s missing discord features like screen sharing and voice rooms (only sort of has them through a third party app, Jitsi, but that experience is… not great).
It also has moderation issues, lacking tools needed to keep spam out and easily control it when it does get in.
I recently deleted my account because there was a spam wave sending out room invites to anti-trans named rooms, and there’s no way to mass ignore, you have to click on every invite, click ‘ignore’ and wait like 15-30 seconds for the server to process.
Related to the above it has performance issues, a lot of UI actions wait for the server to respond, so just have a long delay to them making the user experience feel really crummy.
There are also a bunch of different client apps all with their own features, one will support X but not support Y and the other way around for another app, and there’s no guide on what app to use so that’s confusing.
Overall it feels like alpha or very early beta software, it works if you’re willing to deal with a lot of headache.
Matrix suffers from some pretty poor design decisions and implementations.
I expect its flaws to get ironed-out over the years, but right now people switching from discord to matrix will find their experience severely lacking.
To give some examples, video chatting is not as inuititive in matrix. You can’t even test it on your own without being in a server with specific permissions that allow you to use your camera when nobody else is around. Really fucking stupid design decision.
Another example is the lack of channels. It’s mind-boggling to me how they’re not implemented yet. Matrix will never be competitive with discord until that changes.
I made a few friends switch earlier this year and for our use case it works
Minding we only need a text chat during the day for shitposts, cat GIFs, and the occasional “Gaming tonight ?” “Fuck yeah” “For the Emperor !”
Then we use it for voice chat during the gaming session
To be honest, I don’t think we could have switch if they weren’t a bit tech-savvy and willing to struggle a bit with the encryption at first (but now it’s setted, it works with no issue)
I like it, personally, but I don’t use voice chat.
Next thing you know the ‘orbs’ will be NFTs and we’ll all be expected to grind away at their ‘quests’ (probably training AI) to earn ‘real money’.
