Stop Using Discord
usemumble.neocities.org
usemumble.neocities.org
It's the combination of persistent text chat / community driven features + voice chat / streaming / etc. that all work well together and are tightly integrated. It's easy for someone even with minimal experience to manage Discord servers, even for a large community. Roles and permissions are a breeze. It's easy to add bots that provide a ton of additional functionality. The interface is pleasant for end users.
You would need multiple open source projects running to replace all of the core functionality people use Discord for, and they would be in different interfaces, often less user-friendly ones.
And I say this as someone that ran Mumble and TeamSpeak servers for years.
From my perspective it seems like Discord being free, easy to use, and such a comprehensive solution to online socialization makes it so that no one else even thinks to compete with them. It's going to take significant shifts in monetization or quality to prompt anything similar to get spun up.
You're still missing out on things like Discord Forums, which are inferior compared to a real forum, but work surprisingly well for being what they are inside of the general Discord app. Threaded conversations are a very different experience (and Discord of course supports these as well.)
Matrix stuff also obviously supports bots, but there's just a metric ton of them available for Discord that server "owners" don't need to self-host or manage beyond adding them to the server. Stuff like managing roles based on reacting to messages all the way to bots that will run your D&D combat... all possible with Matrix, but not generally a "click in three places and it's in your server and working" sort of setup.
Discord takes all these things and just makes it extremely friction-free.
If I make an ultimatum to the dozens of people I talk on Discord daily that they either follow me or lose me... they're going to lose me, and I'm going to lose them.
> Solid alternatives include Mumble, XMPP, Matrix, Rocketchat, and IRC.
Be serious. Unless you significantly extend IRC, it absolutely is not an equivalent replacement for Slack/Discord, and it's foolish to pretend that it is.
Maybe prior to IRCv3 this was true.
Also videos/images you just send as links and use a URL previewer. KiwiIRC supported as much out of the box via Embedly IIRC.
Voice chat no, you would use another protocol for that. It's a chat protocol, not a communications platform, but a part of one.
I wouldn't even contend that video chat is apart of a chat platform. Slack doesn't have them and neither does Google Chat. They are separate tools within the overall suite.
But what you could do is use an IRC chat as the chat interface for a video chat/conference room. Given IRC is channel based, this seems intuitive.
I have never once been sent a Discord conference call link.
Video chat is not a huge selling point of Discord, or any chat platform.
That's why it's almost always offered as a separate service.
One of Discords biggest competitors is Slack. Slack didn't have video chat for about a decade.
And to that point, there is literally nothing stopping an IRC suite from supporting video chat.
KiwiIRC has a conferencing plugin. Nothing's stopping someone from commercializing that and wrapping it up in a one click deploy package.
And what community building elements does Discord have that IRC lacks..? I have never discovered a Discord channel in any other way than directly through a link.
You can also send links to WebIRC chatrooms.
> Discord is great for playing games and chilling with friends, or even building a worldwide community. Customize your own space to talk, play, and hang out.
Why, if I'm somebody who's not really great at tech but do want to host a communal place for myself and friends to talk, chat, and hang out, would I chose something using IRCv3 over discord?
> natively embedded into a message
I don't think any chat platform ever does this because they would like to support low bandwidth clients but maybe I'm just making this up.
Practically every service uses a separate file storage service and if not URLs they use some identifier to reference them within said service.
I think maybe you're referring to email, but even then, most MTAs and MUAs will strip embedded multimedia from the body to be downloaded separately anyways (at the user's behest), for similar reasons, but also privacy reasons (and security reasons).
Stopped right there and flagged the article.
> Discord is Extremely Resource Intensive and is Bloated With Unnecessary Features
If there's something I can praise Discord for is that for all it offers, it's nimble. 173MB occupied here and I leave my computer on for days.
Look at the subdomain: it's not just an alternative, it's the alternative the author expects you to use. Between that and the opening sentences, the author isn't exactly making a persuasive case.
To succeed in having people self-host things we need something that can be deployed for distro packages effortless. In the past we have had some example of distributed stuff (aMule, RetroShare, Ring etc) we need something similar. Like a go or python app able to deploy without specific knowledge required. Otherwise most people will simply give up.
With RustDesk we have finally a good FLOSS solution to share screen over the internet for all, deploy the server part is BADLY DOCUMENTED, two distinct component with obscene names (hbbs and hbbr), but still something easy to deploy in few minutes not having read nothing about that specif sw or desktop sharing in general before.
For VoIP we are still far from being there.
I think OP should maybe advocate for Signal instead, which does have a reportedly good mobile client.
Matrix is the closet they get. A large part of their point is self hosting, and Signal is a bit better, but still fundamentally resides on someone else's servers. And last I checked, Signal required a phone number to make account and connect with others, which personally is a line.
A Discord is a public space. For most users, hanging out in Discord is akin to hanging out in your local bar. No once cares too much that anyone at the bar can see everyone and overhear all of their conversations. If anything, I am there to be in a public place. The tables are nice and the drinks are cold. And if the owner sees we are unhappy and having a bad time, and uses that information to improve the bar, so be it.
Even if Discord guaranteed absolute privacy, they can't guarantee that some other users is not just scraping the conversation and reposting it somewhere. The danger of "privacy" is when people are being mislead about how alone they are. But just falling back onto a "more private = more gooder" is not an actual argument about risk associated with using Discord.
You can try to convince your friends to go to a worse bar with worse service strictly on the basis that it's more private. And maybe that's a good argument for your friends or your context! But you can't actually assume all of your friends are only going to care about that.
It's not as convincing an argument as some people think it is to run into a Discord server where hundreds of users and moderators are having very public conversations, yelling "none of this is private!", and expecting them to care.
I think the point being made, with all the abrasion of a sander, was that even in the most controlled case of DMs or two person servers, all information is still available to third party admins, which wouldn't be the case with something like self hosted Matrix server.
I agree with you that this is hardly the most convincing point to 'the friend group', but with every electron of the online experience being mined for potential revenue, there is something to be said for technologies that work a barrier to data siphoning.
> there is something to be said for technologies that work a barrier to data siphoning.
I think something that gets lost in online conversation is the amount of data that gets "siphoned" for QoS purposes. So even for paid services like Netflix or Discord that don't really have an ad or data business, they are collecting their data specifically to drive investment in uptime, reliability, UI, services, etc. So the quality of the product is almost always going to be better than any privacy-first alternative.
But part of the reason I like Discord is they have a sustainable monetization model. They make money on something! That is not ads!
I don't know that I agree with your point about data being necessary for QoS. Many of the issues I have with Discord go ignored, and I've found that more than ignorance, resources are the issue with features and reliability of open source projects.
Further I Googled around a bit to see if I could find if Discord was profitable yet, and didn't see anything suggesting it was. There were some revenue break downs, but obviously that's far from profit. I know there were lay-offs not too long ago, but I would be curious if you have evidence that their making profit.
Though it seems they've taken a number of rounds of investments [0], so if the sale of nitro and other premium services don't cover it. I would not be shocked to learn about an expansion of the "Quest" system that to be more ad like. I remember this specifically being mentioned by the CEO on the Decoder podcast.
My largest grips with Discord is how the community has adopted it as a replacement for forums, and that they have very little interest in linux support, but the former is not really their fault, and the ladder is just the reality of a lot of software. Even beyond those gripes though, I don't know that I agree it is a paragon that won't enshitify like any other for-profit software.
They are not E2E encrypting, but they are not opposed to it: https://discord.com/blog/encryption-for-voice-and-video-on-d...
> E2E encryption does not equal superior encryption. It does not mean that your messages are safer from being hacked. All it means is that Discord would not have the key used by the two end parties and could not immediately decrypt the messages sent.
> People have, and are right this second trying to, used our platform to do very, very illegal things. Like child pornography. Like selling illegal drugs. Like even worse things. It is our legal and moral obligation to do everything reasonable in our power to enforce the law and our Terms of Service. If we were not able to decrypt messages we effectively neuter our ability to do this.
> The more clever amongst you may have noticed that I emphasized the word "reasonable" in the previous paragraph. This is because how we enforce our Terms of Service and the law is defined within the ToS and Privacy Policy. We do not go into random people's DMs and start reading messages. We don't even go into public servers and read the chat in there to see if people are violating the law/ToS. There are over 100,000,000 users of Discord and it's obviously not possible to do manually. We could use a program that reads over all your messages to alert us, but we do value privacy and have stated as much publicly many many times. We only act on things that are reported to us with evidence provided as outlined in https://dis.gd/HowToReport
>> It’s all fun and games until the first people go to jail because of something they wrote on Discord
> The following sentence is purely my own personal opinion: I believe that if someone writes something in Discord and it leads to them getting arrested for a crime that they are in fact guilty of, then the system is working excellently and should not be changed.
> At any rate, I hope that answers your question as to why we haven't added end-to-end encryption. If that's not sufficient for you, I understand and would encourage you to continue to use any of the other platforms you mentioned that do have E2E.
If you're a discord user, there's a high, high chance that you don't give a hoot about privacy or anything like that. Convincing people to deal with inconveniences for the sake of something that doesn't yield a short-term reward is difficult, even with things normally acknowledged to be important, like health or finances---with privacy, it's going to be at least an order of magnitude more difficult to persuade someone not just in the abstract but enough to actually get them to make changes.
I think you have to be, so to speak, the midwife who helps the other give birth to their own ideas---plant the seeds in their mind and allow them to come to the conclusions themselves. The temptation to shock people out of their dogmatic slumbers is strong, but it's just generally not going to work. I've been the person jumping up and down while screaming about how the 1984 dystopia is coming. It's never convinced anyone who didn't already agree with me.
...things would be different if there was an fully functioning free software, privacy-respecting drop-in replacement to discord; you could just say "instead of discord, why not use X?" with no polemics about privacy needed. That is, I think, the most effective way to actually get people to jump ship. As far as I can tell, none of mumble, xmpp, or matrix are as easy to use and convenient as discord. (As much as I love xmpp.) Maybe Zulip?
What is it about advocacy that attracts this type of person? Maybe that’s not how it works. I wonder if it’s that this type of person finds advocacy and suddenly has somewhere to legitimately use their need to speak and to be heard.
(Not like I have a dog in this fight anyway, but I'm not signing up with that opener.)
I can't tell you how many times people whose idea, in theory, i share ... ended pushing me to the opposite party.