Fosscord is a free open-source discord compatible chat, voice and video platform
github.com
github.com
What makes discord is the community around it, and the fact that 3rd party sites have decided to support it.
Also there's the legal (important for edus, etc) and other support from the Discord people themselves.
Gamers aren't going to leave what they already have -why would they? Edus sure as heck won't -who does that leave, a couple of hackers? Maybe?
A better approach would have been to:
a)Not use Discord's logo in your README.Md FFS
b)Build up infrastructure similar to and competitive with Discord's but FOSS oriented
c)THEN after b is accomplished, work on a client and a server.
Like the many reddit clones that have come and gone (and the slashdot clones before them) this will be a mouse fart into a hurricane
[1]: https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
> This is still a work-in-progress and some things may not work but for the most part everything has been tested without issue!
they do, you need target specific group of the population, then with time (years), it spreads to other new generations
that's how teamspeak died, it's userbase was aging and as a result died with time only for discord to take over
For FOSS projects, that really isn't a factor. The main thing is that Discord is a freely available channel that supports modern things like link previews, image uploads, voice chat, and persistent history. Slack does all these things but makes it a royal pain to join a new Slack.
Why does it matter if gamers come or go? They're a totally different audience. This isn't about building the next social platform, it's about escaping control of the existing ones.
Slack does all these things but makes it a royal pain to join a new Slack.
* One-click audio-video screensharing
* One-click video conference and chatting
* Emojis and inline images
* Decent UI
Bonus: Discord gives people the super quick option to have a hosted private server.
Discord can do all this because you are the product. Sure, there is nitro, but Discord is spyware that looks at every process on your computer and I'm sure they are using/selling that data.
So I believe that a client/server architecture that can do self-hosting and meet those technical requirements, could possibly bolt-on "single identity" ala Discord.
Does Matrix support instant screenshare/video chat rooms?
Is there solid evidence that supports this, or are you saying it based on intuition?
There's a reason they shove the app down your throat even though the website works perfectly...
That there are several articles about people reverse engineering the client and protocol and nobody else has brought this up, I feel pretty comfortable calling this unfounded unless you can provide some indication otherwise.
You would have to show all network activity from the app never includes this type of information or anything derived from it, because as soon as anything goes server-side it can be used for anything. Is this actually easy?
All any of the people claiming that discord is spying on you need to do is capture one packet going out that does have that sort of information, or find one piece of code in the client that supports doing so. That is the part that I think would be relatively easy given that it's primarily just a gob of javascript in a chromeless browser.
But that's the point. There is a "server" running on your machine that is snooping on your processes (therefore the one-click integrations). The "client" you interact with never sees this info, instead just what the "server" exposes to it, so I claim you'd need to reverse engineer the "server" or wireshark your network and read probably-encrypted communications...
Given that that information does go to the server, there's no way to know what it's used for.
That "given" there is doing a lot of work. I've never seen any reference stating that it's sending the entire process list anywhere.
The current third party protocol implementations all expose setting the game/activity you're playing directly, sure making it look like everything is done client-side.
I started getting blasted with YT recs for weeks for a channel I had never heard of, never watched, had no real common connections with ... until someone referenced them in a conversation on Discord.
Now, you can shit on that as anecdotal or "intuition" or whatever, but come on. This is HN. No one here is ignorant about the level of data sharing that goes on in the adtech space, and everyone claims they don't until Gmail's selling you ads based on your emails.
It's not like someone's just argued that the president is a space alien. We're talking about suggesting a for-profit internet company is doing something that literally damn near all the for-profit internet companies do and have done now for decades. The bigger question is to how anyone could be so credulous as to assume they are not.
With "refusal to delete messages" being a clear violation of GDPR, I think it's fair to assume fishy things are going on.
_Integration_ with Jitsi is a separate matter, however. Hosting it can be a pain too.
It is implemented using Jitsi at a protocol level but the end-user doesn't usually notice that.
I will be switching.
You have a local problem there and need to reach out to support.
A freshly installed client will also require you to take a tutorial again once logged in. I like to try different OSes so this tutorial is also a pain.
All the best to you.
I am a student but I don't want to link my personal Discord account with school things, which they keep recommending, FFS.
There are several reasons, based on personal experience with discord's limitations, why some gamer would switch.
1) Lack of accessibility. It is very hard to include deaf people in voice chats.
2) Lack of advanced voice capabilities. There is no way to setup channels where there talkers that are only heard by a subset of listeners. If you are using discord voice to coordinate large groups of players it can be extremely hard to manage.
3) Lack of Bot developer support. There are significant issues with how Discord has developed their APIs and how they treat 3rs party developers.
4) Censorship. Many gamers are irreverant / bot PC and the centralized nature if Discord pretty much guarantees that Discord will eventually face issues with moderation and censorship that will drive people elsewhere.
If Fosscord can keep (feature complete) client interoperability while adding additional features for self-hosted servers, there is a decent chance that a significant minority would move to Fosscord.
I would expect that if such starts to actually happen, Discord will do everything they can to put legal and technical roadblocks in the way of Fosscord.
#3, there's way more discord bots than for any other platform and they're way more useful
#4 is pretty funny given people have been screaming at Discord for years that they have a lot of child porn, right-wing political extremist and white supremacist groups - including servers that exist for the sole purpose of coordinating attacks on LGBTQ community servers - and Discord has just shrugged and said "we don't have the resources to police it."
That doesn't accomplish what I am describing. For example, suppose you want several squads that can coordinate among themselves but also still hear the overall commander, there is no way to accomplish this.
> there's way more discord bots than for any other platform and they're way more useful
There's also been a lot of developer goodwill that's been burnt over the years and a thus reason to believe that 3rd party developers could help accelerate the move to an open source discord compatible ecosystem.
> pretty funny given people have been screaming at Discord for years that they have...
Which is precisely why more and more moderation from a centralized provider like Discord is inevitable.
In the end, we were able to find and setup a bot and some other software to get transcription working but it was far from easy.
Just on this, most Discord mentions I've come across on HN describe how the user experience is what separates it from the competition and I'd agree.
The networking effect across communities doesn't seem anywhere near as strong as traditional social media where one might argue it's what keeps users retained. Few I've observed in the years I've been on Discord seem to care or recognize who someone is across 'servers' (Discord meaning), which is made less obvious by the encouraged feature of changing handles/avatars across communities to maintain quasi-distinct identities (even across related gaming chat). It's also not uncommon for some users block all PMs and friend requests from communities merely due to spam issues.
The communities using it that I've experienced are often doing so since it's the most convenient service for their purposes. Users can join with invites without signing up (a la IRC, traditionally), supports inline attachments (acting as an all-in-one image/video/file host), includes persistent, easily searchable message logs and just as importantly is all free.
A decent number of the communities I've encountered (ranging from software, subreddit/forum chat, game modding, media creation) could migrate elsewhere if there was an alternative suitable for their own needs. A number of them have migrated from other platforms before and one of the gaming-related ones even discussed potential future alternatives. If anything the self-hosted aspect would be the main drawback to a Discord-equivalent alternative (ie: the costs, maintenance).
Since my discord activity is growing by the month, is search good/great with (very) old content?
It's not perfect though. There's no exclusion filter option, some queries are automatically broadened without a way to enforce strict string matching (eg: searching enemies will also include results for enemy but wrapping in double quotes like "enemies" doesn't prevent this), the pagination when there are too many results for a query maxes out at ~200 pages even if more pages are shown/should be accessible via the navigation (seems like a bug), the pagination is also only at the bottom which adds a little extra time navigating and attachment filenames can't be searched.
That said, even with the above caveats I manage to find what I'm after reasonably quickly the vast majority of the time, even things years old.
But the search will let you specify time periods, channels, who sent the message, etc. It also gives a line of context around the result, which takes up some space, but I find is quite useful for, well, getting the context of the statement and figuring out what it meant.
I think the most important facet for (very) old content searching, though, is that you can almost immediately go back in the chat history to any result. Whereas other chat apps make that slow or difficult.
Which means I could swap clients and still participate in the same community, which seems to be what this project is about.
This is incorrect on very clear, unambiguous history. quakenet was fine but all the kids were on discord so left we did. I still hate discord because where it fails is specifically because it isn't FOSS (or at least, with a public protocol), for example, lack of ability to save chats like you could with IRC.
You and me might care about software being FOSS all day long, but the masses don’t. For them it’s just not a thing. I‘d guess „selfhosted servers“ actually is a step backward for the majority of discord users.
Maybe everyone else, who never felt home in that weird gaming platform, would.
Simply removing it altogether from the readme, and if it is used anywhere else replace it with an all grey solid color square.
Worry about creating a logo when you have time to do so, but don’t postpone removing the Discord logo.
When something UI/UX pops up on HN I always look for screenshots or GIFs showing core interactions. If there aren't any, I move on. I don't have the time/energy to install, inspect, etc.
Basically I'm as shallow as folks swiping on Tinder. Show me a pretty UI/UX and I'll be all over it.
Really inappropriate for FOSS.
If I had doubts before, seeing this I lost all faith in this product just like that.
This is not how you build a FOSS alternative.
The other instances do not rip their frontend code straight from discord.
It does follow a client/server model so your server asks like a proxy/BNC while your client(s) connect(s) to your server.
If you want to be $random_uuid, that’s fine too.
I have no clue how federated ID would work. Maybe some interop with PGP?
Gotta love how they reframe the conversation about user's rights. It's like how car companies of old redefined[0] walking as "jaywalking", reframing the conversations about street space in a way where the car became more important than the pedestrian.
What they call "self-botting" is arguably the whole point of having general-purpose computers available to general population. Bicycles for the mind and all.
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[0] - Allegedly; it's a factoid I saw repeated on HN. But even if not true, this doesn't affect my point.
Discord is seeing a huge spam/bot epidemic with stolen accounts right now, makes sense that they want to get on top of something like that.
On the other hand, Discord has drawn some ire for their behavior. Third party clients are obviously not malicious or abusive, they are simply unauthorized. Tools that allow bulk deletion of messages are also very much not really abusive, though they may consume a lot of server resources if the architecture is poorly optimized for this use case. Yet these are probably the main legitimate use cases for so-called self-botting, and while many users have not been banned for it, many report having been banned for it. I have used both without issue, as well as done some manual self-botting, so I can only guess it is not really intentional to kick off legitimate users.
There is a long and well-written discussion from the former developer of discord-py regarding their feelings: https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/4a2f62751b9600a31a0d3c7810028...
Personally, I did not mean to convey any particular feelings to the legitimacy or morality of Discord’s stance, just to provide what I knew in a relatively neutral fashion. That having been said, while I find Discord to be relatively inoffensive, I am getting a bit bothered by the recent rebrands and crackdowns, and I sincerely long for a federated open-standard IM that works like email. But, I know lacking a good product, with good UX and some decent mechanism to handle abuse, it is a pretty asymmetric battle against IM clients with huge network effect advantages. And with email, you can see some cracks in its openness, as a direct result of trying to deal with abuse…
There's no technical reason users can't automate how they use the services, and the security angle is an afterthought. The reason user automation is banned is because it might impact these companies' revenue streams.
Discord doesn't seem to go after unofficial clients as much as they could, but if this client becomes popular they'll probably go after them.
At this point effort should just be spent optimizing electron IMO including just using the latest version.
What went for/against?
WeChat sucks, but it's still used by billions. People are not using WeChat because WeChat is great or Tencent is great. People are using WeChat because their family, friends, employers, favorite medias and hospital reservation services are there.
I wish there was an open standard like we have with email, which I guess is IRC. There’s something frustrating about seeing services like Twitter and Discord holding dominance over such primitive concepts.