Co-founder Jason Citron is stepping down, but will remain with the company as a member of the board of directors.
It’s joever fellas 😔
My friends and I can always find 50 other apps for voice chatting, texting and screen sharing. What pisses me off royally is the thousands of companies/groups that decided instead of making forums or websites or GitHub pages, they would just host EVERYTHING from within Discord’s walled garden.
A former Activision CEO. Can you announce “hostility to our users” any louder, Discord?
Well, that’s that ruined then.
I apologize for sounding ignorant but what do people use discord for exactly?
It could be that I don’t enough friends on it to replace text messaging.
I tried to join a bunch of communities to replace Reddit with discord but the stream of consciousness design of the channel posts kinda muddles everything since you can’t really separate the replies from the submissions.
I guess I should be happy I didn’t get invested in something that looks like it’s changing for the worse but kinda curious when I see people get really upset about change and wonder what I missed out on haha
And so the hell-loop continues. Matrix seems like the closest successor, but having used it for awhile I would describe the experience as janky-but-workable. Signal’s good, but requires a phone number. I hear that Mumble’s good, but it’s overly focused on VoIP. Hopefully the alternatives polish themselves up before the enshittification gets too bad.
There’s a huge opportunity not just for Matrix, but also for other open source or distributed players here, if they can move quickly enough.
They won’t, though.
You can nowadays create a signal account without a phone number, you’ll get a user name instead
Oh? When did they change that?
I also thought you could create an account without your phone number nowadays, but since I already have a phone-connected account, I haven’t tested. Only thing I found in their blog was this: https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/
Until now, someone needed to know your phone number to reach you on Signal. Now, you can connect on Signal without needing to hand out your phone number. (You will still need a phone number to register for Signal.) This is where usernames come in.
There are some newer post about other changes, but I haven’t checked them in detail.
Pretty recently I think
So glad I never got into that thing.
Just doesn’t understand why so many people prefer Discord over forums. In terms of information preservation Discord sucks!
I hate how discord has replaced this forum culture in many places for this reason, but overall it’s incredibly good for participating in communities in real-time, especially smaller ones. I agree with the forum part, but aside from that it has also replaced IRC, Skype/MSN/ICQ, TeamSpeak, etc. all in one place, while even expanding on their features. It’s unbeaten for friend groups or smaller communities to create a space just for themselves that features text chat, voice chat, screen/video sharing etc.
Unfortunately though the open source alternatives, even the ones trying to be fully compatible with discord, have not yet reached this featureset and usability level. Also one big issue with communications tools like this is they rely heavily on adoption. Doesn’t help me when I can convince my closest friends to switch to Matrix for example, when there’s so many more people that I interact with on a daily basis through discord who I have no control over. Especially when the alternative just doesn’t cut it for all these normies who don’t understand the implications of big companies controlling such exclusive spaces.
It’s even become mandatory by communities in some games, which is something I hate with passion. For instance, many MMORPG communities are on Discord these days (e.g. Guild Wars 2, more specifically the raiding scene).
So I subscribed to these communities and started using Discord. I still don’t get the appeal, it’s a cluttered mess all over the place and it doesn’t feel intuitive to use. Maybe I’m getting old…
I think the main thing is that it’s the lowest friction for just sending a message, making a “post” gives people pause, but sending a message people will do no problem, so small communities get more activity in Discord than anywhere else
Hey, listen I know it’s bad and all but discord makes it really easy to create your own channel, customize it however you want and organize study/gaming with friends.
Since it’s convenient and easy to setup and use, people use it for things they really shouldn’t.
To bring back forums we need another equally easy to setup and host forums system that modernizes the bbs.
Modern BBSes aren’t an issue – they’re out there, and they’re pretty good these days – but the lack of VC funding that lets them fund massive user growth isn’t there, so the level of friction re: setting up your own remains high.
Discord’s advantage is that it’s not just easy to set up, but also free. You’re not going to get that in the forum space anymore. ProBoards isn’t going to invest the money into making them sexy anytime soon.
This whole “spend a ton of money to get your foothold, take over a market, then enshittify to bilk the users” shtik is getting very very old.
Might finally open the doors for viable alternatives. If Spacebar (former fosscord) garners tractions for example due to mismanagement by discord they might make the transition over from discord to an open source, decentralized alternative for the everyday discord user viable. Although I haven’t tried Matrix in a while… But convincing users to switch to a completely separate service is way more difficult.
That’s tech companies for you.
Why else would they make all this for free?
That’s Jason Citron for you.
Any good options recommended for self-hosting something similarly functional that doesn’t take too much effort to get up, audit, maintain? Discovery isn’t really important for me, so federated isn’t really necessary, but a cool extra. I’d love to host something or contribute to hosting for my gaming groups, my class or multiple classes at my school, or otherwise. Voice, chat, screen share, camera, would all be great if possible, but range of options would be good. I’m still using Mumble for gaming…
Haven’t tinkered much with Matrix nor do I know much about Revolt, but I’m curious before I look into it deeper if anyone in the community has experience hosting any communication platforms for small, invitational groups.
Matrix is probably be the best bet atm, although I’m hoping for Spacebar to get more mature as they are aiming for feature parity and compatibility with discord. This way you can host your server with Spacebar, use their client and still be friends with discord users/be in discord servers that haven’t switched yet. Only thing impossible with Spacebar is discord users joining your self hosted server, but once they reach feature maturity (esp in regards to voicechat and videochat) it’ll make switching super seamless.
Nothing comes close to the feature set offered by Discord, Matrix’ bad priorities unfortunately made sure of this. There currently is a project to fix their shit even if it means to break some bad decisions, Tuwunel, however it’s neither ready nor is it clear where it will end up. The previous project it forked, Conduwuit, got bullied into giving up.
You’ll probably be best off with a classic 2-way approach for now. Stick with Mumble for Voice and get something nice for Chat and Organizing like Mattermost or Revolt (or even IRC if you’re a purist). With some luck Discord’s strong enshittification will give projects like Tuwunel the necessary push it needs to force Matrix to finally care for more than just the needs of governments and their perfectionism that gets them nowhere for years now. That or we’ll see some kind of soft-fork with even more bad blood.
This just sounds like FUD.
What should the Matrix developers have prioritized instead? Chat programs are complicated, especially when you’re making them distributed. You’re comparing an organization and a MSP with like $1M/yr revenue with a soon-to-IPO company with $600M/yr in revenue.
What feature is missing from Matrix that is preventing Discord users from joining?
Is this a joke? Even if you ignore the overly fancy stuff like those Forum-like features Matrix can hardly do the basics correctly. The encryption constantly causes issues, Voice feature is still beta, the UX is a mess, the UI is lackluster, basic features are missing (you can’t even set the Voice Activation level, wtf), there are no integrated admin tools and the third-party UIs are either wonky or lackluster, the software (both server and client) is a bloated mess that takes aeons to do anything and is awful to develop (a friend looked at it and quickly decided it’s not worth all the hassle)…
Of course there’s a difference in size, still they could’ve figured things out way better in the last decade. People ask for voice channels since 2017, and not just did they have a working Jitsi integration, there also are WebRTC frameworks ready to use they could’ve picked. And even now with that Beta feature it is more than obvious they do not want it to work as simple as Discord, but more like a professional software for meetings (that or they just really love creating convoluted UI).
There’s no way to get any majority of Discord users to use this mess. We discussed this once in our local hackerspace, and while the general opinion of course was more complex given some people know how complicated the protocol is, there also was a consensus that the software as it is is “not great to use”. And if even hackers / enthusiasts are saying this there’s no way in hell to convince casual users.
Small note on Revolt: You can’t chat with other people which are on other servers. Revolt does not federate and is not encrypted!
I’ve got 2 gaming Discords I want to bridge with Matrix (and maybe Revolt too?) can you suggest an instance? one is for Deus Ex Randomizer, and the other is for The 7th Guest fan club
Note that when you join a Space, you are not automatically joining all the rooms inside it.
this is going to be a bit painful for people who are used to Discord
you can search public rooms but not public Spaces? how do you find Spaces? they should’ve copied the good parts about Discord lol (EDIT: I found the way to search public Spaces, I guess it can’t search across instances though which is a shame, it probably wouldn’t require much disk space to index the name and description of every Matrix Space)
I don’t even see rooms linking back to their Space?
tchncs.de has a lot of public spaces, I created my account using my Google but it just assumed my username :(
Three, before there was Discord there was TeamSpeak and they’re still fighting
Ventrilo would like a word as well
I can’t tell for sure, but it doesn’t look like Revolt has voice chat yet? Which was what attracted my friend group to Discord initially.
Yeah, sadly most open source alternatives to discord either cannot do voice/video chat or cannot do it as well or seamlessly as discord did, partially because federated voice/video chat is not really a solved issue and partially because of money. Though even most of the centralised ones don’t really have voice/video chat that works well except for a few like Signal because they have the resources.
Another problem is it’s based on p2p a lot of the time, whereas I think things like discord partially use their servers to facilitate it, I’ll check on this though.
Discord routes over their own servers and uses a private I3Dnet backbone to spread the signals across the world. The latter is one of the reasons why discord video is very good.
If discord did any p2p there would be stories all over of people getting ddos-ed after joining a voice call / screenshare.
In general, discords tech is pretty solid overall. The platform itself is just getting shittier.
Thanks for the info!
Yeah, sadly.
Matrix could’ve implemented it with classic TURNS for a while now so the feature at least is there for those needing it, but they dug their own hole instead and focused so hard on their idea of a protocol they created software that hardly can do anything, and what is should be able to do it does really badly. Also for some reasons it was more important to throw away he concepts of “Communities” and build… “Places”. Now Element is a convoluted mess that <Error Decrypting Second Part of this Message>
Yeah, the people behind it always seemed to be more interested in getting corporate funding and thus gave corporations more what they wanted/needed instead of typical users and mods. This is part of the reason why I’m no longer interested in matrix main and more hard forks of it.
Matrix uses TURN, and the Matrix protocol is not used for carrying voice/video.
Element is an independent client developed by Element, and not part of the Matrix protocol.
To my understanding they’re pushing those TURN connections through your home instance though? Wasn’t that the whole reason it takes so phenomenally long?
Otherwise implementing WebRCT with TURN would be rather easy, there are ready-to-use modules and frameworks to do so in basically any language. Whatever it is that’s wrong with the teams behind Matrix, it causes Matrix (especially when used with Element) to be just awful and buggy.
The legacy jitsi-based rtc used turn, and so does matrixrtc I believe. I haven’t tried it myself, though.
Jitsi
Jitsi doesn’t have e2ee except in a few situations and they don’t seem interested in bringing e2ee to all platforms, or they can’t. It also is somewhat buggy with disconnects etc. Also it’s meant for one off calls or meetings compared to discord, but yeah, it’s okay for some situations.
I’m not sure, either. I haven’t used it yet, though that might come sooner than later after this announcement.
Never heard of Revolt before, nice.
As a community I’d use Revolt if my game/mod/whatever is built upon extensive bot functionality, and Matrix if not.
[sarcasm] Who could have ever seen it coming? [/sarcasm]
Honestly, the writing was on the wall for a long time, it had no clear business model and was a mess. It was always going to go this way and I tried pointing out that it was a bad platform but nobody either cared or believed me. Whelp, looks like I was a Cassandra yet again.
Hope Open Source people can make something to fill the gap, there really is nothing else (yet). Matrix really doesn’t have the features and that which it does have is often bad UX and doesn’t work everywhere. Not seen anything else which will fill the gap and I’ve been looking but I guess nobody thought discord would go down, go this way, or just don’t really know how to make something that would fill the gap, or didn’t want to.
Everyone loves Activision and what they’ve done for gaming. There no way this could go wrong.
Well it was nice for a while there.
No it wasn’t
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That sucks
Gonna go ahead and show my ignorance here, but why is this such a bad thing?
Shareholders want quick profits & they don’t care if the service shuts down in 10 years, or becomes largely unusable in 3-5.
Cause things that make most money for shareholders make the worst experience for the end user.
Public companies have to account for the shareholdres’ expectation of, well, making money (and more money, and more money, and growing the numbers as much as possible). Shareholders have some degree influence on how the company works, depending on how many shares they own, e.g. they can vote for the CEO. This usually leads to the company to introducing more aggressive ways of making money off the users/customers, enshittification, etc., as it has to satisfy the shareholders and not so much the original customers.
