Repost from @technomancy@icosahedron.website

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Stop doing Discord

  • capitalists were not supposed to own your community
  • Years of hanging out yet no real-world use found for sending your private data to be sold to advertisers
  • Wanted to leak private data anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that; it was called “turning off ublock origin”
  • “Yes please search our chat archive for answers to your question. it will certainly remain up forever and not get deleted when the shareholders realize it’s not profitable” statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

Look at what discord admins have been demanding your respect for all this time:

  • task manager screenshot, discord using 97% of CPU
  • discord making too many automated requests and getting throttled
  • crash screenshot

“3rd-party client? lifetime ban”

They have played us for absolute fools

Based on this image macro

  • Discord is easily accessible text/image and voice chat that just works for the majority. If you want people to switch off it then you’re going to need Matrix to catch up in basic features and accessibility at the very least.

    • Umbrias@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      I mean honestly has matrix not caught up? It’s been perfectly usable and honestly more responsive than discord so far. The only real pain point was the most baseline effort that goes into e2e encryption but even then that wasn’t really… difficult?

        • Umbrias@beehaw.org
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          2 years ago

          Yeah it has voice chat, video calls, and screen sharing. I haven’t tested any of them yet personally (soon™) but they are stated features. Element in particular is rolling out video rooms right now, still in beta, which operate identically to voice channels in discord from a UX perspective. So all said not too bad.

            • Umbrias@beehaw.org
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              2 years ago

              Voip is a voice chat, so your question doesn’t make much sense. You can voice chat in voice rooms identically to discord, as I said above.

              There is no longer an eight person limit on video or voice calls. There is a limit depending on your server.

                • Umbrias@beehaw.org
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                  2 years ago

                  The best that you could find?

                  I am personally unconvinced it’s not a viable alternative to dsicord already. But yes it will always be improving and it will be good to see how far it continues to improve.

  • ComputerSagtNein@lemm.ee
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    2 years ago

    Let’s be real here for a second: Companies are NEVER your friend. NEVER EVER. But if you keep looking for it, you will find something that makes you leave every company behind. You’ll end up in the woods. Some ignorance is needed to live a decent life. You can act if a company gets to a point where it’s too much.

    • Yozul@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      Okay, but on the other hand Discord is basically IRC but worse, and I hate it every time I need to use that stupid site. The fact that its evil is really just rubbing salt in the wound. For me anyway.

      • YuzuDrink@beehaw.org
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        2 years ago

        On the other hand, I have hated the experience every single time I ever needed to get on to IRC for any reason. And needing to either stay logged in or run my own private always-on bounce server in order to see what overseas friends have been up to while I was asleep? Man, that’s such a bad user experience. :(

        • Yozul@beehaw.org
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          2 years ago

          That’s fair. It would probably be more precise to say that Discord adds a whole bunch of stuff to IRC, and for my purposes it’s more bad than good, but if you’re trying to use it like a social media platform IRC just doesn’t really work.

          But personally, I’ve never looked at IRC and thought “You know what this needs? To be turned into a purple gamer social media site that’s used for tech support for some bizarre reason.” That is just not a thing I need in my life.

  • bermuda@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    anybody else old enough to remember hopping from chat program to chat program? When I first started gaming it was teamspeak in the majority with other programs like ventrillo in the minority. Then when teamspeak got shit everybody moved to Skype. Then when Skype got shit we moved to Discord. I will say it’s shocking Discord has lasted this long honestly, but I’m not surprised if another one turns up whenever Discord gets inevitably too shit for the majority of people to handle.

    • Scary le Poo@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      Roger wilco? 🤣 I remember seeing an advertisement for Roger wilco in a program installer and was so jazzed about the idea of talking with my friends over voice while playing games lol

        • Scary le Poo@beehaw.org
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          2 years ago

          Honestly if anything wants to unseat discord they have a looooong ways to go. Discord is, imo, the most important communication tool since web forums became a thing.

          I think a lot of people only have a couple of servers joined and don’t really interact with them.

          For developers it’s worth is incalculable. There is a reason I happily pay for nitro.

          Not all services are bad. If they had sold to MS or whatever company was courting them a while back then I would have had an issue, but literally all they have to do is just keep being good.

          • YuzuDrink@beehaw.org
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            2 years ago

            If something came up that were as easy to use as Discord but didn’t store all the chat centrally unencrypted… I would be well in favor of that. Like if each developer could just fire up a private server instance and I could add that server to my list and chat in their channels and jump around servers? That would be super awesome.

            But yeah, I’m in probably a dozen Discord servers that I mostly follow for gamedev news or YouTube channel post updates or whatever, that I never really interact with.

            It’s very similar IIRC to IRC, just… with a GUI that makes it easy to use for non-techies and those of us who just don’t have the time to memorize commands.

  • IcedCoffeeBitch@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    Discord is Gen Z Facebook now. I want to leave it so bad but at this point I would miss 95% of my friends(both online and irl), plus the communities that are not tech savvy enough to build a Matrix bridge.

  • perkele@sopuli.xyz
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    2 years ago

    I honestly wouldn’t mind seeing an extension to the IRC spec to bring in reasonable discord-like functionality to some servers. It’s time we start moving back to open standards from walled gardens.

    • YuzuDrink@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      Yes, please! The UX of IRC is the absolute worst for me! Give me some IRC that’s easy to hop in and use? With file transfer and in-line image sharing and voice chat? Okay, I’m in!

  • BeardedGuy@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    I can’t remember what Discord did at the time, but there was a decent push to try and move to a different platform. We tried out Guilded, but we had a pretty hard time getting adoption from the users on our Discord server and ended up dropping the transition.

    I didn’t think I’d ever say this again, but TeamSpeak5 is actually looking like it could be the solution we’re looking for. I still need to figure out how I can host a server compatible with version 5 though.

      • BeardedGuy@beehaw.org
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        2 years ago

        I only just learned about that combination yesterday. Sounds like I should look into it a bit more?

          • YuzuDrink@beehaw.org
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            2 years ago

            Does Matrix have an equivalent to “servers” on Discord? Like, I can join one and it comes with a bunch of chat rooms owned and moderated by the same community? Because that’s the biggest thing I used Discord for is following and interacting with communities I’m in; and I just fired up Element and I see nothing that hints that it would be possible…

    • noontrust@lemmy.sdf.org
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      2 years ago

      How does Teamspeak differ from Discord in terms of ownership? Bc it seems like the functionality is pretty similar

    • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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      2 years ago

      I still need to figure out how I can host a server compatible with version 5 though.

      You can’t. Only trusted vendors at the moment can host v5. You can only host v3 and v5 clients can still connect.

  • BlackCoffee@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    I literally only use discord to voice chat with my friends once a year when we are gaming.

    Do people use it for other stuff?

    • Gil (he/they)@beehaw.orgOP
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      2 years ago

      Yes, some developers use Discord to provide technical/product support - this is where the “Yes please search our chat archive for answers to your question. it will certainly remain up forever and not get deleted when the shareholders realize it’s not profitable” comes from. It’s honestly really annoying, since I don’t really want to add yet another Discord server to my existing clutter just to get an answer that may not even be there.

      I really only like using Discord as a parallel community, like the Discord guild for Beehaw or the ones I used to be on which were associated with other forums/subreddits/etc. Making it a privileged channel for getting important announcements, support, or other information feels like stretching it beyond what it’s good for, on top of the fact that it’s still corporate and stuff could (and does) happen to it without user input.

  • Andy@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 years ago

    You can get banned for third party clients? I’ve been using BetterDiscord for years now with no issues. I hate the direction of Discord though, I agree with everything else.

    • Gil (he/they)@beehaw.orgOP
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      2 years ago

      Here’s an old post from the Discord support forum talking about this. Not sure if Discord is still handing out bans for third-party clients, but it’s definitely a possibility.

      • Andy@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        2 years ago

        I gotcha. I think currently, you’d only get banned if they found out (which they can’t currently). If the app ever becomes more invasive client side, I’m certain it would cause a ban wave (and maybe a small riot) but for now, it’s not that risky.

  • steakfries@lemmy.one
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    2 years ago

    i just use discord for one group my friend made called 'omies and its just like 5 of us from highschool and maybe 15 others from around the world we’ve added over the years. its mostly just for us to have a place to voice chat while we game. I don’t use discord for anything else.