A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Good. Discord is the cancer of the free searchable internet.
If you really need communication, use XMPP or Matrix.
And for everything else use stuff like forums and Lemmy and mastodon reddit Twitter whatever. But not closed walled gardens that are not searchable on the net. It's astonishing that so many people gatekeep content behind this Discord crap.
Seriously. The worst is when developers distribute their software on Discord. WHY.
lol, that, or when they insist discord is the best place to store documentation.....
🤮
It sucks that Discord is being used for a bunch of large communities that would be better served by a forum for future access, but for just groups of friends, it's way easier to use than anything fediverse. And if I'm chatting with my friends, I don't NEED my shitposting to be easily searchable on Google.
I'm not against using Matrix, but I could only get select people to join me. Discord is where all the more tech-illiterate gamers live and sometimes I wanna hang out with them too. It's not the same as Lemmy, where I want to talk to complete strangers, so it doesn't matter too much if more than half a community is lost by migrating from reddit to lemmy.
Yes, that's my reason for still having it too. All my friends are on there. And getting them to change platform is almost as hard as getting a woman to like you.
Why does everything need to be free searchable on the internet?
Call me crazy but I don't want my group chats publicly available on the internet. Discord feels... private. I know they have access to all the data, but it's not like a public website, forum, or even an open irc chatroom. It's my walled garden to chat with friends, stream games, game chat, post dumb memes, etc.
That's like saying signal is cancer to free and open internet. Or hell, email because it's not indexed and searchable?
I don't get the sentiment.
yeah, I particularly hate when mods and romhacks require you to join a discord server to download them
use XMPP or Matrix.
XMPP is mostly dead these days. The protocol is very inefficient (it's all XML) which isn't ideal on mobile devices since it uses more bandwidth to transfer and more processing power to parse.
I work at a big tech company, and at work we use Mattermost hosted outside our data center for cases where our internal stuff doesn't work. It seems fine and I think it's open-source, but I don't know a lot about it.
I've heard about Matrix but haven't tried it yet! Is it good?
What about IRC?
This couldn't be more wrong actually.
Xmpp is far from death. Just because many started to use matrix instead doesn't mean it's dead. Even though matrix is a Ressource and performance nightmare much more so than xmpp will ever be.
I'm an IT specialist and work in IT too. I also selfhosted a lot of stuff publicly.
XMPP is used by many companies like Facebook , Google, Nintendo, GitHub, zoom, WhatsApp, Apple etc.
Xmpp is a an official Standard.unlikr things like matrix.
And if you think that xmpp has battery issues.oeadays then that tells me you used any xmpp app like conversation/snikket etc. like many years ago.
My xmpp Apps use way less battery than any matrix app ever could.
XMPP is fast, reliable and just works. Matrix is a nightmare to selfhost, too.
IRC? Irc has no E2EE whatsoever. Therfore isn't even comparable to xmpp with omemo or matrix.
XMPP is used by many companies like Facebook , Google, Nintendo, GitHub, zoom, WhatsApp, Apple etc.
Facebook doesn't use XMPP; they use a custom protocol built on top of MQTT. WhatsApp was using a binary equivalent to XMPP (keeping the same stanzas but removing the XML), but I'm not sure if they still are. Do you have a source stating that the other companies use XMPP?
Xmpp is far from death. Just because many started to use matrix instead doesn’t mean it’s dead. Even though matrix is a Ressource and performance nightmare much more so than xmpp will ever be.
How is matrix a performance nightmare? been running a matrix server for years with almost no issues. I guess the only exception was the few times I ran out of hdd space, but that's it.
Xmpp is a an official Standard.unlikr things like matrix.
What's an official standard? Matrix is a protocol just like xmpp and the specs are public, just like with xmpp.
Matrix is a nightmare to selfhost, too.
It's literally as easy as running a docker container and editing a yaml file, at least for synapse.
Not all discussions should be public.
Oh god, here you go the next "enshitification" victim... Matrix isn't really that good of a replacement, I wonder what we will end up with.
Since they introduced super reactions, which nobody needs, I've become a bit worried, because I live on discord.
Sure are a lot of tech companies seemingly speedrunning their self-destruction right now. Is there something in the water in the SF?
On a more serious note, Discord has always been mediocre. Makes me sad that the third-party client(!), Ripcord, is more or less abandonware. Being able to monitor just the specific channels you're interested in is infinitely better than being forced to use servers wholesale given it's near impossible to keep an eye on one at a time beyond notifications -- which are clumsy at best. But for how useful that is, not having access to things like spoiler tags, most voip (and all video related) stuff really limits its practical use.
Oh well.
As long as I can still use all the current free functionality then I don't mind these things. It's when these things become the only option ala Reddit killing 3rd party apps that it becomes a problem.
Yea, I don't have a problem with a company, whose service I use, try to sell additional services or create a paid tier that basically pays for me to use it for free.
I like discord. The name change hubbub was..a nothing burger. If people want to pay for extra emojis or whatever for their server....cool? How does that impact me?
I actually discovered Matrix through the comments on here and am now using Element. I'm really glad about it. I knew there was something fishy with discord suddenly being so intrusive about their super long "birthday celebration" (with annoying unread notification needing me to click on their gift reveals ugh) and making activities free or whatever lol.
And it's their 8th birthday. EIGHTH! WHY DO THEY CARE ABOUT THEIR EIGHTH?!
The "enshittification" continues
Matrix has always been a great alternative. Any service that is owned by a corporation will eventually be monetized. I never liked discord in the first place.
Matrix rules, but I can’t get my friends to leave Discord because that’s where all their friends are, they run servers, etc. it sucks.
The trick is to not have friends sucka
this feels like back in 2015 when I was trying to get all my friends to go from TeamSpeak to Discord because it had Text & Media Channels and you didn't have to pay for the server
I won't pay for anything that discord offers. I understand that companies are there to make money but they do not have anything of actual value to sell me. I don't care about emojis or Nitro or whatever. I just want a chat client that allows me to communicate with people I play certain games with. In-game chat can do this as well and I will simply go back to that if the monetization of discord gets to be too big of a problem. It's less convenient and sometimes sucks when folks are on different platforms but it's free.
Capitalism claiming it's next victim.
Gross. Time for a mass exodus to Matrix.
Can't wait for the 2nd hand free exclusive meme trading scene!
Discord has been making a lot of bad decisions lately but imo this isn't one of them. It's not like they're forcing every server to setup paid channels.
Currently, many creators have Patreons setup and allow varying levels of access to their Discord servers based on Patreon tiers. Literally all this change does is give creators the option to do this entirely through Discord rather than using Patreon.
This is nothing new. Just a slightly different way to handle monetization.
Where are the Discord alternatives? Just in cause Discord goes to hell
divolt looks pretty good, has bridge support so you dont need to make all your friends move to something else
I heard about "guilded" but i don't have direct experience.
This is the classic tactic of make a product free and run it at a loss until you have full market share then you can extort users for whatever.
Or as Cory Doctorow calls it - "Enshittification". They're now in the second stage - open the gates for other companies to market to Discord users:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
I'm confused, this changes nothing for most users. All this does is allow creators that use Patreon tiers to grant certain roles in Discord to do this entirely through Discord. If you're not in one of these servers, this probably won't affect you.
Even if you are, it's still barely a change
Yep, we've seen that before
Will the memes be immune to screenshotting and OBS? lmao
"microtransactions" "exclusivities". Average silicon valley update gruel. The best that comes out of this is probably competition, while i like discord basic featureset as its solid, the UI is genuinly one of the worst things i have experienced.
So it's just an expansion of what can be monetized within a server. I see nothing wrong with this. It even gives small indie devs like me a chance at a small revenue stream.
If you don't like the things a specific server is doing, leave. It's pretty simple.