Discord is also proprietary software and is backed by Tencent. Read the privacy policy, it might surprise you.
Please try investing in Free, Open Source alternatives first.
Please try investing in Free, Open Source alternatives first.
I did. I put a lot of effort into staying as FOSS as possible. Discord is the thing that got me to compromise this, by being so incredibly good.
No replies? Why after all this time are there still no replies? Default notification settings are still to flood you every time you add a "server". Attachment limits are tiny. And can I just say as a sysadmin calling your chat rooms "servers" is a huge slap in the face to my profession?
The welcome messages are infantile and spammy. Who knows about any privacy at all on the platform. I could go on and on and on and on.
Grown with IRC, Slack replies are awful and so awkward to use. Should I check "Also send reply to #channel?" or not? I check it 50% of the time and I still don't know if I should.
I hate them.
Stackexchange chat has a proper reply feature. You can reply to a message in the same channel. Your message still goes on the bottom of the current channel, but it pings(highlights) the user and contains a link icon to the original message. Hovering on a reply also highlights the message it responds to (if it's on the screen). This is mainly used when responding to older messages, where it otherwise wouldn't be easy to see what you're responding to.
If you want specific others to participate in your thread, you just @ them in your reply. No need to send to channel.
Do you genuinely mean this or are you being hyperbolic?
I agree that that the loading messages are silly, and that could be forgiven, but for the fact that when Discord has trouble updating (which happens when Discord feels like it, not you), you just keep seeing them happen over and over, with no sense of progress or ability to debug.
Discord isn't too bad in that sense.
Other critiques about their administration and overall culture aggravate the UI issues in a way that has a similar non-serious tone. It's Bastard Operator From Hell run through I Can Haz Cheeseburger; I have witnessed people banned on the basis of frivolous complaints with messaging that has a tone of "lolz ur acct bann't" that has left some of the Discord servers I am on without some solid admins until things magically straighten out with the same "guess how this works on the inside" attitude.
The thing is just the incredible ease of use. The easy with which you can join a server and then drop into any text or voice chat you feel like.
There are probably programms that technically replicate the feature set, but I haven't used anything that feels as effortless as discord does. And I can't even pinpoint why exactly that is.
For a chat-only replacement, it's definitely perfect.
https://modular.im/services/matrix-hosting#fair-billing-poli...
It looks like if I wanted to invite 10 friends to my room on Modular.im, I'd have to pay $17.50, compared to $0 for Discord.
- Open source. Self-explanatory.
- Federated. Sure, you can probably redundant-ify your IRC server with Apache Something and Amazon AWS/ Cloudflare whatever if you really wanted to, but I regularly see Matrix rooms with 10+ addresses because the protocol's designed around that redundancy, not the other way around. And of course with Discord none of this even applies...good luck if Intern Greg elbows the Big Red Button, or they pull a yahoo groups/google+/etc.
- The protocol leaves a lot of room for experimentation that Discord isn't nearly open enough for. [1][2][3]
- There's bridges to other discord, irc, and dozens of other platforms, sidestepping the adoption problem (note that there's been even more added since this graphic was made). [4]
They aren't exactly languishing in obscurity either: the government of France is one of their userbases [5]. Yeah, I'd say Discord-style VC would be nice, but the lack if it isn't exactly holding them back.
[1]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/other/matrix-live/ [2]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/other/freebird/ [3]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/other/lightrix/ [4]: https://matrix.org/blog/2017/03/11/how-do-i-bridge-thee-let-... [5]: https://vector.im/#case-studies
The only thing this doesn't let you do is install bridges to other services (such as Discord). For that you'll need your own server.
While I think they're both great, neither of them are an alternative to Discord.
Getting in? One click on email/URL and then sign up. Join a channel? One click. Voice chat? One click. Stream your game? One click. Seamlessly switch to mobile app? Done. I have yet to meet a user that can't get into it with just an invite link. It's amazingly user friendly. And if I want to, I can granularly create roles for users and administrators of arbitrary levels and access rights.
I share the privacy concerns, and that I can't grep any logs easily (though with voice chat that's harder regardless), but simply from a user perspective if it wasn't for the network effect of my IRC communities, and Messenger groups, I could happily just use Discord tomorrow.
I strongly dislike that it's closed source and partly Chinese owned, but I've been using Messenger to reach people I couldn't on IRC for years already, and that experience is much worse, with no privacy gain.
Credit where credit is due, they knocked it out of the park in most aspects.
Also the protocol is open so it should be doable: https://mumble-protocol.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
For those curious about the switch from murmur to mumble in our conversation, murmur is the server side, while mumble is the client side.
we can push open source alternatives all you want but the truth is that these alternatives don't do a good enough job with the most valuable part of social networks: building the network. yes, word of mouth is a big part of growth, but the developers also need to put in work. discord didn't simply blow up because early adopters told their friends and so on, as much as we want to think that to be the case.
Most people came because a)others were there and had chosen it as a platform. b) It's just really nice in every way (other than the bottomline control an privacy part) c) There's no competitors that completely match it's functionality and profit model or if they tried to get close they came too late.
You have your voice chats, video chat and of course text chats. No trouble hosting servers. Easily and extensively customisable modding, structure, permissions, etc. Pins, pings, etc Almost all functionality one might need is there and if it isn't there's bots for it. Sharing and inviting is easy. No time limit on how long stuff is saved or needing to be online to see messages. Linked images, articles, videos what have you show up nicely. Theming is consistent. It works on every OS (except maybe bsd idk) and the browsers consistently so you won't have one group being left out and crusading against it. Everything is in a single place unlike the various irc networks. Want to show a pic you took? a webm? No need to host it somewhere else first.
If there was an open source alternative that got close hell yes of course I'd use it. I'd consider it a big bonus that i'd drop a bit of functionality for. But as it stands there's no comparable private alternatives either.
where do you see this kind of effort from open source alternatives? i believe this is the biggest issue with the "alternatives". my perception is that they think they built an amazing product and that people should just start using it. but that's not how that works.