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miga

There are many problems with discord, and GPU is not the worst one.

Discord Snap has to block many unusual activities, but I still see these:

* attempt to `ptrace` processes all the time;

* using 99% CPU;

* to work Discord needs some non-standard interfaces to be connected;

* Discord tries to track which other programs you run by default and shares it.

* too frequently restarting desktop integration snap until the logs make machine non-functional (got 500GB.)

* blocking other programs using desktop integration for file dialogs: latency of several minutes, sometimes dialogs never appear.

Discord is as dodgy app as can be. Hope we will not find it is actually another distribution of spyware.

Since programs with so many bugs and crashes are frequently prone to security issues, I recommend to replace Discord with another app that allows push-to-talk.

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>> blocking other programs using desktop integration for file dialogs: latency of several minutes, sometimes dialogs never appear.

I think HN may have solved one of my most annoying technology mysteries... Definitely taking discord out of automatic startup. Moving back to teamspeak or some other system is quickly becoming a thing for me. I used to run a TS3 server for years.

Mumble is a much better experience than Teamspeak, at least in my experience.

Mumble is probably the best VOIP solution on the market. The main issue blocking its wider adoption, IMO, is the lack of support for persistent, multi-media friendly, text chat. I've suspected for a while that Discord could be totally replaced by someone duct-taping Mumble and some forum software together.

Discord's biggest sell is being able to spin up your own "server" for zero effort and for free. Some kind of federated Mumble that people could rent servers from (or join their own self-hosted servers to) would be able to eat into some of Discord's market share but the free hosting is a huge draw ro Discord.

You call that a bug, i call it a feature.

When did they ever call it a bug?

Same. I've thought about what Mumble needs to be competitive at all in the market.

* Persistent chat

* Multimedia chat (Emojis, resized images, etc)

* Camera streaming/game streaming (MUST HAVE these days)

Additionally, if there were "mumble multi-server management" that allowed a host to spin up other servers quickly, third-parties could skim off Discord. There is no loyalty to Discord IMO, it's just so damned easy to use.

Last time I checked, mumble didn't have a web client either

Man, that would be pretty sweet though. Someone could cobble together an unholy Mumble + Mastodon beast of privacy-respectful gaming communications

TeamSpeak 5 is currently in beta and attempts to bring a Discord-like experience to any TeamSpeak server.

TS3 already had a lot of features like file uploads, rich text chat, avatars, and much more, and as far as I know TS5 is mostly a reskin using the existing technology of TS3.

Why not just use it through the browser? That's what I've been doing since the beginning.

> Discord tries to track which other programs you run by default and shares it.

You might not want it, but it's not like this is unexpected behaviour. Tracking the currently running game and sharing that information with your friends is an intentional, advertised feature.

I wouldn't mind this feature so much if it were optional. However, while it's possible to disable the sharing of the information, as far as I'm aware the only way to stop Discord from being able to probe the running processes (so it can display them in the corner to the user) is to run it in a web browser. As such, the desktop apps do not get to run on my machines.

So then I guess the advice is, if you have to use Discord, stick to the web version?

That, or use armcord if you want something that lives outside the browser session.

I use ripcord for discord and slack bonus it's a native app and uses about 20mb of ram.

wow had no idea there were good native apps for discord. im totally gonna try this once im home :))) thx again :)))

This apparently breaks their TOS, but I don't know if anyone got in trouble over it yet

Can you show where in the TOS third-party clients are disallowed?

(The Discord TOS does not even mention third-party clients.)

https://twitter.com/discord/status/1229357198918197248?lang=...

> All 3rd party apps or client modifiers are against our ToS, and the use of them can result in your account being disabled. I don't recommend using them.

That's not the TOS. That's a 3 year old tweet with multiple people in the replies asking to cite where in the TOS it says that, and no further reply from the official account.

Keeping it vague means they can simply shrug and refer to being able to ban accounts at their own discretion

Yeah, that’s already the case with every online service. They don’t need to be vague — they don’t have to give any reason for banning you.

Ah, I didn't really read the ToS, but contemplated a third party client a while ago, and was told I best avoid them due to ToS violations. I guess it must've spread through that tweet.

so just sign up again

like reddit, bans are entirely meaningless

Reddit is one of the most difficult sites online to use as a new user. Virtually no subreddits allow new account to post. There are often waiting periods of a month for new accounts and large karma requirements that are difficult to get, because once again subs won’t let you post.

Reddit is new user hostile.

> Reddit is new user hostile.

indeed it is, because if you're new and don't know about the effective shadowbanning of new users then it just looks like the site is dead

meanwhile anyone actually banned will just go and pay $1 for a 3 month account with 100 karma

Be very careful with third-party discord clients; they are officially against TOS and people have permanently lost their accounts over it.

I keep trying to use ripcord, but the reality is a workplace expects you to be able to jump on board every new feature that Slack adds within moments of it's release. Whether that be huddles, threads, recordings, etc.

If we could pare our use of Slack down to just text, it would be a great alternative - but until them I'm stuck using the official client.

Is there anything you can't do in slack's web client?

This is a real question: what are Slack huddles supposed to do? I run the native client. While anyone can start a huddle with me, I never see any UI for a huddle. All I get is the audio coming across. To end the huddle I have to force stop Slack and relaunch it.

I really like them. No need to invite people to a meeting; just jump in. E.g. if you have an issue to diagnose as a group you can just stay on the line, and dip in and out where necessary.

In Teams you can just call the first person up and then add more people into the call. "Jane Doe is calling you from a group chat" or whatever it says. I'm surprised this is a new-ish feature in Slack?

Not really the same thing. Huddles are voice for channels.

It's hard to explain. You're in a channel already, e.g. your team's channel, and you hit a toggle and it creates a voice chat and others are notified to join. I think it's really slick.

Teams has that too, you can call groups, or teams, people can pop in and out at will.

Two years ago the multinational company I was working at had a global ransomware attack and we had a teams call for like 7 days straight with check-ins every two hours for everyone but there were on call people in there always if you had specific questions.

It worked really well and made it easy for people to get stuff done and have clear chain of command when everything else was down.

I know what you mean - we had Teams at my past place. Difference is Teams UI is intrusive, which might suit command and control style orgs. Huddles are much less intrusive. You can do regular calls with Slack as well, Teams-style, but huddles are much slicker IMO.

This is not true, Slack has removed support for regular calls. When you attempt to use calls it tells you it has been replaced with huddles.

Oh - actually I hadn't used them in a while. Didn't realise they'd gone. Fair enough.

What should be happening is a small window opens at the bottom of the left sidebar (under your channels/direct messages/apps)

The tiny window is sorta useless except for mute/hangup, but you can undock it from the sidebar and make it much larger for video chat or screensharing.

1st party support is (sadly) usually the best experience you're going to get.

I'd love to see some real focus on open standards and enforcement for those standards at a legislative level (the first to go should be any limits on 3rd parties acting on behalf a user... it's essentially the same as the court case that allowed consumers to install 3rd party equipment at telephone jacks)

But until then (and I'm not holding my breath because the US congress is utterly, woefully, frankly perhaps intentionally, useless for both antitrust and tech regulation at the moment) I'll continue to use the first party software.

We use slack at work for text only. I’ve used the web client for probably 5 years now

is there a way to get it to save deleted messages?

Ripcord will temporarily remember deleted messages for channels in which you're a moderator. You can view the contents by right-clicking on the message. It won't do this if you aren't a moderator in that channel.

This is to help avoid having to use a bot to log all message edits+deletes, usually done to mitigate bad actors saying something bad, getting someone else to report the message or take a screenshot of it, then delete it afterwards.

I would love to use Ripcord but I can't find any information on noise suppression/voice focus and that's a requirement for me as I play without push to talk and on mouse and keyboard so all those key presses get sent through to those in my channel. With the 1st party app, despite other issues, none of my key presses come through for people in my channel.

If you have an Nvida card you could use Nvidia broadcast. It runs as a virtual microphone that other apps can target as the voice input. So Nvidia broadcast will receive the raw input from your real microphone, process it, and feed it to any applications that are targeting the Nvidia broadcast mic as their voice input. It also doesn't appear to add any noticeable latency.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/broadcasting/broadcast-...

... and/or use an irc gateway (like bitlbee) if it suits your needs.

One sticking point for people might be the way push-to-talk works for the in-browser version; the shortcut to trigger it will only work when you have the browser window focused (I think due to limitations in how browsers can capture inputs when not focused, which is a pretty reasonable policy in general). Not only does this mean you'd need to alt-tab over whenever you want to push to talk (which isn't super easy for a lot of potential use cases, like gaming), but if I remember correctly from trying this out once, you can have even more jarring bugs like "alt-tab over to the browser to hit push-to-talk shortcut, hit the shortcut, alt-tab back before releasing so you can keep talking, and then having the push to talk never deactivate because the browser didn't detect the key-up event due to a different window having focus when it happened".

On Linux, I just tested that if you have a Mozilla Firefox window running on X (I tested on XWayland but it should work just as well on X11) with the Discord tab in view, you can use your desktop's/compositor global keyboard shortcut functionality to call xdotool to send a keyup/keydown event without focusing the window, like this:

    xdotool search --name 'Discord.*— Mozilla Firefox' keydown F9
    xdotool search --name 'Discord.*— Mozilla Firefox' keyup F9

I configured web Discord to use F9 as the push to talk button since it seemingly doesn't conflict with anything in Firefox, but you can then bind it to any key or mouse button on your global keyboard shortcut settings.

According to some people on StackExchange (I didn't test myself) this doesn't work if you're using Discord on Chromium-based browsers, which seem to reject xdotool events unless the window is focused (which xdotool can do for you, but doesn't work for the PTT usecase). Of course, this doesn't work on Firefox when running native Wayland windows because xdotool is X-only, and ydotool doesn't work either because it emulates a virtual device which would mean you still need to focus the window.

> this doesn't work if you're using Discord on Chromium-based browsers […] this doesn't work on Firefox when running native Wayland windows

It seems like a WebExtension using dispatchEvent could solve both these issues.

> Link?

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/87839

> It seems like a WebExtension using dispatchEvent could solve both these issues.

Great idea! Couldn't find anything any pre-existing project like that from a quick web search and tbh I have enough side projects as it is, but that would indeed solve the issue for both.

In case you (or anyone else) is a windows user with the same issue, I ended up rolling my own solution for it: https://github.com/9001/uptt

Oh wow, that's super interesting! In retrospect it's super clear that muting and unmuting the microphone system-wide will pretty much always work, since it's incredibly unlikely someone would need to have input on between push-to-talk activations, but for whatever reason, it never occurred to me. I use a cheap USB foot pedal to avoid needing to manage holding down the button while trying to do stuff in-game, and I'm realizing now how obvious it is that making it just toggle mute/unmute on each press rather than needing to hold down my foot would be _way_ more convenient!

Me and my friends started using discord early in its life. It was a joy to get away from Skype, google meet, etc. It was such an elegant solution. Sadly it has become a gigantic, bloated, buggy mess trying to do absolutely everything. I hate it. Can anyone recommend a better solution?

To pile on (somewhat). I've been enjoying using discord for the chat features. We just have one channel that I use with long-time friends to chat. Recently, we started playing games together (cross play), and Voice Chat _usually_ doesn't work well on the Xbox. I'm not sure if it's an Xbox or Discord issue though, as I'm the only PC gamer and don't have access to an Xbox to debug it :-)

mumble

The stand-alone server is small, and efficient. There are countless clients that will work with it. I've run it on Linux & FreeBSD systems.

I used to use Mumble. I still think decentralized, encrypted chat is great. But there is nothing like Discord for free.

If Mumble could do streaming/video and rich text support, I think people could be peeled off Discord a tad.

But I don't know what you're talking about regarding buggy. Discord runs pretty much perfectly for me, excepting one issue (it was either Discord or Corsair Wave) that was giving fuzzy audio with a particular virtual audio input.

For how complex the server/channel/DM/text chat/"voice channel" text chat schema is, I think it's a pretty impressive product.

https://tavrn.gg/ maybe?

I yarn for the simpler days of IRC, Pidgin and Skype where these apps ran fine on a 1GHz Pentium 3 chip with 256MB of RAM.

Now you need a quad core 3GHz chip and 8GB RAM just to run a chat app reliably. Where did we go wrong?

They ran fine on machines a hell of a lot weaker than that. If you had an actually-good desktop OS (uh, BeOS is the only example I know of—Linux, at the time, couldn't do this, even with minimalist window managers) you could even browse the web, have chat open, and be playing mp3s, and not hear so much as a pop or skip on the music, on a 166MHz Pentium (that's a single core, kiddos) with 128MB (luxury!) of memory.

I used to be able to do that on my 25MHz Amiga with 10MB of RAM. Static absolute task priority scheduling is actually a very good way to ensure your MP3 will play without stuttering.

Some of those more-obscure operating systems simply felt like magic. Refresh a webpage on Windows or Linux, mp3 you're playing pops and skips about half the time. Mouse just seemingly-randomly becomes unresponsive. BeOS on the same machine? Hard to load the system enough that playback isn't smooth, and input was only rarely anything other than instant-feeling. Closest I've seen to that recently is iOS, but it cheats by suspending or evicting backgrounded programs.

... but, point is, a chat app ought to be able to run smoothly using perhaps 10% of a single efficiency-core on an M1, when actively being used, and about 0% when inactive. These programs acting like they're mining Bitcoin just to let you chat, which we used to do on hardware far weaker than many modern thermostats have (hell, maybe even some lightbulbs), are absolute jokes.

> Refresh a webpage on Windows or Linux, mp3 you're playing pops and skips about half the time.

Not my experience. Windows (and IIRC MacOS too) always had a great disk I/O scheduler that prioritized audio related tasks so I never had mp3s pop or skip on me, no matter how hard I was thrashing my spinning rust disks back then.

Linux was the one where I noticed this issue intensely back then as the schedulers used by mainstream distros were all tuned for server/mainframe workloads.

To be fair to Windows, it didn't take much more powerful hardware before that problem went away—the mp3 stuttering, anyway, UI lag/unresponsiveness is still struggling to match BeOS on ~every major OS, today. Was all Win98 for me in that era, maybe XP and such improved it (I don't think I ever tried to run it on anything that weak)

Linux could do that fine. Not sure why it couldn't for you but with similar hardware in the mid to late '90s I was able to listen to mp3s, browse the web, and chat on IRC at the same time with no issues.

I don't knit, but none of those do what Discord does, really: effective group chat + in game voice. Skype is sort of is in that direction, but Discord's UX nails it for in-game chat whereas Skype's did not. (Though it has been a while since I ran Skype for more than "oh, that's the only medium that party supports? I guess if we have to…")

I do feel that these apps these days, Discord included, eat a ton of resources, and that it feels like a regression.

ripcord is basically what you are looking for it works with slack and discord.

We went wrong with Electron in particular: https://www.electronjs.org/. I am convinced this framework alone is responsible for more performance loss on the desktop than any other single thing.

VSCode is an Electron application and yet, while not being lightweight, snappy and efficient, is not a complete piece of garbage.

I think the blame fully falls on the developers of such applications, not on the framework.

That seems like the exception that proves the rule to me. If every electron application is a bloated CPU/memory hog that ignores the OS conventions, save the one with major corporate resources backing it, that tells me that making electron apps not suck is out of the reach of most developers, and such a thing is probably inherent to the framework.

Also it's important to note that MS makes bit only the best performing electron app (VSCode) but also the worst (Teams). So even with MS' billions it's not guaranteed to become a quality product.

Strange enough they're now touting the move to Edge WebView as the solution (since they finally acknowledge how bad Teams is) but never explained how this will solve the problem as it's just the same tech (chromium) underneath.

It's able to share one instance of the browser engine across multiple apps (the way that Chrome is able to share one instance across multiple web pages). It'll help some, but won't make up for whatever the hell react is doing all the time.

Agreed and I’d go a step further and say that this was inevitable with the advent of JavaScript.

Humans are lazy (efficient?) and will always gravitate to the easiest tool for the job. If “the job” is just to make a functional chat app, it becomes wildly efficient to simply wrap your web app in electron.

I’ve done it to an existing web app and it took less than a day to suddenly have “native” .dmg and .exe to distribute.

So when we yarn for the days of IRC, I think we should also yarn for the days when JavaScript was not the de facto language for everything which lowers the bar for development so incredibly low that you are ending up with truly garbage desktop apps that should be written in native windows SDK using C++.

JavaScript isn't bad. But if only it were used with native toolkits, instead of running a whole browser instance.

Alright so I gotta ask, now that two people are saying they yarn for the days of IRC. I thought maybe it was a different idiom I was missing, but searching for "idiom yarn for" doesn't get me anywhere. Just a typo/misspelling of "yearn"?

Sounds like a fairly good yarn to me.

Some HNers are secretly cats.

You are probably right. But at the same time, there are a bunch of good desktop apps that would not exist without electron (or at least not in the way we know them today).

But it still surprises me that Discord of all seems to care so little about the resource footprint on their users devices. Considering that Discord is still mostly used for gaming you would expect that users want the communication app's system footprint to be absolutely minimal and without any negative impact on the actual game. Thats why I always loved teamspeak so much

My suspicions that some Windows app or another is using Electron under the hood are usually confirmed when I eventually click the app launcher icon and no window appears and I look in the task manager and see like 20 processes of that app running in the background but something is blocking new UI instances from displaying any UI until I go and kill all the headless zombie instances of the app running in the background with no UI attached.

You would think with all the apps that use Electron this is something that would be fixed (I don't know if the root cause is Electron itself or some bad practice that people who use it do often enough that I've mentally associated it with the framework) but I've seen this issue with every Electron app I've used for any period of time (except VSCode) for years.

I will never miss skype. that application was a buggy ass POS near the end.

I meant the pre-Microsoft Skype. That one was magic.

It used p-2-p over port 80 so it would always reach its destination no matter the firewall rules on your network, and it allowed file transfers up to 2GB(!) in size, in 2005(!).

Can present day Discord do that?

> skype was a buggy ass POS near the end.

Skype was great at first. Then Microsoft bought Skype and turned it into a shithole. Then Microsoft said that this product is trash and migrated everyone to use MSN. Thanks, Microsoft!

Skype was always a bloated mess. My gaming/friend group started off with it, but between the hard cutoff at 8? 16? people in a call, Skype taking up approximately half of our typically 4 GB of RAM, and people discovering you could crash people's clients by sending them several GB of ;) emoticons which, when rendered into smiley images, would overwhelm most anybody's computer, we ended up switching to Mumble, where we discovered something else Skype had sucked at: audio quality. Mumble took less bandwidth and less system resources, while sounding like someone actually sitting in the room with you (at least to our phone-and-skype adjusted ears).

I beg to differ and strongly disagree. Pre-Microsoft Skype was a genius invention and performed admirably for the time (~2005) considering how limited PC specs and bandwidth were back then.

It used p-2-p over port 80 so it would always reach its destination no matter the firewall rules on your network, and it allowed file transfers up to 2GB(!) in size, in 2005(!).

There were no better alternatives at the time.

hmm. My experience with it was ~2010-ish? Mumble came out in 2005, too. Can't say for certain when we switch to Mumble, but it looks like they've had some codex changes over time.

> attempt to `ptrace` processes all the time;

Isn't that for showing what game you're running as your status? If you turn that feature off it should stop doing that.

Couldn't you do that by just scanning `px aux` or even just `/proc` rather than running a tool that is meant for observing and control the execution of other processes? A simple name matching should be enough, rather than digging into the execution of the process itself.

You're aware that the majority of users are running Windows or Mac OS?

Well, they have equivalent functionality I assume where you can get a list of process names that are currently running, without having to resort to using ptrace?

Fair enough.

I am surprised anti cheats don't detect and ban everyone with discord installed if it is really doing ptrace all the time.

Dos anticheats even run on linux?

> * attempt to `ptrace` processes all the time;

This is the one that got it removed from my machine. It runs just fine in the browser so I do that. The feature I lose are ones I don't want anyways.

> * attempt to ptrace processes all the time;

There are Discord employees on the thread so I gotta ask.. what's the justification on this one?

Shit like this makes open sourcing the client a must for me

>Shit like this makes open sourcing the client a must for me

The client is written in javascript. It's not hard to go look at the source.

Open source isn't about looking at the sources. It's about legally forking the client to remove malware and other unwanted features.

Open source is about giving back users control over their own computer

'Open source' didn't mean you can legally modify and republish it. 'Free software' does.

Yes, it does. See point 3.

https://opensource.org/osd

* blocking other programs using desktop integration for file dialogs: latency of several minutes, sometimes dialogs never appear.

That's a Chrome/Chromium thing. Often, if I try to open the Nvidia control panel, it will not appear until I close Chrome. I've had something similar happen with rpcs3 (a ps3 emulator) - only with that, it wouldn't start compiling shaders until Chrome was closed. They continued just fine after reopening it.

Good argument to run Discord in the browser instead.

"Discord is worse with the app".

Discord has supported Push to Talk since 2016 (on Windows atleast), if not earlier...

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