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.
What's to stop Revolt from becoming the next Discord?
Edit: I just logged into my account to see that Revolt had removed a "server" for breaking foreign (unjust) laws. That seems to go against everything the fediverse stands for.
...is Discord trying to do federation? I'm confused.
Someone is in charge of Revolt, doesn't matter if it's a company or someone else. Someone is in charge of the servers. What's stopping them from ultimately selling the company? Reddit didn't start out as a corporation. Nor did WhatsApp, but after creating a trusted userbase they were sold off to Facebook to be exploited for data.
IT people love to talk about how "easy" it is to create and run your own server, but this is simply not true and they just lack awareness.
How can revolt "remove" a server since you can connect to any custom hosted server? It's like saying lemmy removed an instance.
And besides, I'm pretty sure that is something that federated instances will have to worry about too, you might not care about your local laws but the ISP or hosting provider of your server where possibly illegal data is, will care.
No it isn't. The default is to be hosted on Revolt servers. I created a "server" and I didn't set up any kind of server, so it's not running on my server. I don't really know all the technical details, I just signed in and saw a message that said the "server" was removed.
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
You're comment makes no sense. Matrix is a federated chat protocol, and works kind of like lemmy. Matrix itself has more in common with ActivityPub, the protocol that the fediverse uses. What's more comparable are the matrix clients.
There are many, many matrix clients to choose from, and even more instances, including the option to set up your own.
Getting friends to leave facebook messenger for discord 8 years ago already, never underestimate how much the average person can ignore. For the time being I'm on discord, but if they start cracking down on small servers I'll be spinning up alternatives overnight
Discord. God I hated how I was one of my friends that got everyone to switch, and now I'm the first one out. I don't think they have added a feature that hasn't been an annoyance for a while, and after a year of no mobile notifications working and their staff being incompetent (especially if you are a free user) I'm just over it.
Everyone worshipping it is kind of a turn off too. It's a service y'all, I've had everything from AIM to Slack and I'm sure there will be a million others. Worshipping a corp is gross.
A question I was asked interviewing for my only marketing position: "What's a brand you admire?" I would have turned right the fuck around were I not supporting stepkids and looking at a 50% raise.
I don't understand the ability to have an emotional connection to a corporation.
I looked at my clothes and said Eddie Bauer and then came up with a wildly embellished tale of how I grew up with their sleeping bags in my closet, and now they're the only jacket I'll buy because they make quality products. I don't know ... I did well enough through the blind rage to get the job.
Turned out my new boss' background was in journalism, so what I thought was a liability was actually an asset. The job wasn't terrible. I hated coming up with flowery descriptions of pedestrian English muffins and exhausted any and all citrus and citrus-adjacent puns known to man. And then we lost the contract less than a year later.
I found out about that the day I got back from hauling a truck from New Mexico to get my stuff out of storage.
Omg I would have absolutely no script for that. They would get the blankest expression and something snarky like "it was impressive how Nestle was able to get market share on water and baby formula in the African market" but knowing my luck I'd probably get unironicly hired with that line when I was trying to be sarcastic. 😭
Well, this seems like powerful motivation for me to eventually find a free open source positive alternative to Discord, while ignoring Discord in the meantime. I would love to bypass their enshittification phase entirely.
Those flashy animated reactions are just incredibly annoying. Wish I could disable them, but of course Discord would never allow you to turn off the monetization.
Matrix is the ultimate alternative to Discord! It’s a FOSS protocol, which has numerous server and client implementations available—much like the ActivityPub protocol.
I like Matrix, my friends and I had a lot of fun with Element. Didn't stick because of course everyone else was still on Discord but Matrix works as well as... Well, Lemmy
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.
You can select which channels you’re interested in in Discord now (though maybe it’s not enabled by default for all servers yet?). I want to be able to see all those channels in a single place instead of clicking between servers but 🤷
I want to be able to see all those channels in a single place instead of clicking between servers but 🤷
That's precisely what Ripcord does so well! I can hardly fathom how decision-making works at Discord, given all the random bells and whistles they add, but not a core feature like this.
Usually I'd think this was just another case of developers not using their own product, but I mean ... they hardly use slack, do they?
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.
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.
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.
Totally, I too think that one should prefer Element for multiple reasons (feature richness, app availability, ... I mean, the web widgets absolutely rule imo), after all, it's UI is similar to Discord/Slack but it also feels somewhat different here and there. For the first 1-2 hours it can be a bit overwhelming for newbies. Cinny's UI is much closer to Discord's UI, and it seems fine for chatting as far as I have tried it.
the encryption broke first just for the desktop app, later also for web browser several times, people couldn't see what I was writing to them, all while it worked in element. I was able to create nested rooms but nobody could see them for joining.. the overall experience was painful and it probably coated me my one chance to convince people to get away from discord after their policy change to record audio from calls
Oh shoot nvm then. I only used it for like two weeks before I went back to Element because of it's feature richness. And even during the time I used it I rarely chatted.
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?
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.
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.
Are XMPP or Matrix really any more seachable? I’m all in on FOSS, clearly, but do they fix that complaint? I feel like the real solution is separating chat and longer term info, and putting the longer term info on a wiki or other public and indexable format.
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?
people don’t just use discord for private communication, and that’s what should be searchable. also, you do realize that discord doesn’t feature any encryption and some people can read your “private” messages, right?
Discord is a chat and the default setting of every server is that too see the content of it, you need to join the server.
It make sense for a chat.
However, companies and communities have largely misused discord and basically turned it in forums.
Lots and lots of knowledge is spread on these chats with no way of finding it unless you know in which server to join and provided they do not shut down at some point.
On top of that, the discord search feature is barebone at best.
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