Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers
theverge.com
theverge.com
If you advertise your community on Discord, especially if you are working on something open source, you are part of the problem.
Use Matrix, Jabber, or even IRC before giving companies like Discord money. The cute icons are not worth it.
Unfortunately I just don't see Matrix's priorities going towards UX. I'm dropping them. Revolt has promise [1], at the very least as a stopgap.
Meanwhile the old Element apps aren’t improving because all our (limited) bandwidth is going into Element X, which we hope to be ready this summer.
The problem is entirely that the alternatives are worse than Discord.
There’s no point in a boycott if there’s no destination to boycott to. The reason that the Digg->Reddit boycott was successful was that there was a better place to migrate to.
In the short term people want pretty but enough bad outcomes will push people to consider that UX is not the only thing to value in a communications tool.
There's nothing concrete that Discord holds that makes them remotely better for the users. Discord isn't even mutable, can't be heavily changed or swayed; it's someone else's closed proprietary product. Where-as Matrix or XMPP or irc can be bent, extended, changed to do more, to meet users where they are.
I don't know how any of these assertions that it's Discord or bust are made. This is an article of faith that Discord is simply the one and only way to go, or else, and the tautological definition of an article of faith is that which relies on no external support to maintain itself.
I do think there's a lot of possibility to figure out how to better bring users onto matrix or XMPP or irc, with easy to use web clients & better feature sets. But I also think culture shifts because culture does. For whatever reason there's doctrine that Discord is how it's done, and it's easy as fuck, but if we tried doing other maybe this Discord manifest destiny would not look so horrifically locked in as it is. But that would require not accepting the dogma of Discord crit-hype, that would require multiple folks trying.
Behold, for the answer has revealed itself.
People use what they think is best, where "best" has a wide variety of answers and very rarely is the answer "a feature set that programmers think are good".
We offer free software and free support. We do not feel it is an unreasonable ask that people use open standards to collaborate with us on open software.
Many have created accounts on Matrix because they wanted our help. It works.
Unlike "consumer" platforms like Discord, they're used to talking with serious businesses, and usually have more sensible rules and customer support procedures in place, but things still can go wrong sometimes.
This is one of a very few things that can actually be solved by a blockchain (because there's no way to have a human-friendly naming system without financial incentives, and there's no way to have decentralized financial incentives without a blockchain), but that causes its own share of problems. Your domain might be impossible to take away, but if you get hacked and your keys get stolen, there's also no way to get the domain back.
It seems that no matter what you do, this is just a risk you're going to face.
Unsure why a distributed ledger like a blockchain would be needed for DNS independence :)
You can go the DNS way and have a centralized registry. It may be hierarchical and/or distributed, but it's fundamentally still centralized.
You can go the free-for-all way and allow anybody to register any handle/domain under any public key. This works for closed networks with trusted participants, but on an open network where name registration is at no cost, a profit-seeker will inevitably register all the names for themselves and try to sell them, probably at somewhat extortionate prices.
The only way to deter profit seekers is to introduce a small cost to register and maintain a name. You need fees to be high enough for most names to be unprofitable to snatch, but low enough to still be affordable to a vast majority of users. The only way to collect fees in a decentralized manner that we know of so far is via a blockchain.
The crucial realization here is that, with a human-friendly naming system, there's always going to be a cost to acquiring a name. It may come from the designers themselves or from the people who got all the names in a gold rush, but it's always going to be there. The cost doesn't necessarily have to be financial, many centralized system require scarce resources (e.g. phone numbers or human attention to solve captchas) to squat on.
Connect via IP and you can connect with no issues. Self-signed certs work well for IRC too.
The IRC clients are mostly bad and ugly, and they don’t even implement basic formatting features (bold, italic) in the same way.
NickServ sucks.
Having to use bouncers to keep track of history sucks, this only makes it a non suitable choice for a chat platform today.
Does IRC even support long messages and multi line messages yet?
Oh and btw, net split is not acceptable today.
And considering multiline messages as "bloat" is a wild take to be honest.
No, thanks. If Discord were, you know, open source, The way I compiled it would strip those options out as well as any edits to pure ASCII Smileys.
Given that, Rich text support is not wanted. I would however like to be able to Share VIDEO Over RCS that's not so tiny.
Rich text might not take much bandwidth, but I'm focused right now on removing and DNS sink holing all unwanted packets. Tracking, adverts, etc.
So the little bandwidth it takes, yeah sure, but multiply that with everything else that's eating it, and it's another leak to remove.
IRC sucks, but it can be made more or less tolerable with things like IRCCloud or Lounge (or tmux+weehcat if you happen to prefer something like that), but AFAIK nothing can help with the poor performance and the unreliability of Matrix.
While Matrix developers have finally acknowledged the problems, they have run out of venture capital, and have hard time getting any funding to fix the protocol, clients and servers.
They might be ugly, but most are fast. It shouldn't take more than 0.1s to display a new tab or channel.
JSON transport is also eh. At least with XMPP one could embed things like rich text easier and in a more "native" way.
There's also some shadiness with how for example the reference client Element got a CLA a couple months back, because I guess Element wants to sell the AGPLv3+ code with a proprietary license. Of course one need not use Element or Synapse or whatever, but this kind of action is still something to consider.
Matrix is certainly very, very good. But the best? Eh.
What negative experiences would a user face as a result of long polling?
Also, it means that a server can't really push events at you, especially if they're coming in rapidly, as they might be with a sufficiently active community. Like sure, once you're waiting for the server response for your long poll request, you'll get the data, but between receiving the data and the next time you poll, there's bound to be stuff happening in your chat room that you'll only know about the next time you poll. Of course with that, you wouldn't need to poll for long, but that also causes problems with battery.
In contrast WebSockets or even raw, real TCP sockets the server can just push stuff at you.
The timing also isn’t fixed. It isn’t like you only receive data on the poll interval. The request finalises when data comes in and a new one is created instantly. So I can’t imagine there being more than a second delay for receiving messages which is entirely acceptable for the use case.
If nothing is happening, you’d only be making a request every couple of minutes, but in an active chat it’s perfectly capable of making them continuously. And for mobile, it isn’t long polling while the app is closed, it’s using the regular push notifications system.
Discord users often make temporary servers to suit a particular need at a particular time when a group of people need to collaborate. Some of these servers become permanent, some die. If there’s any friction to creating a server then it loses the dynamic of how communities start on discord.
But it's not.
Discord is more popular than IRC because to most people it's better.
Telling everyone to rent a VPS and run a server to hack in an essential feature is insane.
https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory
Plus, again, IT's not necessary to rent a VPS. IrcV3 has a module for backlogging. You just have to actually plug it in and use it.
"People still listen to terrestrial radio?"
Sadly, yes.
There's a new crop pf users today. Depends on the network, depends on the server.
Some of these people are like me, they felt the world was full of possibly back in 2000, they just want the feeling back.
Mind you, some of us know our old uncle that says the good old days were better is full of shit, and has just you know, failed to remember the bad parts of the past. and prefers to only think about the good.
But I started using myself back in like late 1999 to get mp3s before Napster was around, and I'm not like boasting about warez like I'm still 13 I'm actually just matter of fact about it these days like shrug.
Like I don't really think it makes me cooler than anyone else or better or anything, I just- I'm an honest broker.
I do feel an affection for things like the old humorist logs that wwent on bash and everything. the past wasn't better, different, in a lot of ways worse.
but not better.
Since you need to maintain a constant connection to irc for it to work, it’s unusable on mobile since the connection will be killed as soon as you switch app or lock the screen. Which is why everyone used irccloud.
The experience is pretty sub standard even on desktop. Back in the day I ended up IP banned from the whole of freenode because my internet connection was flaky while I was away and I ended up banned for spamming join/quit messages.
Ouch. I feel you there. Intermittent connectivity can truly suck. I've had issues like that before.
I try not to connect to IRC in situations like that. but these issues can often be resolved with a Bouncer.
like, I was beginning to wonder why you were saying what you said.
I was going to be like what do you need logging or such? I honestly prefer the logging situation on IRC. People will expect you to read the entire backlog on discord.
Discord is indeed free of cost which could save enterprises money I suppose. The ocst of maintaining a BNC for networks that don't offer it for free can get high. Running ZNC was beginning to cause hash ocean to ask me for over 100 a month.
But Rizon and the networks I use most frequently run their own free of cost that provides permannence so you get your backlog.
Not enough to matter for the vast majority of people, not even humanly noticeable for most of them. How does that skewer anything?
Most people have Chrome running in the background behind their games too, maybe one or two apps like G-hub or Razer(whatever they call theirs), one to several apps like steam/origin/epic games, etc.. This clearly isn't a relevant argument to normal users, or to serious/professional gamers.
/s
UX, usability, and accessibility all matter.
Alright. https://www.irccloud.com/ fixd.
No, sometimes you need to know something to see it's value.
No, sometimes you need to know something to see it's value.
Companies are capitalizing on this ignorance now and somehow convinces even us techies that our decentralized/open stuff is inferior to their lockin, and so the cycle just continues with a bit more shit at every step..
The problem of "how do I get people to use and fund my server" is still an unanswered one by projects that implement a lot of FLOSS-based services. It's a bit better than it used to be, but if I suggested that my Discord servers try my new IRC system that I hosted somewhere, most people are just going to pass because it's not going to have the level of polish and ease-of-use they're used to from group chat applications.
A better suggestion is to use Matrix/Element, Mattermost or RocketChat. Not IRC or XMPP.
I get wanting mobility, I don't get wanting to scale things down to the point where it fits in a single hand, especially because, the smartphone manufactures seem to not want to allow the same kind of freedom and flexibility available on the PC to their smartphones. The "Smart" part of a "Smartphone" makes them in fact mini tablet personal computers, and that they don't offer the kind of control only a PC does to their end user, is unforgivable. It's a shame, the world favors convenience over freedom.
In terms of logging history, you could use a bot anyway on discord. This is generally not more friction than fully controlling logs in a freer option.
That attitude is why we have Discord and why it’s so popular, and also why IRC is not. People want features like scrollback when they’re not connected without having a set up screen session via SSH. They want to mobile app, It doesn’t even have to be that good of a mobile app. Yeah, I know you can do all of these things with IRC but people just want it all nicely packaged up by a company who has a UX team to make things nice and easy For them.
Looking at the success of slack, there’s a lot of money to be had if you don’t try and force people to “suck it up”.
There are good salesmen and bad salesmen, and telling customers to “suck it up “ is not a winning move.
It was readily apparent to me, I simply felt other things were more important. It wasn't the priority.
The same is true of money, being able to take part in the gift economy of the hacker under world is of more value to me than money.
> "In this instance, there was also a court ordered injunction for the takedown of these materials, and we took action in a manner consistent with the court order"
It's the same as it's always been. There are networks more than happy to host such channels, I remember one IRCop on IRC repeatedly directing me to upload files to FTP Servers that were Bots on Rizon. Either blissfully unaware of these machines being compromised and hacked or knowing and complicit, either way.
He had me initiated into the whole FXP couriering culture for a while. Such Networks would ethuasistatically welcome Suzu and others.
> But it’s possible that people were sharing Nintendo’s cryptographic keys, firmware, or even entire pirated games in these servers despite those commitments. At the end of the day, most people seeking out a Nintendo Switch emulator are looking to play Nintendo games on it.
Emulators are legal, but running unlicensed games is usually the killer app, especially for more recent consoles.
But is sharing cryptographic keys illegal, especially if they are widely known already and are no longer "secret?"
That's why this garbage "law" should be complete repealed.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag
But as easily as they can claim it, as easily it can be defeated if everyone massively ignores it and shares it everywhere, which can highlight absurdity and stupidity of this "law".
These kinds of things make loathe closed source for the simple fact that with a black box you are left in a situation where, like I said, if most of the users want a feature, but you don't because it would be too demanding on your computer, you're fucked. You cannot meaningful opt out of it being implemented we can't, you know, fork a discord lite. Because of how this works.