Finally, I hope Discord’s inevitable enshittification will be the kick in the ass that will launch a platform that doesn’t gargle donkey balls - preferably someting fediverse capable.
I wonder if Flotilla on Nostr will be ready in time. The nostr community can unfortunately be a bit iffy right now, but I like the tech, and I’m always excited to see someone taking a good stab at Discord.
Soon as you hear the term instance, most people are out.
Call it a server, then. Tons of people already call them Discord servers. And it’d be a lot more true of Flotilla than Discord. Functionally, from a UX perspective, there’d be VERY little difference to an end user. You’d get an invite somehow, probably through a link, maybe combined with whitelisting your identity for more private communities, and you’d be in, using a client remarkably similar to Discord once it’s in a good spot. For most users, they can fully ignore the technical complexities.
Duuude. Discord is a dumpster fire right now. I’m interested to see how much hotter that fire can get.
Enough to power cities that run out power because Canada cut them off.
It’s good timing that I’ve been learning Docker to run Jellyfin and *arr. Guess I’ll look into throwing matrix or mattermost on there now, too.
Start making your plans for a replacement because it will be going to shit soon.
Now is the time for Matrix to improve usability and whatnot, because I think that’s the most credible replacement.
I really wish Matrix had been more successful, but it has some pretty core problems that prevented it from gaining more traction.
It fell into the same trap as XMPP, though perhaps even worse, with a focus more on its protocol and specification than a single unified product vision. The reference server implementation is slow, and using a language not optimal for its purpose, with alternative server implementations left incomplete and unsupported. It took a long time for them to figure out voice and video and for it to work well, and the “user flow” still isn’t at Discord levels.
I’ve rooted for Matrix for a long time, but as a former XMPP evangelist, to me the writing on the wall says it isn’t suited for success either. I’d love to be wrong, but I don’t see a way through.
What do you think the main problems are?
In terms of performance, there’s Rust in the synapse repo already, and both Conduit (Rust) and Dendrite (Go) seem viable. If one of those projects reaches parity with Synapse, do you think that’ll “fix” matrix?
If not, are there other issues core to matrix design? I’m not that familiar with matrix except as an occasional user that follows a few tech rooms, but I’d love to help out if I’m pointed in the right direction. I’m comfortable with Rust and Go (and do Python at my day job), so if backend performance is a bottleneck, I could make help out.
But if the problems are fundamental to how it’s designed or how the project operates, I’d rather work on other things.
I do think the other home server implementations gaining parity (production-ready) with the reference home server would go a long way. I haven’t run a home server but I’ve heard from those that have that it really has a hard time scaling. (Though this serves as impetus to give it a try over spring break)
Which brings me to the caveats of the protocol, I personally don’t think the design is ideal, it’s more described as a distributed message bus, what I’ve read of the spec it’s over engineered, it made good decisions wrt using modern web technologies (JSON, WebRTC), but it didn’t scope itself to the particular task.
That said, I haven’t written a federated protocol, and they have. But if I was going to, I’d really want to look at Discord and see how to copy a lot of that model, but break parts of it out to facilitate federation:
I originally wrote a huge hypothetical design here that I speculated would fare better, but honestly the specifics become less relevant, point is that the shared state of rooms is a real challenge, and one out of scope for just a federated instant messaging system, and I’m no longer certain it’s viable.
Although, I’m honestly surprised that there isn’t a Fediverse equivalent/Alternative to Discord.
IK that platforms like Matrix exist, but what I’m talking about is a federated platform that’s a clone of Discord.
I tried revolt a year or so ago and it was pretty rough
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I can’t wait for Discord to enshittify so that lazy devs can’t say “join our Discord for updates and support!” anymore.
Hate that shit.
Fiiiiiiiiiinally.
How can it not be awful for them too? Like users may even try to ✌️search Discord✌️ for their issue only to come up short and have fo ask a question asked a million times already. Gross.
It’s quite shit already
It seems unlikely that will stop, at least with any speed, TBH.
here it fucking come, if you thought it was enshitified you haven’t seen anything yet!
That explains all the AI crap they’ve been chasing for a while now. They’ve been trying to juice up the value to make it look appealing to potential buyers because you can basically slap “AI” on anything and it instantly shoots up in value.
Discord is effectively dead if this goes through.
It has been in the works from the very beginning. They dropped their mask when things got put behind paywalls and they started censoring criticism. Hell they artificially pumped up emote slots on servers they were secretly running just to get the most users on them. why? To control the narrative. Those servers had the most users for this reason and their owners were thrilled about becoming essentially redundant over night which was more than just a little suspicious until they got found out. They also run their subreddit where they also censored any criticism for this weird bait and switch.
To those who say „who cares about emotes?“ I can only reply: You‘re missing the point. It‘s not about the what but the how. Discord is a sleazy company that gaslights their users to an extreme degree sometimes.
If they’re courting buyers, it’s already dead. It’s just not started to stink yet.
They also put ads on the screen and have been shilling their apps for a while now. There is not even a button to go to the webapp on their mobile site, you have to switch to desktop mode just to get in.
much like reddit its other counterpart is doing right now. Juicing up its value by “eliminating tons of accts regardless of the status of those acc”
Unfortunately this is probably going to be a buy for me.
Seeing how the market reacted to the enshittification of Reddit, means that Discord probably has a lot of upside on the share price. The parallels between the two services can’t be ignored.
reddit and discord goes hand in hand, since they often are used in conjuction with each other, where they are censured on reddit they go and complain discord.
Welp, there goes the neighborhood. If they want to do an IPO they’ll probably enshittify the hell out of the platform and jettison all remotely raunchy communities. Because nothing says “good investment” than a service that just drove out a fair chunk of its user base.
I just hope further Enshittification will cause devs to ditch it and start using proper forums instead. It‘s always tragic when a software has no other way of giving feedback and answering questions than Discord where you can‘t find anything, let alone with an external search engine. The abandonment of internet forum culture and searchable discussions has been one of the biggest losses in the virtual space.
Enshitification is on the horizon…
On the horizon? They crossed that horizon a long time ago. It’s just going to accelerate now
Bet they’ll go the way of Slack and put old messages behind a paywall
I want to adopt Matrix but getting started is the hardest part
Getting my friends to shift over is a pain in the ass for sure
I have my friends and family on Matrix.
My instance is over 7 years old.
Love it, can’t imagine being without it.
That’s where a Ulysses pact can help: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/
It was hard to get everyone off aim too but it happened.
Then again there is always IRC.
You SHOULDN’T have gotten people off AIM. AIM was awesome!!!
We used it literally til the servers turned off.
Apparently at least one person is working, fairly successfully, on a server clone. I think it was this one, but I only know about it from one YouTube video I watched weeks ago.
I have a friend who is just so damn stubborn when it comes to mixing up their “comfortable” things if they aren’t the one to come up with the idea
Very frustrating
The hardest part of using Matrix is basically everything about Matrix. They’re an unholy combination of Slack, Discord, and Signal… And not very good at any of those things
What’s the best alternative software to gear up to transition to? I’m pretty pissed because they finally got decent integration for PS5. I was playing Space Marines with a couple friends, one of whom is playing on PC, so we’ve been able to crossplay with voice chat.
Simplex is cool, but it’s more of a Signal/SMS replacement than Matrix. It doesn’t really do rooms as you might want, and discovery of peers is pretty manual.
Cool tech, just not a Discord replacement.
Could we add Zulip? I think it even has IRC integration if I’m not mistaken.
XMPP, but unironically
Any suggestions for an XMPP client?
In an ideal world I want something that has Discord’s “drop-in” chats where you don’t need to “start a call” anywhere, you just join in. My biggest gripe with Element’s voice chat
Depends on your platform. I don’t know about drop in calls, tho.
Maybe Revolt or Matrix?
XMPP, IRC…
You can try matrix if you’re a masochist.
I see everyone suggesting revolt but what about teamspeak?
Revolt chat
Discord, the social chat app popular with the video game community, has met with investment bankers in recent weeks to discuss preparations for an initial public offering as soon as this year, two people familiar with the talks said.
[…]
The people, who requested anonymity because the conversations are confidential, cautioned that the talks were still exploratory and that I.P.O. plans remained subject to change.Discord knows everything about its users. Why don’t its users get to know about the future of their app
Privacy for Me but not for Thee.
