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Discord to start showing ads in the coming week after resisting for almost a decade
(www.neowin.net)
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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I hate this recommendation because Matrix is just a terrible user experience. It has basically nothing of value over Discord other than being open source. Which is important but it's not enough to counteract the amount of basic quality of life stuff that is just absolutely trash garbage on Matrix. Stuff that no normal user is going to put up with.
If Discord does end up completely eviscerating itself the replacement will just be some new upstart closed Source program that is shiny just like how Discord took over from Slack it will not be the rise of Open Source because open source developers have no concept of user experience.
I mean we don't even need to start talking about how bad all the client options are and how half the features don't work and all that. You can look no further than the login system. Average users do not like want or accept having multiple options for logging in. There's a reason that irc, teamspeak, mumble despite in many ways being objectively Superior especially in the case of the voice chats ended up relegated to only nerds like us. Because no one else is willing to deal with keeping track of servers to connect with or how to cross join or add users.
Same reason that Lemmy is like 90% technical users that are already invested in something like Linux. The average user got frustrated by how fragmented everything is how many duplicate channels and content you would find between instances and how difficult it was to search instances in the first place. I am here because I can ultimately work around those emoians, but the average person? Is not willing to and they shouldn't have to
I'd love to be able to disagree in any of your points, but I can't.
The vast majority of users want something that simply works, is polished and intuitively usable. Reading docs, remembering anything other than the bare minimum, running into issues that don't get magically resolved within 5 minutes will turn them away forever.
Even people with a technical background will at least partially compromise and migrate towards the services with the most users to not isolate themselfs.
Matrix is neat, Lemmy is neat, Nextcloud is neat (well, in theory), Immich is neat, so many other privacy friendly solutions are neat. But they'll always be irrelevant in the global context.
I mean with next cloud and immich it doesn't really matter if they are popular. Those are services that you host for yourself for you to use generally by yourself.
Immich I could see someone using if they're already familiar with Google photos, so long as someone else handled the setup and maintenance of it of course
Selfhosted services like Nextcloud/Immich aren't nearly as dependent on a critical user mass like Discord/Matrix, but the principle is the same.
If you host for family or friends, they may even use it if you convince them to switch. But when the setup, which doesn't consist of redundant instances and isn't maintained by a small army of SysAdmins 24/7, inevitably breaks for longer than a few minutes, most will switch back to the easy, reliable option.
That's exactly what matrix most popular client Element does.
It is often sketchy. The search function doesn't work properly. Loading older messages often makes your client spaz out. There's several glitchy commands. Spamming snowflakes can slow down your client to a crawl. A friend once crashed Element on my phone using a lot of nested quotes with muscle emojis. We had to spam other stuff so I could open Element again because the moment those messages started loading my client crashed again, preventing me from even changing the channel so I could open my app again.
I use Element and Matrix because it is the best privacy-respecting option, but it has a long way to go.
I am a big fan of Matrix and glad to see it getting some attention in this post. But it is definitely a bit rougher around the edges and esoteric compared to Discord. For more technically-inclined people, it's fine. But it's a bit much for some people.
I'm no fan of Apple (and don't want to divert discussion here), but part of their winning formula is ease of use.
That is why XMPP is still superior, both for hosting and usage.
2^32 different incompatible extensions for receiving images and an inability to receive messages when offline. Glorious.
Have you used this protocol at all? You CAN receive messages when offline, this is not IRC. And media uploads don't seem to be such a problem.
Yes, I have. With various clients. It sucked.
I just don't get what you're referring to when it comes to "not receiving messages while offline". The only thing that comes to mind that does this by design is OTR, but that's outdated anyway...
OMEMO didn't allow it either, and IIRC I couldn't do it while doing it in plaintext either.
Weird, never got such issues. OMEMO is what I use in my DMs, and it was designed with offline messages in mind (and it does work for me). I know this sounds like "works on my machine", but this is the first time I hear about this happening consistently.
Yeah, man. I tested with a friend. We used Pidgin, Dino, all the famous clients. I don't know what's up.
Ah, okay. Weird. I have used it between Gajim, Conversations, Dino and some terminal one I don't remember (used by the online friend).
Heck agree. In my experience, IRC is a much better alternative.
Someone else mentioned Revolt.chat higher in the thread and it seems to be a promising FOSS replacement for Discord. It's looking to fix some of Matrix's issues like not having voice channels (voice calls on Matrix aren't the same)
Guilded already exists. It's a Discord clone with more features, but no one uses it. I assume they are just waiting for Discord to fail one day.
It's because is owned by Roblox.
I didn't look into it much other than trying it out for 15 min. Good to know lol.
There is one huge thing of value in Matrix: e2ee.
Sadly, the normies don't care about stuff like that, and the UX is indeed atrocious.
The thread is about discord adding ads in their platform, so much of user experience... there's no such trash on matrix
You don't need to be a technical user to use matrix you simply don't have to be closed minded