If anyone is looking for an alternative to discord, please check out revolt.chat The interface and user experience is the closest I’ve seen to discord (miles better than any Matrix client), has functioning voice chat (being rebuilt for more stability) custom server roles, and a functioning youtube music bot called Remix. They’re doing awesome work over there!
Edit: Forgot to mention that it’s also open-source and self-hostable (although not federated)
I think the problem with projects like that is they end up with stuff like this: i.imgur.com/PRX4haL.png where the only recommended client is one that is unmaintained.
Though I hope Revolt succeeds because Discord has way too big of a monopoly.
I have just started using it, but I’m planing to migrate my small Discord group over to Revolt.
If you go to their website revolt.chat it’ll offer a download for desktop or a link to the web app, but they’re basically the same. They’re working on an updated client called Frontend which you can get a beta of from GitHub.
I’m on an iPhone and I used the save to Home Screen function in Safari while in the web app to get an icon for it, and I think it works pretty well! It can even do push notifications, but some weird artifacts of using the web app on mobile mean you’ll only get notifications from mentions in a server or a direct message (or group message).
First of all, I said “compatible”, not “exclusive”. Second of all, why would it fail? Even if there was no tutorial how to run it directly on a system, a docker image carries all the information you need to run it on a given system. That’s why we have Dockerfiles.
We like to think that what we are doing is the only valid way of doing things, specially when we are on the bleeding edge, and we forget that there’s a whole world of people and possibilities (and a history before ourselves) for whom our one solution is not the holy grail for. Not every production environment or homelab is centered around containerization. Yes, it is cool and useful, but it doesn’t exhaust every use case. Some people just don’t use containers and if your app is exclusively available that way, then it’s extra work to use it, or it just won’t even be considered at all.
Thank you. I would prefer not to install docker, that is just a personal preference, but so many apps are like uhh, we don’t know how to run this without Docker. Usually there is a way buried in layers of github issues but just like… why.
It’s mostly about having the ability and wanting to avoid any extra layers of abstraction. I think docker takes up more disk space than pure install but not 100% on that. Only app that I have w docker is Immich right now and would love to just uninstall docker entirely but … I can’t.
I’ve got a Matrix server up and running and have tried a couple of different clients, but at the end of the day the Matrix UX isn’t really an alternative to Discord, rather an alternative to Facebook Messenger/WhatsApp or other group message platforms.
The main thing I would point to is that Matrix itself only does text; the Element client uses Jitsi to add in audio/video calls and screensharing, but at least right now, it’s the only Matrix client to integrate voice, video, or screenshare.
My other gripes are just with the user interface, but if you open any of the Matrix mobile apps and compare it to Facebook Messenger and to the Discord mobile app, and you’ll see it really doesn’t look like Discord. I wish I could quantify it better, but Matrix just doesn’t feel like Discord whereas Revolt does.
Yep, you can host it all yourself. Both UI and the server. Not sure how backwards compatible the “public” client is - I remember Rocket.chat Android client breaking by not updating the server on at least 2 occasions over the past 2 years.
I’ve seen several people say that Matrix clients aren’t good at replacing Discord, but I’m having trouble understanding what exactly is missing. What critical features does Discord have that a client like Element lacks?
Unfortunately discord is the main app used for a lot of communities I follow for specific games, streamer communities, local organizations, etc. But for my friend group we use a self hosted matrix server. It lacks all the nifty bots for music streaming, I’m pretty sure I can’t screen share for movie nights or to share gaming, but it had the bare bones chatting experience
Here’s a critical feature: Matrix bans people using a VPN. Fuck that. I joined a channel for the first time, said “Hello”, and was instantly banned for “Spam”.
I have to use a VPN because I get my Internet from tethering my phone using EasyTether to make it look like phone data, and connecting to stuff like Windows Update would make it really obvious I’m doing so.
Yeah, I think so. I downloaded the recommended app, connected to the recommended server, added a channel, tried to ask my question, and BAM! That was it.
I think they’re just hyper-vigilante about spammers. They have been targeted with a lot of spam as the flagship server. Unfortunate that you had a bad experience your first time trying it.
Which is wild because Discord has taken down servers for what is in my opinion pretty benign stuff like independent Korean comic localization groups. (Although I personally don’t use those because it’s generally very shifty people trying to enter DMs of vulnerable people, just get a website dudes).
I reported a server where the users harassed, both online and offline, a trans woman who later killed herself. Then they made memes about her death. Discords ‘safety team’ suggested I talk to the server admin (who was part of the abuse) and closed the ticket.
Why would a company like discord even attempt to take action against coordinated attacks against anything they see as a threat? That’d only be shooting them in the foot because then people would have the most minute expectation of them doing anything good.
There is also discord guilds for sharing cheats, which is very damaging to the massive fps games industry. If discord would be complicit why doesn’t valve or riot sue them?
There is also discord guilds for sharing cheats, which is very damaging to the massive fps games industry
Using systems built into the game is damaging to the industry?
Or do you mean cracks/hacks? Because if it’s a cheat, that’s something the devs explicitly added.
And looking at Nintendo vs the R4, these companies do take down sites discussing/sharing hacks and cracks. Just not as publicly as you might expect it to happen because why would they, it’s just a lawyer sending a very formal letter asking for them to either take it down, or their company will be taken down in court.
Then they can’t, and I think that’s also the point. A tool shouldn’t be snitching on its users. If the act itself is illegal, then of course the perpetrators can be prosecuted
“I would estimate that the entire fediverse is developed off of the backs of maybe, at best, 100 engineers,” she said. “All of whom are either low paid, underpaid, or unpaid, who are trying to build software, and at the same time, are supporting the userbase of monthly active users in the range of 1.1 million to 7.4 million.”
I saw a few instances had large bills from their CDNs because some spammers uploaded many attachments. I don’t think this is from the current wave of spam about the Japanese discord server though
Ingress and egress costs are real and those assholes attached images to their spam. Hundreds of posts coming in at 700kb a pop does damage if you’re relying on a cloud provider to store your shit. Then, it gets accessed by all your users.
I definitely have benefited as fellow admins were on top of it to the point of automated removal. That’s one of the main reasons this spam attempt is pathetic.
From the article they said smaller unattended instances were the primary target. So you might not have been one of the instances targeted, and if you don’t have open registration and/or have captcha on then it wouldn’t be an issue either.
They targeted smaller unattended mastodon and misskey instances… to create accounts there and post their spam all over the place including larger instances and lemmy.
Several hundred posts were removed since then.
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