Maybe consider matrix instead

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/13807777

Discord to start showing ads in-app this week - Dexerto

In early March 2024, Discord revealed that “sponsored quests”, or ads would be added to the platform to help “support game developers” through the popular chat app.

Discord didn’t initially share a release date, or even how they’re going to implement ads into Discord’s overall design, other than mentioning that the sponsored quests would “tastefully” be integrated.

A report from The Wall Street Journal claims that Discord’s sponsored quests will be landing on the platform this week, and will be displayed at the bottom left of the app.

ArmokGoB,

Ok, just get my IRL friends, my boyfriend, and everyone from my 50+ servers to move there and we’re golden.

haui_lemmy,

You dont need that. Matrix has bridges for every major chat app including discord, facebook messenger, signal, whatsapp and more.

So if you dont like ads and someone you dont know having the only copy of your data, you can switch and just offer your friends to switch as well. No need to force anyone.

hector,

Matrix is so laggy to join servers… or maybe it’s my instance I don’t know. But everything feels sluggish

haui_lemmy,

Matrix is essentially like a car built by the neighborhood and discord is a mercedes benz.

You can absolutely see a difference but one is made by your buddies, for you with no ulterior motives and the other one basically has a kill switch operated by the manufacturer and listens in on your conversations while driving.

Joining rooms, especially bog ones, takes time. Everything else should work fast. Especially matrix.org is insanely slow because its a crazy large instance operated at a loss.

What people need to get is that discord is not a free service. It is an ad delivery network operated for profit.

Instead get one friend to host a matrix instance for your group and you‘re golden. Otherwise you should now be able to rent an instance for small money.

There is no such thing as free lunch.

hector,

Yeah I agree thanks

hollyberries,

I’m all for jumping ship and going elsewhere but Matrix isn’t ready as far as the user experience is concerned. It has a serious issue with simultaneously having too many and not enough cooks in the kitchen. There are too many apps and none of them work perfectly or near-perfectly. All of the apps for it that I’ve tried have breaking issues in one way or another.

Desktop:

  • Element doesnt have good enough support for sticker packs - some dont appear in Element but do in other apps
  • Fluffychat would crash when typing a colon, almost every time
  • Selecting a sticker in Fluffychat would cause crashes at random
  • Cinny would crash at random when typing slash commands
  • Cinny wouldnt verify my sessions even when using a backup key
  • Neko would crash at random when typing a normal message without emoji or stickers

Mobile

  • Fluffychat would crash at random, not show notifications, scrolling up to read back messages would lag my phone or lock up the app
  • Element sometimes wouldn’t display my keyboard when trying to type a message until app restart
  • Element lags when selecting a photo to share in chat, 50/50 chance whether it crashes on pressing send with an attachment

A lot of thise bugs were rage-inducing (especially when writing long messages and crashing out) and as an end-user I’m tired of half functional software. As a developer, I’m tired of feeling like I have to make patches on someone else’s project just to have basic functionality.

I deleted my account over the weekend and will likely return once that is sorted. If efforts went into improving the flagship app and standardising the protocol instead of having a bunch of half-baked alternatives with varying implementations, it would be a much more pleasant experience and easily supplant Discord.

haui_lemmy,

The issues you are describing are definitely not fun but your experience is far different from a lot of others experiences and its not representative either.

Matrix works „perfectly“ for my usecase and like 50 people I chat with regularly. Its the only service I use and I have bridged all old messaging apps so I dont have to use more than one app.

As always, its luck, usecase, skill and platform that makes or breaks the experience. I wrote perfectly in quotes because asking for perfection in mostly unpaid open source development is looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Either start helping by providing fixes, donate or show some patience because what you‘re getting is a lot more than you paid for.

As always, this is just my opinion, not proven fact.

hollyberries,

The issues you are describing are definitely not fun but your experience is far different from a lot of others experiences and its not representative either

You’re right in that my experience is not representative. What made me go ahead with account deletion was the fact that 2 out of the 6 people in the channel I was in deleted their accounts last week over the same issue - “too many bugs”. One of them is the sole reason that Nheko has support for deleting entire sticker packs instead of one-by-one. In the end, the bugs got to them also. As a result of that, my brain (whether I want it to or not) quantifies this as ‘50% functional’ since 3/6 (including myself) of the people that I chat with on Matrix bowed out due to the exact same issues.

A few days before those people deleted their accounts, I complained about some bugs and mentioned that if it weren’t for that channel I would delete my account, so that group is on Signal now. I couldn’t get anyone on Discord to leave for any reason, and the one channel has been together for over 20 years and has been all over the place - we started on IRC in '03.

I wrote perfectly in quotes because asking for perfection in mostly unpaid open source development is looking a gift horse in the mouth.

For what its worth, I understand this well - to clarify my usage of “perfectly”, I only have two hard requirements on a messaging app:

  • Does not crash at all ever when typing a message. Long or short messages, filled with emoji or stickers, or pressing a colon multiple times should not crash anything when entering text input.
  • Scrolling up to read back the chat log doesn’t freeze or crash the app, and scrolling doesn’t jump to the bottom when a message is received, doubly so if theres a big shiny button that lets me jump back to the top and resets the unread status when clicked.

In my opinion, this is bare minimum functionality. (Somewhat related): I think I’ve earned the right to say that because I wrote a short-lived competitor to Trillian back when Pidgin was known as Gaim and sending plaintext messages across protocols was one of the first things implemented.

Either start helping by providing fixes, donate or show some patience because what you‘re getting is a lot more than you paid for.

I’m sorry but I’m not going to learn yet another codebase, framework, or protocol in order to provide fixes. As I said in my comment:

As a developer, I’m tired of feeling like I have to make patches on someone else’s project just to have basic functionality.

For donating, the Matrix foundation’s accountants are dodgy when it comes to their financials so I’m wary of donating. A quick glance at their projected 2024 financials on the blog post reads like they are paying 4 developers £137,500 a year. That seems a bit high for the UK, and especially if Element is the primary maintainer of the server software which is no longer under the stewardship of the Matrix foundation. To an outsider, there’s a lot of alarm bells ringing in the financials department.

Patience is all thats left, so waiting for Matrix to be up to par with other software is the plan and I’ll make a new account then.

This whole post reads like I’m putting down the project. I’m honestly not, and only want to highlight the issues with the project as a whole thats (in my opinion of course) slowing down mass-adoption. Getting open source software out to the masses is not an easy undertaking, and that takes time - more than the 9 years they’ve already had. The varying degrees of implementation and inconsistent user experience from all directions is slowing down that progress.

TheFrirish,

I mean I would start using Matrix instead of discord but absolutely none of my friends know what matrix is. And no one would go back to mumble

haui_lemmy,

Matrix has bridges for all major services, including discord, signal, whatsapp, facebook messenger, etc.

All you need is join a matrix server that has bridges enabled. One is tchncs.de.

TheFrirish,

Thanks for the tip however I have already tried using it and it is not practical to say the least. I eventually got fedgup with it when Whatsapp asked me to relogin using my phone or my account would be deactivated.

haui_lemmy,

Thats unfortunate. My whatsapp works well but I have a phone that still has whatsapp, which is a requirement afaik. I’m sorry the experience wasnt for you. I think it works very well but my usecase might just be different.

Grail,
@Grail@aussie.zone avatar

medium.com/…/discords-secret-weapon-against-open-…

haui_lemmy,

I appreciate you posting this article. But from what I see it is just a bot. They‘re far easier to make in matrix since people already host their stuff on a server and everything about matrix is open. The problem could be that developers are rarely openly queer (I know some but they’re minuscule in numbers). The toxic masculinity train hasnt left the station yet imo.

Anyway, its not hard to build a bot and we have many bots that change messages from a user and putting in trigger messages is not hard. Please consider asking a queer dev to push for it (so an ally is actually at the helm) and then make it known. Be the change you want to see.

superb,
@superb@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Oh cool, ads to support developers on the game platform no one asked for. Aren’t some of these games behind a discord nitro subscription already?

Edit: I’m convinced this is a joke:

Those looking to complete the sponsored quests must stream themselves doing a task in Discord with at least one friend watching the broadcast.

haui_lemmy,

At least they used to be when I left discord. Its a dumpsterfire imo.

kirbowo808,
@kirbowo808@kbin.melroy.org avatar

People honestly need to start using alternatives to Discord fr esp as the app just keep getting more and more shittier in use as time goes on, plus nitro and the fact you gotta pay for themes etc is such a scam tbh

haui_lemmy,

Absolutely!

SendMePhotos,

What’s matrix

haui_lemmy,

An alternative chat protocol. You can self host it or join other self hosted instances, same as lemmy and mastodon.

It works well and comes with encryption, group chat, video and voice chat and maybe a dozen different clients. No single company can shut you down in opposition to discord.

Check out matrix.org for more info.

The best clients I know of are fluffychat and element.

Edit: matrix also has bridges to discord so you wont likely loose your friends from discord. The difference to an alternative discord client is that it runs on a completely different protocol with no chance for discord to shut down your matrix account since its not on discord.

uuhhhhmmmm,

Does matrix have voice channels where I can share screen with sound on wayland?

haui_lemmy,

No idea mate. It uses jitsi and it has screensharing.

But honestly, using discord for this feature is like using leaded gasoline because your new car is special.

I get it, its popular and works but its not a good choice if you want privacy and/or freedom imo.

Feel free to disagree though. :)

Sarazil,
Sarazil avatar

Yes, but it need a little bit of work. https://github.com/element-hq/element-desktop/issues/853

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