It’s almost impossible for them to compete with discord at this point. Discord is so good it has raised the bar far beyond what foss developers can make in their free time.
I can see FOSS software outperform Discord, if you pick an aspect, like "low latency audio". But if someone wants to make FOSS successful, they better focus on the user experience. People sacrifice a good bit of everything else, just to get a better UX, and the more developers realize this, the more potential their projects have to succeed.
The last version of BBB released a few weeks ago apparently reduced resource-usage by up to two thirds server-side and brought in long-awaited features. Or so i heard from friendly hosting collectives, who definitely recommend to give it a go.
You can build actual _communities_ on Discord, it's not just about the voice chat. It brings the people together in a way they can share rich content in one space.
If you're on voice chat you will very often want to interact with them by sending images, videos or links back and forth, and can do this seamlessly by using Ctrl-V.
This is why IRC pales in comparison to modern chat solutions, and proponents will start rambling about open protocols or whatever stuff the end user doesn't care about. Can you paste a screenshot into the chat? Thought so.
It can be nice to see videos and images, and it can be annoying. Quite often videos and images dumb down the conversation as people post memes instead of saying anything meaningful.
It can also be handy to see the image right there and not have to click on a link to open it in your web browser to see it, but that just makes the experience a bit more seamless and convenient, and is not something that is going to make or break a community.
Plenty of communities have formed on IRC.. big and small, even without inline images and video.
On the other hand, IRC could easily be just used as an IM backend to a hypothetical FOSS discord alternative. You would press CTRL+V in the client, it would upload your clipboard image to the server, return you an URL, and that would be pasted into the chat box, which would then embed the image. GitHub's editor does this for example and it's a smooth experience, and perfectly compatible with a text-only protocol.
A) it's free, as opposed to a vent or TS server, which while they are not expensive, it's still a barrier to setting one up.
B) the free tier has quite a lot of functionality without paying for servers, even for a lot of players (like a World of Warcraft guild).
C) it merged voice Comms with a community hub where people could communicate and share things relevant to their game (to use the WoW scenario again, raid organising, upcoming patch discussion, guides and other helpful information) in an organised and central location.
I recognise there is a bunch of issues with discord, I've had it have complete melt downs when the voice systems have broken, it can be a real resource hog, and don't get me started on the security and privacy (it's not great), however because of the additional functionality I still think it's a great bit of software.
I'm so glad I don't have to be in Warcraft guild Facebook groups anymore!
My purpose was not to suggest you were wrong, just present my experience and thoughts about why it's become so widely used _despite_ the issues you've raised.
I think people overcome the awkward UI because of the perceived benefits of the platform verses alternatives. That has certainly been my experience, which I appreciate is a single data point.
I'm sure you're right! The robustness of Discord's call quality definitely seems to be much better than average (though a lot of this comes down to people's local networking hardware).
It does work great for that.
My main problem with Discord is that I can't get logs out of it.
I want to archive all the channels I'm in, so I can search the archives offline using regular text search tools. But as far as I know there's no way to do that. (The closest I've come is copying and pasting text out of it, screen by screen, which is a very long and tedious process.)
The Discord client has rudimentary search capability but you have to be online and connected to the Discord server you want to search to use it, and there's no guarantee it'll continue to work indefinitely, and if you ever leave that server your ability to search it is gone.
Scrolling through chat history is also incredibly slow (especially if you have to scroll more than a little, as it slows down significantly when you scroll back a certain amount and it has to load the chat history from the server).
The Discord client is a resource hog too, and on my old slow laptop I dread playing a game and having Discord open at the same time as this combination will often slow down the game to the point that it's unplayable.
None of these problems exist with IRC.
With IRC you own your own data, and if you want to log and search offline it's super easy to do. IRC clients like weechat are super lightweight so don't cause any problems when running along with other apps, and scrolling back through chat history is lightning fast.
The main thing that Discord has going for it as an IRC replacement is that it can show images and videos inline in the chat, and it has a nice looking client. But having your data locked away and at the whims of a corporation and having to suffer through all the other annoyances and inconveniences of the Discord client makes it a poor replacement for IRC for me.
From a follower perspective, it is a place that usually garners like minded individuals, meaning you can often find friends/people to do stuff with. It is also a very good way to hear news about whatever you are following, a lot of server have a ton of users but little activity because most people are there for the news.
The reason why people don't just create forum websites is mostly because it costs money and secondly because going to a website is more cumbersome than opening an app that holds all these "forums".
Maybe for 24/7 gamers who have tweaked it until they found the right setup, Discord “just works”, but for me it seemed unfit for purpose.
Mumble on the other hand tends to be pretty reliable and comes back up in a few seconds anyway whenever it fails.
Recording the audio in windows you can easily tell the difference between them, but not over discord. Even tried upping the bitrate but it made no noticeable difference.
Teams on the other hand has a terrible UI for text chat, but the voice/video meetings are fine.
Maybe people are just impressed solely by UI but they are apples and oranges wrt quality.
I also admin several servers, some of which are completely unrelated to tech and non-tech people find it seamless to use.
And their noise suppression just works. I have only seen better video quality in Google Duo, and better voice quality in 4G VoLTE calls.
Only three issues I have with Discord-
1. It requires high speed internet connection. How high? People with 3 MBPS reported seamless use.
2. The clients are resource hogs. The mobile clients drop the battery too quick, and takes too much RAM in PCs. Although the latter has improved with updates.
3. I am concerned about privacy. Discord is as close-sourced as it gets.
It's a recorded (sorry) issue, they don't seem to care. My use case is simracing with a couple of button boxes in addition to those on the wheel; the outcomes of this issue can be incredibly random (and frustrating) mid race.
Also (especially applicable if you host a small community) to get high quality streams you must put a staggering amount of nitro dollars in on a monthly basis.
It's just There.
Some people just can't accept that proprietary software can be and actually is good.
Discord does not have ads either.