The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects. There are servers for libraries/frameworks, languages, ai/ml, math, whatever you can think of. And a lot of the adjacent ones will cross-link scheduled events and messages from other servers.
I'm really hoping for an alternative. I'm always weary of en-shitification whenever a single platform wins all the users.. like what has happened to Reddit.
It was a little bit of everything, really. Discord exploded in popularity because:
1. Its free functionality was more generous than many comparable services. Nobody wants to pay for a Mumble server.
2. Its UI and audio quality and noise cancellation settings put much of the competition to shame.
3. Only needing one account for every Discord server in existance gave it the same kind of appeal that let Reddit/Facebook kill off most individual forums.
4. Good marketing, which gave it the critical mass of users and hobby groups that it needed to succeed initially and now make it harder to move away from.
Speaking from being very early on the train for Discord, it also had an extremely solid userbase right from the start because much of the early pre-marketing pull into it was for raid groups in the then-new Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. People really needed a chat client to coordinate a big number of players and it was totally free, functional, and new on the scene. It spread a ton in the community and the people working on it were players as well from what I remember, though it's been a long time. So as the game grew in popularity, and everyone who was in a large group was starting to use Discord more, it cemented friend groups that formed in the increasingly popular game along with the Heavensward release and helped solidify a foundation in the gaming community imo.
Teamspeak had a ton of friction. When I was playing FFXIV and made my discord account, someone literally just sent a link in the text chat of our Free Company, I opened it in browser, made an account and used it right there immediately. To timestamp this, it was the summer of 2015, a little under a decade ago, iirc.
Not sure about now, but back then Teamspeak meant installing an application, setting it all up, having someone in the Free Company (almost always more than the limit for a free server on TS at the time) pay for a server or self-host (even more friction). With Discord there was no debate or decisions, just one step: Click link, sign up.
Discord's killer feature for my money has always been that ever user in a call gets a slider bar (and mute button) to control the volume they hear ever other individual user in the call
Zoom, in 2025, still makes you wait for the host to figure out which of the 30 other people has a dog incessantly barking or is causing the echo or has horrible feedback, and then try to talk them through fixing it before finally muting them.
We had that in Teamspeak/mumble/vent, but the chat functionality on those platforms were definitely an afterthought. Not a place you'd cultivate a community.
Its killer feature was how frictionless it was to adopt initially. If I sent you a Discord link, back then you could just click it and be going in under a minute.
Same reason Zoom quickly took over video chat. It was so easy to use that you didn't have to convince your friends to sign up for it, you just sent them a link and it just worked.
Those tools were all, comparatively, trash. Literally ALL of the gamer groups I was familiar with switched en masse. You can’t compare Mumble and Discord IMO. There was so much setup friction that anything was better than what we had at the time.
Gaming was becoming less and less the domain of the tech-savvy crowd, strongly curbing the public's appetite for such host-it-yourself services. Teamspeak/Mumble were already dying at the hands of (inferior) free/easy chat platforms like Steam & Skype, so it's really no wonder that Discord was able to swoop in and clobber all of them by simply being free and featureful.
The UI is awful, Discord volume isn't exposed, no option to do it, either, so you have to adjust game audio or individual user audio. They put the whole kitchen sink in, for some reason, too, there's a text chat in the voice rooms that needs to be user-revealed for some reason, instead of being exposed by default. Most of it is unintuitive at first use.
Then there's the many contraindications e.g. privacy policy, walled garden, and the dog shit internal indexing and the fact that it isn't externally indexed, there's a lot of pertinent information on there from skilled individuals that could serve society a la the BBS era that will never be surfaced again because it's now being posted to Discord, though that's tangential. I hate it, but it's easy enough to use, though negligibly dofferent compared to Skype, which had many of the same issues.
I think the biggest attractor for my friends was being able to idle in a server so it was easy to start a party vs starting a call on Skype which requires a little more arrangement. Lower cost less friction.
If I haven't used discord in a while I will get stuck in a voice chat and cannot for the life of me figure out how to exit. I clicked on the channel name to enter, but I can't exit from there. Clicking on other channels doesn't get me out etc etc.
Just funny to find myself knowing I've got this wrong before and being annoyed at myself _and_ at them
Weird, I have never noticed a single one of the issues you mention. There really isn't much I don't like about discord, though I wished threads worked more like Slack.
I like that they are unobtrusive and low cost. Easy to spin off a small discussion without bothering others.
In discord, a thread becomes a big visible thing in the sidebar. More than a couple and you're annoying everyone on the whole server. Completely the opposite of what I want.
If you can handle a ton of users on not much hardware it’s quite easy to offer a generous free tier. The more “high touch” (resources per interaction) your SaaS is the more VC money you’re setting on fire trying to achieve a network effect.
And during a downturn the high touch services lose customers faster because part of the virtue signaling of cost cutting is choosing cheaper options that take a bit more work.
For the average user, absolutely it's voice and game streaming. But I've found the more I've used discord, is that a lot of online communities, that typically would exist on Reddit or a forum, also have discord servers for communicating and community management.
I have noticed it’s frequently the only outlet for communication with developers and communities, which I find worryingly closed off and hostile to users.
Just to clarify, when I say "hostile to users", I just mean generally "less accessible than alternatives". I'm not making any value judgments about how we treat one another using said access, which I don't imagine is any great panacea.
I'm sorry, I didn't understand, are you claiming that gamers (perhaps one of the most notoriously toxic communities) are not hostile towards game developers?
Ahhh context was missing. I meant in actual game development discords for game developers, not games that have discords from the developers.
My anecdotal data is based on observations from my partner who has boughten several asset packs from itch.io, got on the discord for support, and the artists/game devs have been extremely unwelcoming to the point of just banning users for simple game dev questions and/or mentions of AI.
Of course, gamers (competitive) are generally a toxic bunch.
> extremely unwelcoming to the point of just banning users for simple game dev questions and/or mentions of AI.
This is understandable when you realize that artist are being accused of using AI for every single imperfection in art now. You messed up on perspective? You must be using AI. Anatomy is slightly off? You must be using AI. At a certain point they just get tired of the accusations and choose to ban people.
I can believe that scenario, but I believe in the cases I've seen regarding game dev, It's more pearl clutching from the artists (rightly so) rather than accusations from the asset users.
Not in my experience, either on Discord or any other platform where devs interact with users. Most users are polite enough, but many are toxic as hell; whereas most devs are maybe, at best, brusque - but you would be too if you had to constantly point users to the FAQ or answer the same obvious questions that Google can answer in 5 seconds.
I don’t spend much time on Discord servers (mostly just use it for DM with specific people) but certainly spent a lot of time on IRC in the 90s / early 00s; are channel bots not a thing? Especially now with LLM APIs and all that, you’d imagine a lot of the FAQ-level questioning would have automated answers in busy project-based servers
Bots are still a thing, certainly, but much like in IRC, they're still usually triggered by devs (of course some users will use them, but then, those aren't the users who need to be pointed to the FAQ)
There's also stuff like server intro guides and onboarding steps that should deal with most of the low-hanging questions... Should, but don't always :P
As for use of LLMs... probably an interesting use-case, but I'm not aware of any solutions using that quite yet.
Okay but I don't blame users for that particular failing - topics are not easily discoverable. They should be shown above the input bar the first time a user visits a channel or until they dismiss it or something.
As opposed to IRC? Forums? hell - even an email list... All things that are a lot easier to search then Discord, have much lighter clients, and can be done free.
Do you really think there was 'no way to communicate' for projects before discord ?
You're comparing ancient obsolete technology to a streamlined instant messaging client. There's a reason they 'just' use Discord. So now you want developers to have to check emails, IRC, forum posts, whatever other outdated communication platform, AND Discord? Why on Earth would they use all that when Discord takes care of all of those features and more.
Having more than one central place to communicate is 'hostile'.
>>You're comparing ancient obsolete technology to a streamlined instant messaging client
I'd hardly call discord a 'stream lined' system. Latency (especially in voice which is supposed to be it strong suit) is bad, search is subpar compared to even simple google searches, information is silo'd, its yet another place that can potentially leak PII, and basically the network is a SPOF. SourceForge promised all you mention, and was backed by (at the time) the largest IPO in history..and lasted what 2-3 years before it started decaying? I remember projects scrambling to find hosting after SF - and I remember how fast everyone jumped on GitHub .. I was donating to GH from the beginning just to help prevent another SF scenario...
As for it 'hostile' - its a lot easier to do a google search and find all sorts of information streams about something, rather then having to figure out the discord server for a project, search the discord server, and still miss any info. from outside of discord. That seems more 'hostile' to me then less wall-garden systems.
Edit: last I knew, over 1K oss projects still maintain libera.chat channels
In 2025, a company using IRC to communicate with its users would be like using ham radio. Sure it exists, but it is far too niche to be worth the effort.
How so? You literally just open a web page, and choose a nickname. It's easier than creating a Discord account and verifying your email address and phone number.
Discord has a gradual onboarding process. If your IP isn't poisoned, and your browser looks pretty normal, you just have to enter a username and you're in with an "unclaimed account"
They'll then nag you to fill in more details as you use it. It's honestly a pretty slick way of doing onboarding.
Completely depends on the niche. The VRChat party scene is comprised of hundreds of clubs as well as a meta-club for people who like to join as many as possible, which imports events channels from dozens of other servers. Some of them even collaborate on scheduling data and can put together a complete calendar/schedule of all events from various clubs each day.
Am I the only person who sees this as a negative? I don't want everything I do to be in the same place.
This isn't a stance driven primarily by privacy/security requirements, although making e.g. compartmentalisation possible is generally a positive thing.
Rather, my issue is with mixing business and pleasure, or even business A with business B, so to speak.
The biggest flaw of Discord is the federated nature and how disconnected each discord is from any others. As a casual game enjoyer, I found myself somehow juggling over 50 discords in ca 2021, each with their own server rules and conventions for how to use @all tags, alerting thresholds, etc.
It's too much burden on the user to manage the incoming information and resulted in a kind of anxiety about reading red marked messages and frustration at realizing how I didn't care for 95% of them, but I was unwilling to completely separate myself from that community (e.g. quitting or muting the discord)
It becomes a question of which friends you want to implicitly abandon and I ultimately decided to just abandon them all.
If the competitor even has a slightly more unified product it could easily displace discord.
Transferring a bot from one chat format to another chat format isn't some kind of insurmountable moat, and I think it's likely this project could make a few changes to support them with no modification required.
It's annoying UX, but unfortunately I've come to the conclusion that the alternative is worse. When channels are opt-in, it makes discoverability effectively infeasible in practice. This is what the Element clients that I've seen do (following the IRC convention), and it just means that everyone clusters in the default channel and the others all wither on the vine.
That said, maybe there's a middle ground. If a server could mark, say up to 20 channels as default/opt-out, and the rest as backrooms/opt-in, that might suffice for 80% of servers while avoiding the long-tail worst-case UX of manually muting 100 channels in a server because there's only one you care about.
Another alternative would be to use threads more. But they are terrible in Discord, even worse than in Slack. When two Discord users are chit-chatting about their dogs all through the night, a mod should just drag-select all of these messages and put them in a "dog chat" thread.
I still want to try Zulip to see how well it works.
I don't think that's an inherent notion of Discord at all, although it is a case of poor defaults. I turn on most of the muting settings immediately when I join a new server (notify for: nothing, suppress @everyone and all role @mentions, etc). Throughout the day, I'll mainly click between the 2-3 servers I actually care about, and every few days I'll go through some of the others. New messages are still marked once I click in so I know where I left off, pings are still highlighted so they catch my eye as I'm scrolling through, but if I don't care about a conversation in a channel, I can just scroll to the bottom and it's all immediately marked as "read."
There's also the shady components of discord. All manner of illegal activity thrives behind custom access control.
The most notable instance in media is the leaking of classified materials, the creation of swatting/ddos communities which gave us the 'BigBalls' hacker employed by doge,
But more sickeneningly recently it allowed this doctor to successfully target countless children, including convincing a 13 year old girl to hang herself in a live discord call. [0]
There is a problem with too much protection of freedom and secrecy.
I don't think Discord has anymore shady activities than any other large scale social media platform. When I helped moderate a very large server, we had access to Discord Trust and Safety team and they were trying against what is a massive flood. Automated moderation is extremely difficult even with all AI tools unless you 100% block any NSFW content and sexual messaging and even then, you will get false positives.
I do find it interesting that we hold these platforms liable but not the phone/pager/mail service. If this doctor had called this girl on her cell phone, no one would be mad at Verizon.
Part of the problem is most parents have no clue about social media/communication tools outside what they use. At my church, I gave presentation about Discord and it was shocking to see how clueless parents were.
It is trivial to find servers with adult topics (BDSM) targeted at minors. It is trivial to find servers that combine those topics with problematic age ranges (like BDSM-themed servers with no ID verification, 'ages 14-28 welcome'). It is trivial to find servers with minors openly selling "content".
Disboard isn't Discord but these things aren't even being remotely "hidden", it is these servers' sole 'purpose'.
> I do find it interesting that we hold these platforms liable but not the phone/pager/mail service.
Phone and mail networks in letter and spirit obey the law: they don't listen to people's private conversations and they give up complete user info on request by law enforcement. There is nothing more they can do.
Discord has built the capability to read every message, public or private, that any user sends. So they are ethically obligated to stop bad things happening on their platform. Whatsapp/Signal have built their platforms so they can't read user private messages, so they have no ethical obligations to stop bad things happening on their platform, beyond banning users in response to legal orders.
> Whatsapp/Signal have built their platforms so they can't read user private messages, so they have no ethical obligations to stop bad things happening on their platform
Why draw the line there? Why don't those platforms have an ethical obligation to build the features that would allow them to stop bad things happening on their platform? Especially if they knowingly developed the current implementation specifically to avoid ethical culpability?
That's a political statement. The position is that one should have the right and ability to communicate with other people in a secure fashion. If you deny this right, and build structures to monitor all communication, when "bad" people take over the government, you end up in a dystopia. Then building any sort of anti-government political movement become very difficult because they can hear whatever you say.
So I am glad that software like Signal/Whatsapp exist that allow secure communication [1]. And I would take the harms causes by them being unmonitored rather than the harm of future dystopian governments. Due to how crypto works, I don't think there is much middle ground here.
[1] I would prefer open source, more community owned platforms take over than these two.
Sorry but you were arguing that Discord should snoop even more into what we're doing for ethical reasons, and now you're saying privacy is a virtue. Do you have a reason to think Discord doesn't already do these things and just doesn't get it right every time?
Phone and email aren't more private than Discord either. Arguably less. Difficult to get a phone these days without buying it on camera. And a phone company will give up all your messages.
There are two competing principles here: (1) Privacy for individuals (from government and non-government entities), and (2) generally do things in a way that minimize crime. Both are good, and generally I want communication platforms to conform to (1) rather than (2).
Whatsapp/Signal are as close to (1) as possible by design, can't actually do (2) at all. Phone/Mail are somewhere in the middle, but quite close to (1). In most countries in the world, there is no mass recording of phone calls or mail, despite it trivially easy to do so. Moreover, due to long long historical legal precedent, I don't think phone/mail companies have any freedom to do things differently. They are pretty much constrained to do exactly what the government tells them to do.
Discord on the other hand, does not respect (1) at all. In fact, it very intentionally records and reads everything for profit. And it hands over any info requested by law enforcement. So, ethically, either they rewrite Discord to respect (1) or they should do (2). I don't think they are. As others have noted in this thread, it is trivial to find servers that are clearly criminal.
One might argue that it is impossible to do so because there are so many servers. My second political position is that if your public platform is so large that you can't effectively moderate it, that is not an excuse. You are culpable. Simply stop your platform from growing past the point where you can't effectively stop bad things happening. You don't have the right to profit while enabling bad things.
Haven't heard of any other platforms that use cartoons in the UI, actively associate with kids hobbies, and also make it one click to join active pedo grooming communities.
"very good moderation" makes me believe you work for them because that is a laughable notion.
I would bet that Big Balls swatting/SIM swapping/ddos community "the comm" still has dozens of discords that have been up for years
Any social app with one click to join communities (all of them) will fall under this.
And how out of touch with teenagers are you that you think cartoons in the UI (whatever that means) are why they use it. What is a kids hobby? Gaming? You cannot call that a kids hobby.
I guess my point is, do we as a society want our children's Roblox communities to share a platform with virtually every cyber criminal, behind security and secrecy measures completely at the will of arbitrary discord owners?
But I assume that is because of the people on that specific server, not because of the software? Or is there something about discord that enables it, that IRC etc. does not have?
I hang out with friends that predate discord, on discord and can't see it. Same with new servers.
choose any sufficiently populated room on libera chat, join, and start talking a lot without lurking first for awhile and see how the inhabitants react
try going to a pub on a Saturday night, walking up to a group of people you’ve never met, having a conversation, and start talking about something completely unrelated, and see how they react.
what you’re seeing in online chat communities is just basic social interaction reflected online
i'm on a number of discord servers. yes, some have that 'mean girls' vibe but considering the content, i expect that. the more tech oriented ones i'm on...that's not an issue at all.
to me, in general the vibe of a given discord is similar to the general vibe of that topic (i.e some games have terrible, vitriolic cesspools for communities and those discords reflect that. other things, such as one of the rust ones i'm on, reflects that community's vibe which is a lot more wholesome imo).
My dream is to be invited into a mildly popular server (more than 15 users), than doesn't have 50 channels, 8 separate roles and T&C to agree to. It hasn't happened yet.
An entire generation of bureaucrats and bean counters is learning the ropes on Discord.
This shows Discord is a genuine successor to Web 1.0 forums. :-)
Unnecessary channels are unnecessary subforums.
User roles are user ranks (https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3.1/kb/article/everyth...), indicating both software permissions and social status.
T&C—well, forum engines like phpBB, MyBB, and SMF come with a standard user agreement they show before registration.
There is more concern with it now because the Internet is real life.
As for training an entire generation of bureaucrats and bean-counters, I leave it to the reader to judge.
I like this take. There was something unique how each bulletin board was customized to the administrator's taste.
And it was up to them to provide plenty onboarding to new users, so they're not overwhelmed by the hundreds of subcategories, and thousands of threads in each.
We used to be part of no more than a handful of forum communities. Maybe that changed.
I'd consider beancounter to be best case. At least a beancounter works for the company and gets paid. It's like they know they're Koolaid drinkers but every server is riced up with Discord's product pipeline like an aftermarket Honda.
I started and mod a server of about 6k users for a community around a niche software used by professionals, students, and hobbyists. We keep it really simple and focused primarily on people getting questions answered. Recently a small but vocal cadre of hobbyists have been demanding more Discord-y features oriented towards socializing with other users of the software, and our reticence to complicate the server and add features just because Discord offers them has been a point of contention. They seem to think we mods don’t understand Discord. We are having trouble getting them to understand that we are aware of what other servers are like and that we’re deliberately choosing not go that route.
That rings true to me and probably has some truth on other platforms as well. We’re trying for transparency but it does feel like there’s a gap in perspective and goals that could only be reconciled by making space for two really different objectives or, as we’ve been doing, remain focused on the original goal and hope that users who want to pursue other activities in the space do it on one of the other forums for the community, like FB or Reddit.
GP was on track - they wanted voice channels, many of them, before we had any demonstrated demand for it at all.
They wanted additional, opt-in roles, so anyone could @ a cadre of self-appointed ‘question answerers’ if they, I guess, (and this still isn’t clear to me), felt as though their question was more important than the questions of those who didn’t elect to do so.
They wanted auto-mod stuff that would maybe somehow automatically answer people’s questions (‘AI’), etc
The software in question (TouchDesigner) is a complex, idiosyncratic, node-based programming environment with a tough learning curve and a GUI dependency that makes question-asking and -answering more onerous than non-graphical programming.
As mods we’ve put a ton of effort into helping the torrent of new arrivals ask better (often less lazy or broad) questions and thus get better answers, more often. Many of the requests we get are well-intentioned but seem to think the reason questions go unanswered is because no one saw them, when it’s obvious to us that in many cases, they’re just extremely lazy questions.
Unreal has a similar problem, in my experience, with the difficulty of asking a question with sufficient information making it common that those willing to help are still only inclined to go the distance with people who are willing to meet them halfway.
EDIT- Second hint: To summon Galrog the Destroyer, say "Live. Action. Role. Playing." and clap your hands 5 times.
But fear not what is ahead; the entire moderation team's activity status has shown "Playing Roblox" for 8 hours. Luckily, it's just a simulation, and none of this is real.
I can't piece together what you're trying to say. There's something to do with disdain (the remark about putting a child in a position with lots of responsibility) but being a "moderation simulator" makes little sense in the context of chat software (you don't go to a chat to be a moderator but to... chat). For that to make sense, they'd have to generate fake messages for you to moderate or something?! Then the LARP reference, does that also have a negative connotation in your head? Eyeing the pilot comment, should one read it as "childishly playing at"? And then something in the last sentence about everything being a simulation... is that a theory of life or are we still on the topic of Discord? You'll have to give more context for this to make any sense (the linked source didn't provide any I didn't already have/know), although the shards I'm piecing together so far make it seem like it's a destructive personal campaign that I'm not sure I should be interested in being recruited into
I'm frankly wondering whether I should ask if you're okay. Idk if you have a legitimate dispute with Discord or some people on there (I dislike Discord as much as the next self hosting open source non walled garden fan, but this is next level), or if it's something else. Wild guess / legitimately concerned: do you have a heater that can leak carbon monoxide? Or maybe I am just extremely bad at understanding what I've just read
I started a channel with some friends last year for game servers we started running. It's been so much fun. We were worried about what you're describing, but we've had the exact opposite experience. People are friendly, they go out of their ways to help others especially new joins or people asking questions, and they try to protect the channel from the few people who break the rules.
The combo of ease of use and rich feature set makes services like Discord hard to resist for users and hard to compete with for FOSS software/services which prefer to take more focused, more technologically-inclined approaches.
It’s a major factor in what made Reddit big, too. Spinning up a subreddit is effortless and takes practically no knowledge and similarly easy for users.
IRC doesn’t seem terribly complicated to me, but I came of age when using computers seriously required a higher level of knowledge. I don’t find it restrictive either, but when I started communicating with others online, being able to send “just” plain text was amazing. Things have changed since then… the communication styles popular with young people haven’t been strictly text in many years and the overarching expectation is to be able to start using services in seconds after discovering them with as few clicks and as little research as possible.
Like reddit or Facebook groups? Discord being realtime chat is an important part as well. I don't think it was necessarily competing with traditional forums that are post and thread based.
I noticed that, but I also noticed the quality in those "servers" (really groups) is kind of shit? There's way more random off-topic discussion than about the thing you're looking for, and you still have to search through it. And when there isn't, there's nothing (due to fragmentation) and you stop checking.
I think the biggest selling point is clearly the community.
Without the community revolt.chat is just another Mattermost or Matrix.
Discord is popular for one reason and one reason only, all the young people are there. The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook.
I've been trying to explain this to a friend recently. You're only on Discord because they took a huge loss for many years with the hopes of building up a massive database of users.
Yeah, it is the chat program treadmill. Spend investor money to host a completely commoditized program. Of course it is better than the version that costs money by virtue of being free. Eventually run out of investor money and do something unpopular to raise revenue, leaving the opportunity for the next iteration to come in for free and take your spot.
The only thing I don’t really understand is why investors keep falling for this? The only real business model is giving their money away. Maybe they get some good ad network profile data in the time between the heel turn and the point where everybody ditches the service.
Investors aren't falling for it. Users are falling for it.
Leaking millions for years pays off in the end, or even half way through. Some investors would exit at some stage. Taking profit due to valuation going up, despite no revenue/profit.
At the end of the tunnel is acquisition by a major player who is basically buying the users.
Typical examples: Skype, whatsapp.
But also LinkedIn. GitHub.
Businesses that offered some (basically) free offering for over a decade until reaching critical user base, then sold off for billions. Reason being precious data along with millions of daily active eyeballs.
May not be clear, even to finops at Microsoft. Skype tech ended up in Lync subsequent versions, aka Skype for enterprise. The user base also became a free ad target (to buy the entire consumers tool suite) I remember being constantly nudged to sign up for the free 30 days One Drive to backup Skype pictures and the jazz. So creative these heads of sales at MS.
It's shocking really that Microsoft didn't buy Slack and drive that into the ground too.
I'm glad to see WhatsApp is proceeding relatively slowly down the Shit-en-slide, since it's completely entrenched in some countries. I've had companies who just assume that I have WhatsApp and it's cool to message me on it instead of sending a text or email.
> The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook.
In 2015, when they first got started, they marketed towards gamers (i.e. boys and men in their teens and early 20's). Even though the company's tagline at the time was that it offered a better Skype, Discord was more inclined to be a better replacement for a moribund Xfire and an aging Teamspeak. Word of mouth marketing on Reddit didn't hurt either.
They also have ties to Universities with their student hubs. This part is great if you're a student, as you can find clubs and people with similar interests. There is immense power in what an older sibling does, and soon the younger siblings are using it to chat with them. They can chat with their friends from any mobile device or a desktop without the dreaded green bubble or restrictions of SMS / iMessage. In groups, they can hide their identity.
It gives the server "owners" the ability to enforce rules, ban those who are disruptive, and has an impressive bot API. I can see why it is immensely popular.
I don't like depending on a proprietary commercial product to facilitate my personal relationships. I don't like the fact that they can (and are likely to) ban / block me from talking to my friends for choosing to run a client other than their proprietary web browser wrapper on my computer. I don't like that it's a single point of failure (that often does) for something as easy to host as chat. These reasons probably fall under the "not too shocking" label, but they're important to me.
Curse was becoming more popular than TS at the time, but Discord offered a better quality of audio and stable connection. That's why my group of friends migrated to Discord around 2016.
TeamSpeak was usually the default option at the time (with some on Mumble). Skype had some presence, but was usually grumbled about beyond 1:1 calls. RaidCall was starting to gain some presence because it was free but otherwise followed TeamSpeak's UX, but was still pretty niche.
> The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects
True. As it also hits a local minimum in terms of user experience (to the point that the average user does not care), I don't think it is possible to make a new centralized (even self-hosted) alternative on technical merits alone, since you necessarily incur a cost in the form of signing up to every server.
The only hope is a decentralized alternative like Matrix which is enshittification-resistant. I actually think the server part of matrix is more or less ready for a good Discord-like client, but the client side is lacking.
Cinny exists as a discord-like client, thing is, Matrix is mostly the text chat part, it doesn't implement voice chats or anything. Also, the space/room system works differently to discord server/channel
I've never used it but Matrix does seem to support conference calls, if not natively then via Jitsi. I'm sure a good app can paper over the differences to get a voice-chanel out of it if this is what people are after, though I've never really used this much on Discord.
The same can be said of space-room vs server-channel. Of course a space has different semantics, the space doesn't own the rooms, etc. But they can be made to be nearly the same for an end user. In general organization of resources is much looser and less opinionated on Matrix. But an opinionated app can also paper over this to force a stricter hierarchy, while offering advanced users the ability to make their own spaces, etc.
I mean from what I can tell a lot of its recent success is simply because Slack is terrible. Most of the discord "servers" I use which aren't actually gaming related would be almost the same on slack, but slack has a less generous free tier.
I don't think discord has much of a real network effect, it's just a good value proposition. When the screws tighten that may change.
Slack's UI sucks for multiple different "server"s. Good for work, but no gamer wants to juggle around the Slack UI for 2/3 different game servers, not to mention DMs being isolated. Imagine DMing the same person with 2 or 3 completely separate chat histories, depending on the source server. Many people have multiple servers that share a subset of people, and talking to them would be absolutely insane, not to mention the amount of people that primarily use Discord for DMs that don't care about any server at all.
The selling point to me was it's sophistication in handling moderation issues. But they enshittified it to be like Facebook moderation. Maybe that's why they're going public.
Love it or hate it, furries make the internet go. A lot of them are very early adopters and developers themselves. Source: I've had more than a few friends in and around the community since I was a teen.
I think I'm using every chat platform that has wide adaption in tech circles. The one trend I'm seeing is that most of us just use the platform random communities insist on us using, we don't use them out of preference. And those communities choose the platforms because of the support they're getting from companies like discord and the amount of work needed to moderate and administer the community under the platform. My point being: community admins are the real consumers of these products, not normal users.
If I need support with an open source library of some sort, I don't mind using IRC , MS Teams or anything in between. But if I have to run a community, I will chose whatever platform requires the least effort while integrating well into all my administrative and devops workflows.
If I could speculate a bit, I think discord webhooks and bot api has helped it succeed a lot. But things can be improved upon. Making it dead-easy to integrate into github actions, alert/monitoring platforms,etc.. is a huge selling point. It should be easier to use a platform like this to send notifications than with email. And it should have at minimum one "bridge" type integration that is natively supported: for email! It's really mind-blowing to me with M365, how I have to switch between teams and outlook. How come they haven't figured out how to get and respond to emails from within teams? (the reverse is possible but doesn't work well).
>If I need support with an open source library of some sort, I don't mind using IRC , MS Teams or anything in between.
I honestly cannot think of something worse. Chat applications are not forums and they generally suck at replacing them.
Not only does this make topics harder to follow and much harder to find to begin with, it also makes the maintainers bother with the same questions again and again, because users can't find their results in search engines.
it sure beats mailing lists. look at LKML. I prefer discord over LKML any day. But some people prefer them over anything else. That's kind of my point, I don't have the time or energy to complain about this, I just want to talk to the right people. No one asked my preference, so in practical terms, it doesn't even matter.
Few people care about going 31 years back, and indexing stuff themselves. Most users are casual users, and want to have their problem solved right now, with as little effort as possible.
Not that power users don't matter! They do, especially at places like LKML, where everyone is expected to be quite tech-savvy. But most users in the world are not nearly as tech-savvy. For them, zero-friction solutions are a clear win. even if not the only accessible way, despite any other shortcomings.
After searching on lore.kernel.org, do you click through individual messages with such insightful subject lines as, "media: camss: Format configuration per hardware version," and, "rcar-vin: feature enhancement and fixes?" or do you read through the nested results, which on a test search related to a recent problem I had, gave me 2.5 MB of text across 74K lines?
Even then, I didn't find exactly what I wanted and would need to browse the kernel source (and will it be mainline or next?) and click through. The frontend for git.kernel.org does not have per-line blame (unless I missed it somewhere) so I have to checkout just to find the commit I want or browse the log until I find the changed line or hope that the expanded log is verbose enough to match my search term.
lkml.org is certainly no better, with no method of searching or grouping related topics.
Or... Do you refer to a third-party search engine doing the heavy lifting of indexing and deciding the relevance of a problem?
As opposed to most chat clients, where you just search and get a preview of all possible matches, and then go to that conversation. Sure, with Discord it involves opening the client and the potential for security mishaps and other problems of modern software (ads, useless features) but it is generally not difficult to search through a half-decent channel.
You get similar ease-of-use and searchability with a git repository with a half-decent frontend plus it makes it significantly easier to track proposals, changes, feature history, etc.
... except when a merge request or issue suddenly has more than 5 participants or a branch is building a new feature, where it then makes sense to take it to a chat where you get an instant notification and tight feedback loop between all participants, rather than rapid-fire updating the bug tracker and its associated merge request comments and the reported issues in a dependency's repo.
Gotta go; a coworker is asking me in the chat to push a fix to nightly.
Do you use any GUIs to see the emails as a tree of replies? I tried using LKML and even subscribed to some FreeBSD mailing lists.
Its absolute trash. I don't know who's talking to who in what topic. Using ">" as a quote without any coloring and having to judge what level of indentation this is. Its horrible.
discord's search functionality has actually been incredibly useful. Many forums are notorious for having awful search. This is somewhat made up for by the fact that they're indexable and you can google search that forum instead.
There's also a wide spectrum between chat sites and forums. Threads-centric tools like Zulip can be amazing for a community like that. Some, like rocket.chat, are even search-indexable
EDIT: it was actually Zulip not rocket.chat that has the option to make channels public to the web
> Many forums are notorious for having awful search
But google/bing/etc index (basically) all of them. Forum search is great for finding exact title matches, and sometimes useful for exact content matches. Google with site: is better for finding conceptual matches. And, if you don’t know what forum you’re looking for, adding “forum” to your search engine term searches all of them.
Discord is not (and likely will never be) indexed by any search engine. The level of discoverability is almost as low as it can possibly be; you can’t find the community by searching general terms, you have to know the community exists, join it (agreeing to both discord’s and the community’s rules), and then search, only with discord’s search itself.
>Many forums are notorious for having awful search. This is somewhat made up for by the fact that they're indexable and you can google search that forum instead.
I think this really depends on the content. Projects that use discord as their primary community support create a significant barrier for users doing preliminary troubleshooting. I have a huge folder of discord servers of projects I took a couple steps into before passing on. Those should have just been internet searches. Once I have an agent doing that research for me, I assume it will have to register with discord servers just to do its job.
Technically, I think you can make a chat application's chats archivable and searchable, but nobody is going to do that. Discord actually does a better job than I expected, but the text is stuck in the app. It would be great if somehow the chats could be archived in text based format online, but then you would need to write a security model to handle the privacy aspect.
I've landed at AnswerOverflow from Google before. It's a bot you can add to your server so that your server's threads get indexed. I haven't added it to a server myself but it seems decent enough. See https://github.com/AnswerOverflow/AnswerOverflow
I actually despise using forums, so this is a good thing for me. Chat is a lot more casual, like how you might walk up to a colleague in the office for some advice.
My experience with many forums is that most moderators spend too much time making the forum perfect and less time helping me with my problems. My experience with chat is that I post a question and then someone has an answer pretty quickly
pretty much this, you go where they have setup camp. For instance, I have one tech group that uses telegram, the dumbest tool for a tech discussion that you could choose, but there they are, so that's where I checkin now and then.
I dislike discord because it's a clumsy UI. Usually you want to be able to research what you're interested in. Not a great experience on discord.
Discord tip - if ever you need to rewind to the first message, append /0. Used to be a pain to get there, maybe they've fixed it.
I am thinking about that time and hosting a forum myself all the time. But there are a few issues connected with it: (1) If I hosted one, I could only do it invite only, because I don't want to be responsible or held responsible, if some shithead posts illegal stuff on it. (2) So it is back to friends only. But my friends do not show motivation or interest in being very active initially in such a media. I would have to artificially create topics and discussions around them and ask them to comment or so. It feels like it would require a lot of initial investment to get something that sustains itself by having active people and good info on it to be worth it for people to interact through it.
Can we stop building communities in non-indexable locations? The death of forums and hence “google-ability” for problems and solutions is so depressing. The UX is worse in every way
I think this is largely a consequence of the escalating commoditization of human attention, political polarization, marketing yadda yadda.
Communities disperse, and are drawn to solutions that make them a little trickier to bot into and be absorbed by the marketing apparatus. A little friction that makes it harder for sock puppets / gpt bots carpet bombing your communities wholesale is an ephemeral competitive advantage right now. Not a perfect defense, but what is anymore? Is it even possible to build an effective captcha now?
Tell you what would really gum them up, make some communities require people buy a physical X$ RSA token. Sure you could make bots for that, but how long to automate the unboxing of those tokens? It could become an arms race where the packaging becomes the captcha.
Some humans are going to always try to keep moving ahead of the noise wavefront. I'm rooting for them.
Wanting all things to be index-able these days kind of feels like asking early 90's internet kids to be normal and go hang out at the mall.
Bingo! I changed my mind about this after AI. (Specifically that they are allowed to train & commercialize any IP they want without license - I have nothing against AI itself)
Negative. Communities need not be findable by bots on the public web, in fact many should not be. Nobody has a right to read, index, analyze, or resell my conversations with friends. Anyone who wants to has plenty of options for posting in public forums, and the movement away from that behavior indicates a growing awareness of its problems.
Not arguing with what you said (not agreeing either) but i want to add a perspective.
Not all human discussion can happen in forum-like format. Quick disposable chats are also usefull for when you're in a state of "figuring things out" where quick and short feedback help you navigate a problem rather than reading long well-researched well-formatted replies.
There must be room for both modes: the "thinking about it now" is in chat and the "having thought about it" is in SO, forums, documentation etc etc.
May even be required, if you have a license that requires sharing the code along with the product (AGPL). Still not sure why that license isn't more popular, isn't it in the open source spirit that you can get the code whenever you use the product? Same as when you get the binary with GPL license, that you have a right to see what code you're running?
There's a considerable amount of FUD around AGPL. Mostly around never being able to actually redistribute exactly what people are accessing, IIRC. I remember conversations about it being rehashed on here constantly a few years back.
Yeah, I had to click around a bit to find the link. Oddly it was only on the discover page for servers I found it. Bottom left corner https://rvlt.gg/discover/servers
But now I also know where to go if I'm in need of a femboy community.
So you have the chance to redesign Discord and you decide to stick with the unicorn-puking emoji-littered eye-scorching UX/UI garbage that Discord is? Interesting.
I think Discord, especially when it was new, had amazing UX and UI. Nowadays it definitely became bloated and new features don't integrate that well into the existing UI, but it is still on a perfectly useable level, currently.
Discord's UX is a testament to the fact that people will learn complex systems if they believe all parts of the system are valuable. This is the same truth as, for example, spreadsheet software.
The only thing "bad UX" means anymore is that you have parts of your app that people don't find valuable, and you're showing it to them anyway.
> Yeah, I would find it hard going back to not having a offline history
It's funny but I personally prefer that the IRC server isn't required to store every chat log indefinitely. You're right though, these are solvable problems, BNC for example but we're getting a little off topic.
I saw 100+ community force migrate from Telegram to Discord. Most of the people complained about UI/UX, me included. And Telegram is not even very good in that area. Normal people are not fond of Discord UI specifically, they just get used to it.
And do you think a Discord community force-migrated to Telegram wouldn't have their own UX complaints? This is gonna happen almost no matter what platforms you're talking about, people are used to their thing and don't like seeing it forcibly changed.
> Normal people are not fond of Discord UI specifically, they just get used to it.
Disagree. I think most people are pretty okay with it, maybe not in love with it, but they don't see it as particularly bad in most respects either. I use Google's corp chat for work and my god, Discord is SO much better than that it blows me away.
I came over to Discord in January 2016, from a combination of TS3, Forums & Skype for the purposes of both online and personal gaming groups. It decimated all the competition in gaming spaces for voice chat, async text chat and sync text chat within 6 months. Every single guild or group moved over almost overnight. That should go to show how absolutely revolutionary Discord was, and that it was an actual, huge software innovation. People _loved_ the UX & UI. Users loved the chat and channel interfaces, admins loved the fairly easy to understand moderation tools. Its gotten a little less loved as the app has gotten less and less reliable, the VoIP quality has been reduced (especially for non-nitro boosted servers) and new, unwanted features are added. However, I don't understand how the core UI is bad. Its not puke or emoji ridden beyond what users make of it -- avatars, server icons & banners, role colours, emojis in channel names etc are all user defined. Everything else (beyond the shitty new features they rollout for 6 months then kill) is pretty standard contemporary electron app design, and honestly minimalist in some ways. It is certainly minimalist and easier to navigate compared to something like Element.
I think that HN users seem to not fundamentally understand the needs of online groups beyond what is necessary to carry out an asynchronous open source engineering project. Much of the "bells-and-whistles" that discord offers are _essential_ to both the day-to-day communication of these groups as well as to moderators. Element does not come fully replicate some core features offering an outright less stable experience. Slack/Teams are not accessible to private users. Telegram has even less features than Element/Matrix.
I mean, if you are looking for a Discord alternative, isn't the design/UX part of what you're looking for? If you want something that is the opposite of what you describe, IRC still exists and works well, but not sure many end-users would call it an alternative to Discord.
> isn't the design/UX part of what you're looking for?
I think this applies to the original target audience, namely gamers, but as a general purpose chat application, e.g. as a support channel for software projects, the UI design of Discord is indeed atrocious.
Of course, this begs the question why these projects adopted Discord in the first place. I guess the lack of a better alternative (that is not self-hosted)?
They use it because Discord works well and simply, with a rich feature set, that's largely free. And yeah, there aren't FOSS alternatives that actually match up.
The nicest thing about Discord is that there are so many servers for every topic you can imagine; the rather sad thing is that when a server goes away, all that valuable content is gone. It should really stop companies from using it or make sure there is a bot offloading/indexing the content.
Or prosper fine and then end up being sold anyway to some crappy corp for a few million $$$ leaving users stranded there, we need better models for both ends of the risks.
Slack belongs to Salesforce (US), Discord is based in the US, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple...
Not saying this is better, but is definitely not worse. At least in Europe there is the GDPR, whereas in the US there is a president officially supporting corruption [1].
If you care about privacy, you have to go for open source end-to-end encryption. Probably Signal. At least this you can self-host.
The backend seems to be a fairly standard Rust project, you basically run `cargo build --release` and then deploy the binary. For the frontend, it seems like a pretty standard frontend project, you install dependencies, then run build command and you have a bunch of website assets you deploy to your server.
Overall, seems pretty standard and easy to deploy. Most complicated would be to also run the various services that are supporting the backend, but again, not overly complicated.
Is there something specific that is missing to be able to self-host this?
I think it's pointless to selfhost if you have to recompile an app in order to connect to your server. The team should have a field box to add a server URL.
The self-hosting guide even walks you through setting up the VPS on a specific platform. What more do you want? One could even argue that if you need your hand held through setting up a VPS, you probably shouldn't be self-hosting anything, so from that viewpoint, these instructions are a lot more friendly than they had to be.
> ...if you need your hand held through setting up a VPS, you probably shouldn't be self-hosting anything...
Since when does IT tell corporate what to do?
You and I both know that corporate calls the shots, and if they tell someone to do this, and that's not their field of expertise, they'll need their hand held.
There are plenty of non-profits and other orgs that have IT staff of 1, and that guy is IT because he knows how to format a word doc.
8 GB RAM minimum for a non-graphical server software?! This thing must have more components and services than my desktop OS while having a few website open in Firefox and Chromium each
Synapse, after a reboot and the cache is cold, uses less than that. I don't think our synapse server even has 8GB allocated to it.
But that's for private chat, we can't join large rooms because I deployed our server as a test, alongside Mattermost and rocket.chat. I haven't felt compelled to switch to dendrite or whatever, nor split the synapse microservices out, nor install postgres on a dedicated VM, and so on. All of which would make someone else's matrix experience better but my life ^ that much worse.
Ignore the below, it is for a different "FOSS" discord replacement.
i did self-host it for a week to test it out - and honestly i was put off immediately.
What happens when you set it up according to the docs, is that it automatically "registers" for a license - the free license being limited to 5 users, even if you self host. Ridiculous, and just right out the gate shows me that whoever makes this does not have the user's best interest in mind.
the UI is also full of stuff that requires an expensive license, and i did not see an easy way to remove that stuff when self hosting.
License? Isn't revolt open-source, so you could have as many users as your server can handle? https://github.com/revoltchat/backend uses the AGPL, I assume whatever other things a revolt server requires have similar licenses.
Rocket wasn't that way when we used it, but it turned into a snap or flatpak or something, and as me, I won't maintain opaque software.
Matrix does everything we need, to where the group on matrix and the people I talk to on discord are a two separate circle Venn diagram.
Matrix also lets you inline files, do threads (y tho), voice chat, video chat. I don't know if it does conference calls or screen sharing as we don't use that.
I had to sign everyone up in my family. Because "change the server to 'matrix.whatever.com'" is impossible for nearly everyone.
Discord? Click a link you're in.
I don't like discord that much - I don't have it installed on my cellphone with a SIM.
A benevolent assumption would be that GP tries out a lot of stuff (according to their other comments) and therefore mixed something up, unwittingly spreading FUD about Revolt
Note that there have been rumours about Discord preparing to go public, I reckon this might be made in preparation for it. I think it is a wise move to offer an alternative.
The design is very similar to Discord, could this possibly even go to a copyright breach or is the bar for that set too high?
> I reckon this might be made in preparation for it
Revolt has been in development for many years
> could this possibly even go to a copyright breach
Ianl but I’d imagine this would require discord to prove they own the “multiple groups, with subchannels” paradigm, which would be difficult when slack exists
even then it would be a potential patent infringement, not copyright.
but there's prior art for literally every feature Discord has so as long as they aren't copy-pasting Discord's source code I think they're just fine
I'm not a lawyer either but I am an SWE and I've had to read and been expected to understand so many goddamned licenses that at this point I feel like I'm expected to be one just to be able to navigate this field
I remember a gitea update where they said in the release text something like "new github-like ui" and they basically copied all of it (check some screenshot of the latest version)
I would lie if I said I did not ever do something similar, and I am not really aware of any court cases or litigations based on copying a design. Core functionalities, sure.
There is many an open source software that could actually use a little bit of copying from the thing they are trying to emulate. GIMP is still one of the ugliest programs I have installed on my computer.
> I am not really aware of any court cases or litigations based on copying a design
Apple tried it in the 90's with the infamous "look and feel" lawsuits against Microsoft. They lost.
They've had more success suing Samsung over phone design and UI (which was about more than "rounded corners" to be sure, but a lot of the patents are still questionable).
There really is no other app in this space on the same quality as Discord. Discord was born out of Skype, Teamspeak and similar being so awful to use. Discord took the complaints from these and made a product which was the best version of them all.
Quality? I see it as extremely bloated, very sluggish and clunky (on M3 macbook pro), search sucks bad and I can not figure out how I should keep track of multiple chained replies (like threads in slack). It's not as bad as teams, but talking about quality seems out of place.
I feel like Discord was born out of Slack. Slack was actually once popular for gaming groups but they decided they didn't want to capture that space and focused on business only. Teamspeak and Ventrilo were the alternatives and while they are still solid and arguably still popular with certain groups, they were a bit behind the times.
With an emphasis on the gaming space and open communities, whereas Slack focused on corporate and closed communities.
I've been in the Go community for a while and they had to write a bot to get access to it (as Slack works invite only) and iirc had to work with Slack engineers to work with the scale they had. Meanwhile Discord's success is down to it being open, anyone can create a new channel and get instant access to things like voice chat.
Of course, this has its downside, and I'm sure Slack deals with a lot of abuse, ranging from porn to doxxing to it being used as a C&C server.
I think it’s a good product. The problem with all these chat apps (as companies to invest in) is there’s no moat; as soon as a more convenient or better option comes along, people will switch. There’s not a big integrated community or advantage to sticking to one app. Which doesn’t mean they can’t and won’t make plenty of money, just that I don’t buy into any hype around them.
'Awful' seems awfully subjective there. Can Skype even reasonably be grouped with Teamspeak? If all you want to do is quickly chat with a group, is Discord not actually far more annoying, all else equal?
Windows isn't beating out Linux in the desktop space because Linux is awful. Network effects are much more significant.
All clans' voice chats that I've been in were via Mumble, hosted on the server of whoever was the Linux nerd of the clan (nowadays that's me). No complaints about that software, but I heard lots about Skype and Teamspeak indeed. Mumble also uses TLS for encryption and authentication so it was more secure than anything else at the time as well, and more secure than Discord because the admin could maybe listen in but that's another team member and not a stranger working for a commercial entity
I hate the Discord UI/UX as well (e.g.: sluggish add hell; need to press a few specific pixels on mobile to show the mute button and other controls that automatically fade out if you don't touch them for 2 seconds) but apparently what they do well is filtering out super loud eating noises, or that's what a friend said when I asked them to mute when they were eating crisps with the mic pointed directly at it as well as blowing on the mic with every breath. Apparently they never got complaints doing that on Discord
I feel like an old person when muttering something about mute button etiquette to myself while writing this comment. If machine learning can fix that (if it doesn't require proprietary datasets from storing millions of peoples' conversations), I should let it ^^'
> Note that there have been rumours about Discord preparing to go public
That’s disappointing, but even now it’s hard to imagine they’re particularly profitable. The core functionality of Discord is entirely free and I doubt that Nitro / other paid features earn that much.
I didn't see federation mentioned anywhere, just self hosting. The difference:
- Self hosted means everyone has their own server, people need to register for the server they're interested in using. Websites are an example of this: you host your own system independently of anything else going on (though there are hyperlinks to cross-link content, which aren't necessarily present in other self-hosted software). Git servers are another example, like Gitea or Forgejo or Gitlab or gitweb
- Federated usually lets you connect servers, so that if I'm on HN and want to post a comment on a Reddit thread, if they were federating, I could just do that without logging into reddit specifically (let alone registering a completely separate account for the other server). The best example may be email, where I don't need to register with Google (yet) to send a Google user an email but I specify @gmail.com after the user's name. A more recent popular example is Mastodon
Each has upsides and downsides, like having to moderate content from other servers and having a much more complex protocol (federated) versus being independent and simple but also being another walled garden (self hosted)
I was wondering whether this was just a matrix client the entire front page. I dont see why you wouldn't utilize the matrix ecosystem with an already usable userbase when trying to recreate discord. If i would want something opensource i would also want something decentralized.
> I was wondering whether this was just a matrix client the entire front page. I dont see why you wouldn't utilize the matrix ecosystem with an already usable userbase when trying to recreate discord.
Judging by the FAQ, they see Matrix as a protocol as "obtuse and unstable":
> Does Revolt have federation?
> As of right now, Revolt does not feature any federation and it is not in our feature roadmap. However, this does not necessarily mean federation is off the table, possible avenues are:
> Implement the Matrix protocol (unlikely, obtuse and unstable)
It is hard to get E2E (device 2 device) right. I get matrix is not perfect, but I have jet seen an open source alternative with both server/client implementation that get it right.
One thing about matrix is that every device has a key in addition to the password, that key in in addition encrypted with another password, it makes it very difficult for average user, but then just use matrix in unencrypted mode to get the slack/discord effect.
If Revolt is a Discord alternative, then they may have chosen not to implement E2E because their intended audience generally doesn't care for it and the UX is too confusing for a marginal perceived benefit
Matrix definitely has problems. I'm not sure if Revolt solves them (and it likely has problems of its own) but I'd say there's room for multiple approaches.
i wish they picked a more unique name. to me, it just seems like they're a copycat by picking a name that's a synonym - or at least of the same nature - of the word "Discord"
same with the streaming platforms Twitch and Kick
looking at their UI, it's the exact same UI as Discord. no improvements while also inheriting the same flaws that make using Discord neurotic
It's tough to compete in a market like social networks, you need mass adoption for high value. Although this looks cool, I'm interested to see how it differs specifically to provide more value than Discord already does (ton of people, various servers, great integrations, etc.)
I think it doesn't necessarily have to be dominant to be considered a success. It's good for people to have the option to choose a free alternative if they want to, where they can be in control of their own data rather than it being centralized and at the mercy of some company, much like with software forges. Of course mass adoption would be cool but I don't think it's necessary to justify these types of projects
Voice is kinda supported, in the sense that they implemented the feature years ago and then proceeded to decide to do a huge rewrite that they've also decided blocks any sort of improvement or iteration on their voice chat features. Last I checked we're like 3 years into said big rewrite with 0 improvements to voice chat.
I am surprised that it is written in Rust. Bi-directional long live connections don't require Rust's raw horsepower. Maybe it's needed for audio/video streaming?
Is the API discord compatible? That's basically necessary for adoption.
> Bi-directional long live connections don't require Rust's raw horsepower.
If you're an app dev who's really and truly serious about lowering the barrier to self-hosted services, then you need to consider what the install and deployment step looks like. For languages like Rust that default to producing a single static binary, that's as easy as it gets.
Likewise, you need to consider that users might want to self-host on a potato, which is where Rust's efficiency shines even for small services.
These are both things that Mastodon got horribly wrong, for example, by choosing to use Ruby.
I use Discord for three things: text chat, voice chat, and screen sharing. Looks like screen sharing isn't supported yet, but it's on the roadmap at least[1].
It's not exactly an instance though. They just stole most of the Mastodon code. In theory it could be opened up so other instances could subscribe to the Truth Social feed but we don't really know how feasible that is and how much of the protocol/code was modified
It looks like this is still a closed platform, isn't it?
Is there a way to just browse the chat of a public server without signing up? I would like to have a more open, low friction, internet searchable alternative to Discord. Revolt doesn't take it far enough.
What do people find upsetting about Discord? It's free, there's no ads, it's reliable, it has many established communities, it's cross-platform and even works in the browser, supports voice chat and screen sharing.
What more could you ask for? Or, are you asking for too much?
What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?
This is a patently ignorant and ridiculous statement. They absolutely shove their own store garbage every release and upsell Nitro at every opportunity. Here's an article from last year about them explicitly introducing third party ads.
> I would define ads as promoting other businesses' products, as you would see on YouTube etc.
They do that, they call them "quests". Companies pay them to promote their product/service and users get rewards for doing a task (like playing a game, watching a video, etc.) https://discord.com/ads/quests
Well, concernedc1tizen, I don't like it when people spout of misinformation. Especially when it comes to deep societal issues like pervasive advertising. Making thoughtless and inaccurate blanket statements hurts the overall discussion.
"Belligerence" as you call it is direct, unambiguous, and will probably be remembered.
But I've never seen these ads myself, so it's surprising.
The Americans do take pervasive advertising to the next level though, with product placement, "influencers", and other deceptive tactics. Their behaviors are a major cost to the legal system, because more legislation has to be introduced to govern against their obviously anti-social and exploitative behavior.
> What do people find upsetting about Discord? It's free, there's no ads, it's reliable, it has many established communities, it's cross-platform and even works in the browser, supports voice chat and screen sharing.
It's an information black hole, as someone else mentioned in this comment section. Otherwise, it's a nifty communication tool.
I personally come from running and using {TeamSpeak,Ventrilo,Mumble} servers. Started using Discord in winter 2015, it was just trivial to open a browser tab and join a group session with your friends. The audio experience was an order of magnitude worse when compared to other solutions, but the overall UX and ease of use made up for it.
> What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?
If you'd allow me to, I'm going to address this question from a different perspective, as this post is about Revolt: What could Revolt do that would make me, at least, start using it alongside Discord?
I'd love it if I could self-host a server, place it online and let people find it and join seamlessly, similar to how Fediverse works for other social networks.
They don't seem to be interested in adding this: https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html#admonition-does-revo...
Other than that, I'd see myself using it to run a workspace. Having used Discord as a work-related communication platform in the past, I've come to find voice-based channels very useful, these seem to transmit a better feeling of productivity somehow. Other tools (e.g Slack, Teams) make me feel kind of "alone" when working. Even if it's just for body doubling, I'd argue voice channels are underrated and actually quite helpful for remote workers.
That's exactly the question - how does a free communication app achieve a multi-billion dollar valuation despite not having ads or directly selling user data?
Discord's business model relies on attracting a massive user base to secure substantial investments and potentially a lucrative acquisition. We've seen again and again and again what happens once acquisition takes place.
Also a big existing investor in Discord is Tecent which, under Chinese law, could grant the government access to Discord's extensive user data.
So yeah.. it's not about features it's about freedom.
And there's no way to delete your chat history basically. You can delete your account, but that doesn't destroy your messages.
And as for privacy: Your username is anonymous, but your email isn't (to Discord), so the % of users that didn't create a separate fake email, or ever connected with a trackable IP, basically aren't anonymous at all. They also record your voice. Every user's voice is recorded in isolation and can be used as training data for identification algorithms. Including unusual characteristics like breathiness, diction, accent, and so on. Probably it can estimate your age as well.
Data on Discord has never been safe really. I don't know how it is nowadays since my memes have gotten less edgy/dank but you could get banned for private messages for a long time.
They use your messages for AI training, even if you disable the AI summaries "feature". I kept seeing events related to AI summaries on a custom client, even with them turned off in the only server I was in.
They'll hold your account hostage until you give them a phone number if you happen to trigger their "anti-spam" detection. And sending a message with a number below 13 might be all it takes for Discord to withhold your account for age verification as well.
They basically track every click, every action you take on their client. You can see that if you request a data package.
Abuse is rampant. There's no way to report servers, channels, or individual users. Things that were all possible in the past, through the Support form, until they made in-app reporting the only option, which relies on reporting individual messages and has a very low rate limit.
> What more could you ask for? Or, are you asking for too much?
Let's see...blocking that actually prevents you from seeing messages from the person you blocked. A native client. Better reporting tools. Better message deletion tools - you still can't delete every message along with your account. The ability to opt out of having messages fed into AI. None of these are unfeasible.
> What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?
The network effect is the reason why technologically inferior solutions like Discord are still thriving.
Many platforms have followed the trend of first offering a legitimately good product to build up a userbase, then squeezing out profit with increasingly anti-user changes, exploiting the fact it's difficult to switch (network effect and intentional lock-in).
It's not impossible that Discord stays more or less as it currently is, with a few features locked behind its paid subscription but generally a good experience, but it seems prudent to have a backup option for if/when things go further downhill.
These are the most common complaints I see from people
- They don't allow third party clients and some people have various complaints about theirs (e.g resource usage)
- Some people think discord is too popular, to the point some things that "don't belong there" have moved to discord. This is usually about being search indexable and requiring an account.
- Fear of monopolostic behaviour ( "enshittification" )
- Some people are mad that they killed public urls for files uploaded to discord. Mostly this is people running into links to images online and being unable to see them, usually not the uploaders
- Discord is centralized and you cannot host your own server
- The only client they allow you to use (See above) is propietary, and some people would rather run something open source
As for me personally, their search functionality drives me insane. I feel like the exact same query gets completely different results depending on the time of day and phase of the moon, making it super unreliable.
Sounds like your average web development project though; frequent releases are a good thing, although I suppose for each individual they'll want to slow it down a bit.
I just wish there were more native applications instead of all the web desktop stuff. But, visual design options and developer availability is a huge factor there. Native iOS designs come the closest to what I'd like to see on the desktop.
An example of the worst-of-both-worlds 'always needs updates' like a website but 'takes over your screen (while strobing your taskbar) so you can't multitask' like a desktop program.
Let me preface this by saying I use Discord daily to keep in touch with friends. It's a great digital campfire where you can relax with people, talk with them over voice and video or just post random stuff.
The issue is that Discord has replaced things which it shouldn't have, the internet forums. Discord is the epitome of a golden cage. It is a prison for information, a black hole.
I'm not even talking about the absolutely atrocious search functionality, but the fact that information inside the Discord walls is impossible to find from the outside. You can't search across discord communities, none of the content there is indexed by web search engines. Entire communities have FAQs and knowledge as pins inside threads inside Discord servers. Things which used to be on the web.
15 years ago, these discussions would've taken place on forums and on IRC to a lesser extent. IRC itself was a really bad information black hole, but at least the forums were great. They supported long running discussions and were easy to search.
Now everything disappeared into effectively hidden Discord chats and youtube videos where you need to watch 8 different idiots bramble on for 10 minutes before you find the 30 second segment of information that you were actually looking for and could've been a single paragraph.
Only if it's in the discord search index, which sometimes doesn't include all history, and it does some fuzzy elasticsearch query that works ok for most cases and awful for anything that isn't most cases.
The metadata filters are nice but they're also what keep it usable at all.
Discord search won't even surface partial word matches or typos or matches in URLs (eg you share a facebook.com link then later on you search for "facebook", it won't show you that post).
Maybe there are some secret incantations I don't know about, but Discord search is positively useless most of the time and I have to manually scroll up until I find what I want (or give up).
I still use IRC, irssi in particular. My go-to for searching local logs is `less` rather than grep. I have the date on every line in the log file. I can jump to a specific date easily, then search a different term up/down from that spot, and I see context of surrounding lines easily. No regex needed.
I guess this is like a dunk and I shouldn't even respond, but I'd probably (from less) do /nick.*http and then hit n or N a bunch to jump around. Yeah, it's technically a regex, I guess, but I think it's probably the easiest/most common form. You don't really need to remember much of anything or understand how it works. You could be used to wildcards from a shell and just think "I gotta put a . in front of it sometimes for it to work".
I would not get more advanced than that, personally. Sure you'll have matches that aren't exactly what you're looking for, like that'd match both lines I said and lines mentioning me, and URLs that aren't images (better than trying to account for all types of image URLs, IMO) but I'll probably find what I'm looking for fast enough for it to not be worth looking up more complicated regex. Often I'll remember who posted something, too, so then maybe I'll throw their nick in the search as well, before mine. Or at least I could narrow down who posted it to a few people and just try a few searches pretty quickly back to back.
I would also say this particular search you're talking about would be fairly uncommon. I might even remember something like "oh, Bernie said that image was the funniest thing he'd seen all day, I'll search the word 'funniest' starting from the end of the file since it was under a month ago and should end up near the URL".
You would then also need to search for /http.*nick, as he might mention you after the link.
IRC had so much potential, but somehow we fumbled it. A simple search based on local logs and for the user hidden reg-ex could have been implemented 10+ years ago.
Discord search still sucks a lot because by nature discussions are largely unstructured. It's not really suitable for discussing specific topics - only perhaps types of topics. Discord threads could ostensibly fulfil the forum topic role, but their implementations is so utterly incompetent that it is genuinely puzzling. You can't search specific Discord threads, they often disappear from the left hand nav bar even if you subscribed to the thread. Whoever implemented the Threads in Discord should be kept away from computer systems because they are a danger to any application.
But even if Discord search was good, it still doesn't matter because it is not only a walled garden, it is a hermetically sealed chamber from which no information can escape.
They want my phone number and email address just to look at a forum I don't plan to participate in yet which information I would like to access is siloed in.
They have been trying to get to IPO for a while. 2 years ago they deleted a huge swathe of accounts to cause those people to create new ones to boost their growth stats and frankly having been caught up in it that was the push I needed to get off Discord. It caused a huge discontentment at the time as it wasn't clear if it was a bug or intentional but Discord didn't fix it.
They will do anything to get to a successful IPO including cooking the stats but they aren't there yet.
The problem with Discord is that it doesn't allow for servers in the same way a protocol like IRC does. Some commenters have alluded to this.
From a quick glance, revolt.chat doesn't allow for server creation either. Am I mistaken or is this pretty much a joke (Discord replacement with the only real benefit being a 'trust us bro, we're European' sort of promise to not do bad things)?
Financial success, undoubtedly. Successful at distancing users from the systems that underpin their interactions, certainly. As far as granting users more agency over their digital existence, it has been an abject failure, a state consistently exacerbated by the number of tech communities that could easily exist on IRC or a custom platform.
It really hurts when a con is so solid that even the 'enlightened' are ensnared.
A success in terms of popularity, in terms of creating something that regular users enjoy and find value in using.
> It really hurts when a con is so solid that even the 'enlightened' are ensnared.
It's exactly this sort of sneering attitude that so often causes FOSS projects to fail to catch on in the mainstream.
The framing isn't "people like this feature set", it's "people got conned". For a certain type of user, they must see others' preferences as beneath them, as lesser.
I'm not an elitist and I don't have problems with 'regular users'. What I do have a problem with is all the technical users who know better and turn everything over to Discord corp anyway. How many 'hacker spaces' do you know that use Discord as a primary communications channel?
They could just as well run a primary communications channel on something sensible, durable and self-hosted that ties in to discord intake for newcomers. Come in to the discord, say hi, chat a bit and then graduate to where the real content is.
Discord should have been a on-ramp for technical communities, not the foundation.
Nice and I'll try it out, but I can't help but to wonder what about all of the open-source Slack alternatives like Ferdi, Franz, Rambox, etc. Is it just because Slack is just no longer in vogue that there's a market for this?
I used Riot (now Element) back in the day, but like others have said in this thread, without a network effect these things don't really take off. I haven't heard of anyone using Element for years now.
I have over a dozen people I regularly talk to on Matrix, though I prefer to not use browser/electron apps, so I only use Element on my phone (separate codebase from other Element), and Nheko on my PC. FluffyChat on Android also seems decent and recently added multi-account support.
There is a webapp version. It's the grey button just to the right of the download button. Looks like their main desktop client is the same as their webapp.
Some would consider a commitment to overthrowing oppressive power structures extremely pro-social
Would you call the French Revolution antisocial? Massive demonstrations? What about the Hong Kong uprising?
It's all a matter of perspective. Those who live a stable life might see a threat to the system that grants them that stability as "anti-social" while those who do not benefit from the current system can see revolting as "pro-social"
There's a massive shady component of discord inherent to how access and security are at the whim of ar arbitrary discord mods. All manner of illegal activity thrives behind custom access control.
The most notable instance in media is the leaking of classified materials, the creation of swatting/ddos communities which gave us the 'BigBalls' hacker employed by doge,
But more sickeningly, recently it allowed this doctor to successfully target countless children, including convincing a 13 year old girl to hang herself in a live discord call. [0]
There is a problem with too much protection of freedom and secrecy.
I guess my point is, do we as a society want our children's Roblox communities to share a platform with virtually every cyber criminal, behind security and secrecy measures completely at the will of arbitrary discord owners?
EDIT: moved this to a global comment as it was too tangential to where I originally replied
Really nice. Perfectly timed for enshitification, and love that it's open source. Now just need some sort of federation and it's good to go. And choosing to go with an established UI will make adoption that much easier when TSHTF.
[just had a longer look around. Is this a Russian project?]
>To ensure users stay safe on the platform, we explicitly disallow:
>Misinformation & Conspiracy Theories
>Spreading false or misleading information that can cause harm to individuals or society is prohibited. This includes conspiracy theories that have been debunked or lack credible evidence.
Why? That sounds so dumb to waste resources policing it.
Why is it a good thing? What's the motivation behind it? It just seems like a really unnecessary restriction to have when you're trying to launch a FOSS alternative existing software.
Why are you opposed to running your servers the way you want? Why do you support people that don't run your servers controlling what you can and cannot say?
This is for content on Revolt.chat itself. You can download and host your own servers and allow people to lie all you want. But on the servers they control, they can decide what they allow.
Why are you opposed to running your servers the way you want?
No platform can allow you to 100% say whatever you want, just how it has limit to what it can enforce. Every platforms has to balance this fact. It is impossible to enforce clear borders on this as well, as human interaction is endlessly complex.
They can allow you to 100% say whatever you want as long as the law allows them to host your speech. If they try to limit you beyond that, they are censoring you, which is what is occurring here.
Why are you opposed to running your servers the way you want? Why do you support people that don't run your servers controlling what you can and cannot say?
Reminder that discord is an app for kids. Is your open source code and volunteer run project going to keep kids safe? Is it an advantage that the comms protocols are open and everyone can build bots? Or a disadvantage for this usecase?
Also, how is it an alternative for Discord if it's in a whole different jurisdiction?
This is an outdated perspective. A lot of open source projects are picking Discord now that Slack has become hostile to small projects. The vast majority of the Discord groups I am in have nothing to do with gaming
I mean the logo is a game controller.
If your company uses discord as a tool to communicate, it gives the message that it's like a game to you, that it is not serious, that you are relaxed,etc..
Certainly not the right register for serious stuff like an IT company, tax company, weapons, etc...
And it's not just semantics, the app was built for gaming, it has features and design choices built for that, one of them being kid safety, another being it shows what game you are playing. Not a corporate tool like slack.
Slack is being enshittified after the acquisition. I use it less today than beforehand. They have shown they no longer care about small projects and groups, so those projects have moved largely to Discord.
There are so many tech companies with Discord. Are you saying companies like Cloudflare are not serious companies. Know what they know that you don't? You have to meet your users where they are. The open source projects I care about are there.
It's cool if you want to maintain your outdated perspective though
Looking at their product offering it seems they have branched out from their original product that earned them their reputation (IP hiding DNS Servers and proxies), now it looks like they are branching in all directions, including random AI products and generic cloud offerings.
Definitely not getting a "we are a serious company" vibe. More like a "try to appeal and sell everything to everyone banking on our reputation because reputation doesn't pay the bills" vibe.
Not sure about that one. There's a ton of minor edating/esex/grooming going on. You have massive community servers that essentially work like gaiaonline back in the day and tons of servers of 18+ communities. Horny, curious kids will always find a way so I can't blame Discord for not having a magic wand but I would be monitoring its usage if I were a parent. Only 1 of the servers I'm in is what I'd consider kid safe and it's a company's community server.
Yeah I get that it would have problems. But I'm saying that being a closed source product with staff is what allows it to fight against that.
Foss on the other hand just clones an app offers a download and calls it a day, "self host", sometimes they encrypt stuff so that not even devs or admins can see the content, they would think of this as respecting privacy, but then when they get a subpoena for a sex offender case, they can't turn up anything.
Sorry, I don't see it. I can quickly jump around channels and server with shortcuts, the UI looks similar to other chat apps. Auto-Embed can be disabled, if that steals your attention. Or what do you mean?
If your company uses discord as a tool to communicate, it gives the message that it's like a game to you, that it is not serious, that you are relaxed,etc..
Certainly not the right register for serious stuff like an IT company, tax company, weapons, etc...
And it's not just semantics, the app was built for gaming, it has features and design choices built for that, one of them being kid safety. Not a corporate tool like slack.
I also spot "That’s the website, you can’t scroll further." in large, helpful letters. These people seem to have a pretty solid sense of humour. Mild enough it is difficult to take offence to, playful enough to add character.
Hope they do well; I dislike closed source chat programs.
Rather than open or closed source programs, let's have interoperability. Then everyone can choose. I believe Facebook was aiming for something like that with Threads, and was playing to have WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger be open to a specific standard as well?
Proprietary services are interoperable in the beginning and then stop.
Both facebook and google supported XMPP but that's no longer the case. Slack supported XMPP and IRC, but that's no longer the case.
It's completely pointless to expect proprietary stuff to be interoperable. It requires constant reverse engineering and remember that they have money to throw away to hire developers to make breaking changes to the protocol constantly.
One of the highest confidence outcomes I predict from LLM use in software dev is more use of open protocols. It is going to become difficult to maintain a network if you don't use them.
XMPP isn't dead either. Here's an open source project of an XMPP based Slack - https://prose.org/ (I have no association to this, was amazed how much digging it took me looking for Slack/Discord alternatives to find it.)
The most damage to open communications software probably came from the closed mobile app stores. The barrier to maintaining a working app simultaneously on iOS and Android is high. Almost every iOS game I bought 10 years ago is inaccessible and no longer downloadable. Those barriers are in the process of being torn down too, with or without AI's help.
Facebook never federated so their implementation was just an API they couldn't control to them:
> Facebook Messages are evolving to allow people to share rich content beyond text: photos, videos, audio and even stickers. We want to ensure the best possible send and receive experience where all these rich forms of content are reliably and consistently available on every platform. XMPP doesn't support all these (and future) content types, and it's difficult to ensure an XMPP client is rendering them appropriately. As such we've decided to sunset the XMPP Chat API.
> XMPP doesn't support all these (and future) content types, and it's difficult to ensure an XMPP client is rendering them appropriately. As such we've decided to sunset the XMPP Chat API.
This is such a lame excuse, and reveals how much they're control freaks. One of the main points of an open, federated protocol is that people can choose clients that behave the way they want and render things the way they want. "Oooohhh, we can't guarantee with an iron fist that our stupid 'stickers' render correctly on all clients, therefore we can't deal with it!"
This same mentality infests the web, and is why companies insist on slathering JavaScript into everything to force browsers to render their pages exactly as designed, rather than just letting the user agent serve the user's needs.
The push for messenger interoperability is a reaction to the EUs Digital Markets Act (DMA), which requires certain gatekeeper services to allow interoperability with smaller platforms.
Threads is working on implementing ActivityPub for interoperability with other platforms that already use it. ActivityPub is an open standard for implementing the Fediverse, a group of federated social platforms heavily based in the open source community.
Not like it's new, though? The Internet is literally interoperating networks, emails hop from server to server until they reach the user-specified destination server, DNS delegates zones to other servers. These are protocols older than I am, and I've had a driver's license for longer than Matrix exists. Their push is amazing but not by any means unique
Should be mandatory. Things like facebook took off because of network effects not because of the quality of the platform. Being able to migrate all your contacts/ chat/ tweets/ etc somewhere else seemlessly should be enforced by the gov to allow for actual competition. else you end up with first player advantage and network effects being unsurmountable and creating de facto monopolies with 0 benefit for the customer, in an environment that has low set up costs and you should see fierce competition.
And if you are nerd/privacy conscious enough, though their app and cloud service is proprietary, it’s based on Matrix and open source bridges which you can have a full list here : https://github.com/beeper
They did it with XMPP and Windows live messenger in the 2000s.
At the end of the day these companies have no incentive to be responsible stewards of open protocols. The moment they have a tough quarter they’ll eviscerate it if it means they’ll make a buck.
Since US English retains more historical features of English and has fewer of the newer ones (especially in light of Received Pronunciation, rhoticity, and random u insertion), one could argue that US English is the more traditional one.
I live in a region of the UK where rhoticity is alive and well. It actually means I've an easier time understanding some words when Americans speak them, compared to the English.
On the broader point I'd agree up until I notice that you'd write 'defense' yet also 'fence', and ponder why the verb 'got' is so overused.
I'll just say that I sometimes use defense because the Firefox spellchecker seems to prefer UK spellings even when US English is set in the language settings and the red squiggly lines bother me.
Wonder where that idea even came from, the BBC article even says as such "“It is a delightful and attractive myth that Shakespeare’s language got fossilised” in parts of the US, [the dialect anthropologist] says."
I mean; we have old runic languages that match northern English pronunciation really well- along with "olde english" spelling which is clearly a rote writing of a southern English accent (likely from somewhere like Gloucestershire).
An attractive myth, perhaps, but I'm not sure how much truth there really is.
Shoutouts to Noah Webster for "opinionatedly curating" British English from an inconsistent crufty unspellable mess to a randomly tweaked version of the same thing.
Other way around. The British wanted to differentiate themselves from colonial hillbillies so they tried to assume the appearance of culture by making the words look more French.
With emphasis on few. I'd wager less than 0.01% of potential users would be butthurt enough by that joke to avoid the platform as a whole. And the ones who got butthurt, probably better off not having them on the platform in the first place.
I’m an American and not offended in the least. It is simplified (color vs the obviously incorrect UK variant colour). Gray va grey. y’all is a great addition to the Simplified English.
Despite being told long ago by a drunk English visiting student that “the language is English not American” I’ll stand by our American simplification! Lamentably this simplification seems to be backtracking our political system…but hey we’re going from Discord to Revolt!
"Push" is the right word, because moderating web forums was always a labor of love, and automated trolling/spamming has only gotten easier and more prevalent, not to mention anti-mod culture.
It's just too hard to moderate a space with so little friction, and any friction you add chases away all but the most dedicated users -- and the most dedicated users are often the ones more likely to get entangled in some insane drama and try to burn the whole place to the ground.
It's a difficult problem. I've always wondered what it would actually cost to actually, properly moderate a reasonably sized forum if you paid a professional mod team real wages and gave them proper tools. Probably way more than we would guess.
Way to miss the point entirely. GP was talking about why that happens. And yes, it's almost entirely due to going places that actually provide effective tools to deal with bad-faith participants.
Agree 100%. Not the most important example, but I used to be heavily into World of Warcraft. The go-to place for discussion of high end play was a forum run by the guild "Elitist Jerks". Everything was there out in the open, to be read and indexed and discussed and preserved indefinitely. The forum eventually went away, but the info was still available thanks to the Wayback Machine.
Fast forward to 2020 when Blizzard put out WoW Classic (basically the original 2004 state of the game again, as a nostalgia trip). I was bummed to find that all discussion of the game had moved into discord servers. And not just one. There was a separate discord for every single class (mage, warrior, priest, etc). Sometimes more than one if the community couldn't agree on which was best. Every guild had their own discord. Special purpose servers existed for niche topics. If you wanted to find a piece of information, you had to hope that a helpful moderator had pinned it somewhere, or else rely on a crappy search feature. If a server is shut down or you get banned, all of that info is lost forever. It's a nightmare.
Discord is a perfectly good tool for real time chat. It is a TERRIBLE tool for summarizing and preserving knowledge. But unfortunately it's increasingly being used for that purpose and I do not for the life of me understand why.
For now at least. Some day everyone's relatives will be digging through databases of their ancestor's grand wisdom filleted wide open. Maybe it'll even use all that info to recreate an Ai version of them. Sorry just thinking out loud.
The real loss for the internet is the puritan approach to federation and decentralization. It's either that or app-centric solutions like matrix. Even forums weren't discoverable easily. I'll say this, matrix really has the right idea, it just does too much too fast. An SRV DNS record indicating your matrix server should be enough, then browsers should auto-discover the 'matrix' for the website, and via matrix you can comment on a site, leave reviews, chat with visitors, post forum-style,etc..
But as I mentioned in another comment, what's more important is how easy it is to administer and setup. The experience for site/community owners is the critical factor for adaption.
Based on how search engines behave to day, not really. These days, you'll have to fight spammy forums who game SEO, reddit, stackoverflow, ML digested output,etc.. it is discoverable as in technically it is somewhere in the results, but people never see it. If google paid discord like they pay reddit and searched discord servers that allow for that, that might be a nice compromise.
Also, ancient forums without https seem to be excluded by Google more often than not. I know they have their rules to push TLS but I still want results regardless.
Add forum or “forum” to your search term and you’ll get results from tons of forums. Yes, you have to know to do that, but once you do, your results will actually be good.
Don't forget IRC. My previous employer [very reasonably] blocked Discord with their MITM. This meant that the numerous developer/package discords were inaccessible to me.
Gitter exists, and they use Element. As well as many other open source alternatives (including IRC, but I can understand the apprehension with nicserv and all that ceremony).
This is why when we wanted to build a community around our product we went for Discourse instead of Discord (even though many people asked us for Discord instead). It certainly feels a lot less "lively" than a Discord server, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Ironically internally we still use Discord for comms.
I started a Discord 'server' for my JS Canvas library thing a couple of years ago because - apparently - it was a "good way to build a community". Not only have I failed to build a community, I've grown to hate its UI and confusion of channels.
I think Discord is overkill for my requirements. But I still want a (free) venue (which is not GitHub) where people can ask questions and - maybe, just maybe - form a community around the library. I keep staring at PhpBB ... but it feels too oldskool, so: nope.
I am beginning to like the idea of a self-hosted Discourse[1] thing; there seems to be a fair number of active tech-related communities... maybe if I have some time over Easter I'll investigate further.
IMO, you should have different channels of communication: A wiki which has commonly requested information; A manual for references; A bug tracker for issues. I strongly believe that IM should be reserved for active contributors. Forums should mainly be user to user help and support.
Seeing as this is closely related to [1], which I also commented on, and in the hopes that someone finds this useful regarding Discord's ownership of your data (where your messages remain even if you delete your account):
If you'd like to delete your Discord messages en masse, I made an open-source tool for that [2]. It leverages a fairly undocumented process using your Discord data package, providing a UI to explore it and choose what to export. The tool gives you step-by-step instructions and a CSV file that Discord expects when you contact their privacy team. It works across all channels in both servers and DMs, even those you no longer have access to.
Every time I see one of these projects, I wince because 2/3 of the time the backend is in PHP (no offense). The backend is in a typesafe, memory safe language!
How is open-source supposed to compete without access to Apple's certificates? If you are constantly forced to override the warnings about unsigned software, assuming your system even allows you in the first place, how much friction before less technical users give up?
Code signing is good, I like it, I approve, but it is a big obstacle for me personally and others who cannot afford Apple Developer Credentials.
> How is open-source supposed to compete without access to Apple's certificates?
Does the license of your application somehow prevent you from following whatever Apple wants to do regarding signing? I think there are plenty of apps/games out there built on FOSS technology yet they're still signed and run like anything else signed on macOS, but maybe I remember incorrectly?
Some developers avoid paying for the Apple dev program on principle. Joining it could be seen as supporting Apple's attempt at building walled gardens.
There's also the operational challenges for open source like who will sign-up and how to secure or maintain the signing keys etc. It brings in lot of friction.
The problem is that with exception of single person projects it's not as simple as paying 99$.
Using individual developer account means exposing private information of one of the developers (which not everyone wants) and is a major buss factor.
Doing it properly with organization account means nontrivial amount of paper work to establish either a commercial company or an officially registered non profit. There are very few open source projects big enough for this.
Just financial and organizational one. Not every open-source project is going to do that.
Not sure why Apple had to change how Gatekeeper works. I will have to look for an alternative once my mbp dies. It gets tiresome to fight with the OS for every other app after every update now. Especially when it worked perfectly OK before.
Discord seems to be going the way of Skype: deprecating their support for Windows 7, in favor of a newer OS offering from Microsoft which harvests data in the background under the feeble guise of telemetry. Granted there is telelmetry in Windows 7, but you can disable it in Windows 7 and not worry obout it being over-ridden the next day, or even the same day, with some forced update.
Are you worried there is some sort of anti-Windows 7 conspiracy, where software vendors stop supporting a 15 year old years out of support OS so that an unrelated software vendor receives more data?
Or is it simply more likely that nobody wants to test their software on a 15 year old OS? When XP came out that would have been Windows 95, and the same thing happened.
The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects. There are servers for libraries/frameworks, languages, ai/ml, math, whatever you can think of. And a lot of the adjacent ones will cross-link scheduled events and messages from other servers.
I'm really hoping for an alternative. I'm always weary of en-shitification whenever a single platform wins all the users.. like what has happened to Reddit.
I thought the main value of discord was quick and solid voice / game stream integration.
I rarely feel any connection between servers, but that might just be me.
It was a little bit of everything, really. Discord exploded in popularity because:
1. Its free functionality was more generous than many comparable services. Nobody wants to pay for a Mumble server.
2. Its UI and audio quality and noise cancellation settings put much of the competition to shame.
3. Only needing one account for every Discord server in existance gave it the same kind of appeal that let Reddit/Facebook kill off most individual forums.
4. Good marketing, which gave it the critical mass of users and hobby groups that it needed to succeed initially and now make it harder to move away from.
Speaking from being very early on the train for Discord, it also had an extremely solid userbase right from the start because much of the early pre-marketing pull into it was for raid groups in the then-new Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. People really needed a chat client to coordinate a big number of players and it was totally free, functional, and new on the scene. It spread a ton in the community and the people working on it were players as well from what I remember, though it's been a long time. So as the game grew in popularity, and everyone who was in a large group was starting to use Discord more, it cemented friend groups that formed in the increasingly popular game along with the Heavensward release and helped solidify a foundation in the gaming community imo.
Teamspeak and others were so well entrenched at the time. Wouldn't players of WoW, CS, etc. have brought those tools to FFXIV? What made that special?
Teamspeak had a ton of friction. When I was playing FFXIV and made my discord account, someone literally just sent a link in the text chat of our Free Company, I opened it in browser, made an account and used it right there immediately. To timestamp this, it was the summer of 2015, a little under a decade ago, iirc.
Not sure about now, but back then Teamspeak meant installing an application, setting it all up, having someone in the Free Company (almost always more than the limit for a free server on TS at the time) pay for a server or self-host (even more friction). With Discord there was no debate or decisions, just one step: Click link, sign up.
Discord's killer feature for my money has always been that ever user in a call gets a slider bar (and mute button) to control the volume they hear ever other individual user in the call
Zoom, in 2025, still makes you wait for the host to figure out which of the 30 other people has a dog incessantly barking or is causing the echo or has horrible feedback, and then try to talk them through fixing it before finally muting them.
We had that in Teamspeak/mumble/vent, but the chat functionality on those platforms were definitely an afterthought. Not a place you'd cultivate a community.
Hilarious how in The Year of Our Lord 2025, so many video conferencing apps have not figured out how to implement something similar to the Dugan automatic microphone mixing algorithm. http://www.protechaudio.com/products/PDFFiles/DuganMixing.pd...
I mean, what do you want, it's only been around for 50 years.
Its killer feature was how frictionless it was to adopt initially. If I sent you a Discord link, back then you could just click it and be going in under a minute.
Same reason Zoom quickly took over video chat. It was so easy to use that you didn't have to convince your friends to sign up for it, you just sent them a link and it just worked.
You did have to sign up and login, right? I believe this is one of the major things that make it much less frictionless for people.
If I recall correctly, yes, but it was like, enter your email and username BAM now you have an account.
It's not quite so easy anymore, partly because when you reach a certain size, it's all about controlling bots and whatnot.
Agreed. You now have to verify your phone number to have access to many guilds.
Those tools were all, comparatively, trash. Literally ALL of the gamer groups I was familiar with switched en masse. You can’t compare Mumble and Discord IMO. There was so much setup friction that anything was better than what we had at the time.
Gaming was becoming less and less the domain of the tech-savvy crowd, strongly curbing the public's appetite for such host-it-yourself services. Teamspeak/Mumble were already dying at the hands of (inferior) free/easy chat platforms like Steam & Skype, so it's really no wonder that Discord was able to swoop in and clobber all of them by simply being free and featureful.
Every action had more friction and the ability to post images was game changing.
The UI is awful, Discord volume isn't exposed, no option to do it, either, so you have to adjust game audio or individual user audio. They put the whole kitchen sink in, for some reason, too, there's a text chat in the voice rooms that needs to be user-revealed for some reason, instead of being exposed by default. Most of it is unintuitive at first use.
Then there's the many contraindications e.g. privacy policy, walled garden, and the dog shit internal indexing and the fact that it isn't externally indexed, there's a lot of pertinent information on there from skilled individuals that could serve society a la the BBS era that will never be surfaced again because it's now being posted to Discord, though that's tangential. I hate it, but it's easy enough to use, though negligibly dofferent compared to Skype, which had many of the same issues.
I think the biggest attractor for my friends was being able to idle in a server so it was easy to start a party vs starting a call on Skype which requires a little more arrangement. Lower cost less friction.
I don't remember marketing, though.
If I haven't used discord in a while I will get stuck in a voice chat and cannot for the life of me figure out how to exit. I clicked on the channel name to enter, but I can't exit from there. Clicking on other channels doesn't get me out etc etc.
Just funny to find myself knowing I've got this wrong before and being annoyed at myself _and_ at them
Weird, I have never noticed a single one of the issues you mention. There really isn't much I don't like about discord, though I wished threads worked more like Slack.
Funny. Every day at work, I lament that Slack's threads don't work like Discord's. What do you like about them?
I like that they are unobtrusive and low cost. Easy to spin off a small discussion without bothering others.
In discord, a thread becomes a big visible thing in the sidebar. More than a couple and you're annoying everyone on the whole server. Completely the opposite of what I want.
If you can handle a ton of users on not much hardware it’s quite easy to offer a generous free tier. The more “high touch” (resources per interaction) your SaaS is the more VC money you’re setting on fire trying to achieve a network effect.
And during a downturn the high touch services lose customers faster because part of the virtue signaling of cost cutting is choosing cheaper options that take a bit more work.
For the average user, absolutely it's voice and game streaming. But I've found the more I've used discord, is that a lot of online communities, that typically would exist on Reddit or a forum, also have discord servers for communicating and community management.
I have noticed it’s frequently the only outlet for communication with developers and communities, which I find worryingly closed off and hostile to users.
Just to clarify, when I say "hostile to users", I just mean generally "less accessible than alternatives". I'm not making any value judgments about how we treat one another using said access, which I don't imagine is any great panacea.
Users are worryingly hostile to developers.
I'm gonna give it up for that one. Nicely done.
If you've been on a game dev discord, it's usually the opposite.
I'm sorry, I didn't understand, are you claiming that gamers (perhaps one of the most notoriously toxic communities) are not hostile towards game developers?
Ahhh context was missing. I meant in actual game development discords for game developers, not games that have discords from the developers.
My anecdotal data is based on observations from my partner who has boughten several asset packs from itch.io, got on the discord for support, and the artists/game devs have been extremely unwelcoming to the point of just banning users for simple game dev questions and/or mentions of AI.
Of course, gamers (competitive) are generally a toxic bunch.
> extremely unwelcoming to the point of just banning users for simple game dev questions and/or mentions of AI.
This is understandable when you realize that artist are being accused of using AI for every single imperfection in art now. You messed up on perspective? You must be using AI. Anatomy is slightly off? You must be using AI. At a certain point they just get tired of the accusations and choose to ban people.
I can believe that scenario, but I believe in the cases I've seen regarding game dev, It's more pearl clutching from the artists (rightly so) rather than accusations from the asset users.
Not in my experience, either on Discord or any other platform where devs interact with users. Most users are polite enough, but many are toxic as hell; whereas most devs are maybe, at best, brusque - but you would be too if you had to constantly point users to the FAQ or answer the same obvious questions that Google can answer in 5 seconds.
I don’t spend much time on Discord servers (mostly just use it for DM with specific people) but certainly spent a lot of time on IRC in the 90s / early 00s; are channel bots not a thing? Especially now with LLM APIs and all that, you’d imagine a lot of the FAQ-level questioning would have automated answers in busy project-based servers
Bots are still a thing, certainly, but much like in IRC, they're still usually triggered by devs (of course some users will use them, but then, those aren't the users who need to be pointed to the FAQ)
There's also stuff like server intro guides and onboarding steps that should deal with most of the low-hanging questions... Should, but don't always :P
As for use of LLMs... probably an interesting use-case, but I'm not aware of any solutions using that quite yet.
Yeah, people never read channel topics so we're forced to use commands & embeds for common things
Okay but I don't blame users for that particular failing - topics are not easily discoverable. They should be shown above the input bar the first time a user visits a channel or until they dismiss it or something.
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As opposed to IRC? Forums? hell - even an email list... All things that are a lot easier to search then Discord, have much lighter clients, and can be done free.
Do you really think there was 'no way to communicate' for projects before discord ?
You're comparing ancient obsolete technology to a streamlined instant messaging client. There's a reason they 'just' use Discord. So now you want developers to have to check emails, IRC, forum posts, whatever other outdated communication platform, AND Discord? Why on Earth would they use all that when Discord takes care of all of those features and more.
Having more than one central place to communicate is 'hostile'.
>>You're comparing ancient obsolete technology to a streamlined instant messaging client
I'd hardly call discord a 'stream lined' system. Latency (especially in voice which is supposed to be it strong suit) is bad, search is subpar compared to even simple google searches, information is silo'd, its yet another place that can potentially leak PII, and basically the network is a SPOF. SourceForge promised all you mention, and was backed by (at the time) the largest IPO in history..and lasted what 2-3 years before it started decaying? I remember projects scrambling to find hosting after SF - and I remember how fast everyone jumped on GitHub .. I was donating to GH from the beginning just to help prevent another SF scenario...
As for it 'hostile' - its a lot easier to do a google search and find all sorts of information streams about something, rather then having to figure out the discord server for a project, search the discord server, and still miss any info. from outside of discord. That seems more 'hostile' to me then less wall-garden systems.
Edit: last I knew, over 1K oss projects still maintain libera.chat channels
> You're comparing ancient obsolete technology to a streamlined instant messaging client.
Just because something is old, doesn’t mean it is bad.
Disagree.
In 2025, a company using IRC to communicate with its users would be like using ham radio. Sure it exists, but it is far too niche to be worth the effort.
How so? You literally just open a web page, and choose a nickname. It's easier than creating a Discord account and verifying your email address and phone number.
Discord has a gradual onboarding process. If your IP isn't poisoned, and your browser looks pretty normal, you just have to enter a username and you're in with an "unclaimed account"
They'll then nag you to fill in more details as you use it. It's honestly a pretty slick way of doing onboarding.
oh yeah through a reddit bounce that is true, it's their live chat platform in a way :)
Completely depends on the niche. The VRChat party scene is comprised of hundreds of clubs as well as a meta-club for people who like to join as many as possible, which imports events channels from dozens of other servers. Some of them even collaborate on scheduling data and can put together a complete calendar/schedule of all events from various clubs each day.
Am I the only person who sees this as a negative? I don't want everything I do to be in the same place.
This isn't a stance driven primarily by privacy/security requirements, although making e.g. compartmentalisation possible is generally a positive thing. Rather, my issue is with mixing business and pleasure, or even business A with business B, so to speak.
It's common for users to have multiple accounts and use the built-in account switcher.
While useful, I don't think that addresses much of anything in this context.
The biggest flaw of Discord is the federated nature and how disconnected each discord is from any others. As a casual game enjoyer, I found myself somehow juggling over 50 discords in ca 2021, each with their own server rules and conventions for how to use @all tags, alerting thresholds, etc.
It's too much burden on the user to manage the incoming information and resulted in a kind of anxiety about reading red marked messages and frustration at realizing how I didn't care for 95% of them, but I was unwilling to completely separate myself from that community (e.g. quitting or muting the discord)
It becomes a question of which friends you want to implicitly abandon and I ultimately decided to just abandon them all.
If the competitor even has a slightly more unified product it could easily displace discord.
Transferring a bot from one chat format to another chat format isn't some kind of insurmountable moat, and I think it's likely this project could make a few changes to support them with no modification required.
discord needs to abandon the notion that every message in every channel deserves to be read by every user. it’s absurd in servers with >50 users
It's annoying UX, but unfortunately I've come to the conclusion that the alternative is worse. When channels are opt-in, it makes discoverability effectively infeasible in practice. This is what the Element clients that I've seen do (following the IRC convention), and it just means that everyone clusters in the default channel and the others all wither on the vine.
That said, maybe there's a middle ground. If a server could mark, say up to 20 channels as default/opt-out, and the rest as backrooms/opt-in, that might suffice for 80% of servers while avoiding the long-tail worst-case UX of manually muting 100 channels in a server because there's only one you care about.
Another alternative would be to use threads more. But they are terrible in Discord, even worse than in Slack. When two Discord users are chit-chatting about their dogs all through the night, a mod should just drag-select all of these messages and put them in a "dog chat" thread.
I still want to try Zulip to see how well it works.
Note: Discord has given servers the ability to make channels opt-in/opt-out - 'Browse Channels' in the channel sidebar.
I don't think that's an inherent notion of Discord at all, although it is a case of poor defaults. I turn on most of the muting settings immediately when I join a new server (notify for: nothing, suppress @everyone and all role @mentions, etc). Throughout the day, I'll mainly click between the 2-3 servers I actually care about, and every few days I'll go through some of the others. New messages are still marked once I click in so I know where I left off, pings are still highlighted so they catch my eye as I'm scrolling through, but if I don't care about a conversation in a channel, I can just scroll to the bottom and it's all immediately marked as "read."
There's also the shady components of discord. All manner of illegal activity thrives behind custom access control.
The most notable instance in media is the leaking of classified materials, the creation of swatting/ddos communities which gave us the 'BigBalls' hacker employed by doge,
But more sickeneningly recently it allowed this doctor to successfully target countless children, including convincing a 13 year old girl to hang herself in a live discord call. [0]
There is a problem with too much protection of freedom and secrecy.
[0] https://youtu.be/GgfGhzkq8FE?si=nFahQlTUTsY5WEuI
I don't think Discord has anymore shady activities than any other large scale social media platform. When I helped moderate a very large server, we had access to Discord Trust and Safety team and they were trying against what is a massive flood. Automated moderation is extremely difficult even with all AI tools unless you 100% block any NSFW content and sexual messaging and even then, you will get false positives.
I do find it interesting that we hold these platforms liable but not the phone/pager/mail service. If this doctor had called this girl on her cell phone, no one would be mad at Verizon.
Part of the problem is most parents have no clue about social media/communication tools outside what they use. At my church, I gave presentation about Discord and it was shocking to see how clueless parents were.
Disboard is the biggest Discord search engine.
It is trivial to find servers with adult topics (BDSM) targeted at minors. It is trivial to find servers that combine those topics with problematic age ranges (like BDSM-themed servers with no ID verification, 'ages 14-28 welcome'). It is trivial to find servers with minors openly selling "content".
Disboard isn't Discord but these things aren't even being remotely "hidden", it is these servers' sole 'purpose'.
> I do find it interesting that we hold these platforms liable but not the phone/pager/mail service.
Phone and mail networks in letter and spirit obey the law: they don't listen to people's private conversations and they give up complete user info on request by law enforcement. There is nothing more they can do.
Discord has built the capability to read every message, public or private, that any user sends. So they are ethically obligated to stop bad things happening on their platform. Whatsapp/Signal have built their platforms so they can't read user private messages, so they have no ethical obligations to stop bad things happening on their platform, beyond banning users in response to legal orders.
> Whatsapp/Signal have built their platforms so they can't read user private messages, so they have no ethical obligations to stop bad things happening on their platform
Why draw the line there? Why don't those platforms have an ethical obligation to build the features that would allow them to stop bad things happening on their platform? Especially if they knowingly developed the current implementation specifically to avoid ethical culpability?
That's a political statement. The position is that one should have the right and ability to communicate with other people in a secure fashion. If you deny this right, and build structures to monitor all communication, when "bad" people take over the government, you end up in a dystopia. Then building any sort of anti-government political movement become very difficult because they can hear whatever you say.
So I am glad that software like Signal/Whatsapp exist that allow secure communication [1]. And I would take the harms causes by them being unmonitored rather than the harm of future dystopian governments. Due to how crypto works, I don't think there is much middle ground here.
[1] I would prefer open source, more community owned platforms take over than these two.
Sorry but you were arguing that Discord should snoop even more into what we're doing for ethical reasons, and now you're saying privacy is a virtue. Do you have a reason to think Discord doesn't already do these things and just doesn't get it right every time?
Phone and email aren't more private than Discord either. Arguably less. Difficult to get a phone these days without buying it on camera. And a phone company will give up all your messages.
There are two competing principles here: (1) Privacy for individuals (from government and non-government entities), and (2) generally do things in a way that minimize crime. Both are good, and generally I want communication platforms to conform to (1) rather than (2).
Whatsapp/Signal are as close to (1) as possible by design, can't actually do (2) at all. Phone/Mail are somewhere in the middle, but quite close to (1). In most countries in the world, there is no mass recording of phone calls or mail, despite it trivially easy to do so. Moreover, due to long long historical legal precedent, I don't think phone/mail companies have any freedom to do things differently. They are pretty much constrained to do exactly what the government tells them to do.
Discord on the other hand, does not respect (1) at all. In fact, it very intentionally records and reads everything for profit. And it hands over any info requested by law enforcement. So, ethically, either they rewrite Discord to respect (1) or they should do (2). I don't think they are. As others have noted in this thread, it is trivial to find servers that are clearly criminal.
One might argue that it is impossible to do so because there are so many servers. My second political position is that if your public platform is so large that you can't effectively moderate it, that is not an excuse. You are culpable. Simply stop your platform from growing past the point where you can't effectively stop bad things happening. You don't have the right to profit while enabling bad things.
>Discord has built the capability to read every message, public or private, that any user sends
So they need to get rid of that capability
This isn’t fair to say.
Any platform that’s popular will have its share of undesirable users, out of the company’s control.
Discord has very good moderation in contrast to other platforms (Constant banwaves on illegal/shady servers, terminating accounts frequently, etc)
Haven't heard of any other platforms that use cartoons in the UI, actively associate with kids hobbies, and also make it one click to join active pedo grooming communities.
"very good moderation" makes me believe you work for them because that is a laughable notion.
I would bet that Big Balls swatting/SIM swapping/ddos community "the comm" still has dozens of discords that have been up for years
Any social app with one click to join communities (all of them) will fall under this.
And how out of touch with teenagers are you that you think cartoons in the UI (whatever that means) are why they use it. What is a kids hobby? Gaming? You cannot call that a kids hobby.
Nah Facebook doesn't have swatting and pedo communities.
Source?
Telegram is the undisputed king of shady shit, at least insofar as centralized services go.
Yea but how many children's games use telegram to manage their community?
I guess my point is, do we as a society want our children's Roblox communities to share a platform with virtually every cyber criminal, behind security and secrecy measures completely at the will of arbitrary discord owners?
I hate discord, it is where enthusiasm is met with "bad girls" energy. Plus, it's an information black hole.
> it is where enthusiasm is met with "bad girls" energy.
What does that mean?
Group mentality that picks and chooses who is "cool" and then bullies everyone else.
But I assume that is because of the people on that specific server, not because of the software? Or is there something about discord that enables it, that IRC etc. does not have?
I hang out with friends that predate discord, on discord and can't see it. Same with new servers.
happens on irc constantly too
chat rooms are cliques, almost always
choose any sufficiently populated room on libera chat, join, and start talking a lot without lurking first for awhile and see how the inhabitants react
try going to a pub on a Saturday night, walking up to a group of people you’ve never met, having a conversation, and start talking about something completely unrelated, and see how they react.
what you’re seeing in online chat communities is just basic social interaction reflected online
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i'm on a number of discord servers. yes, some have that 'mean girls' vibe but considering the content, i expect that. the more tech oriented ones i'm on...that's not an issue at all.
to me, in general the vibe of a given discord is similar to the general vibe of that topic (i.e some games have terrible, vitriolic cesspools for communities and those discords reflect that. other things, such as one of the rust ones i'm on, reflects that community's vibe which is a lot more wholesome imo).
I've never been in a Discord server and thought "Wow this server doesn't do the moderator LARP-ing thing".
My dream is to be invited into a mildly popular server (more than 15 users), than doesn't have 50 channels, 8 separate roles and T&C to agree to. It hasn't happened yet.
An entire generation of bureaucrats and bean counters is learning the ropes on Discord.
This shows Discord is a genuine successor to Web 1.0 forums. :-)
Unnecessary channels are unnecessary subforums. User roles are user ranks (https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3.1/kb/article/everyth...), indicating both software permissions and social status. T&C—well, forum engines like phpBB, MyBB, and SMF come with a standard user agreement they show before registration. There is more concern with it now because the Internet is real life.
As for training an entire generation of bureaucrats and bean-counters, I leave it to the reader to judge.
I like this take. There was something unique how each bulletin board was customized to the administrator's taste.
And it was up to them to provide plenty onboarding to new users, so they're not overwhelmed by the hundreds of subcategories, and thousands of threads in each.
We used to be part of no more than a handful of forum communities. Maybe that changed.
I'd consider beancounter to be best case. At least a beancounter works for the company and gets paid. It's like they know they're Koolaid drinkers but every server is riced up with Discord's product pipeline like an aftermarket Honda.
I started and mod a server of about 6k users for a community around a niche software used by professionals, students, and hobbyists. We keep it really simple and focused primarily on people getting questions answered. Recently a small but vocal cadre of hobbyists have been demanding more Discord-y features oriented towards socializing with other users of the software, and our reticence to complicate the server and add features just because Discord offers them has been a point of contention. They seem to think we mods don’t understand Discord. We are having trouble getting them to understand that we are aware of what other servers are like and that we’re deliberately choosing not go that route.
My experience is that discords that arent properly moderated go through a boom/bust cycle.
And that whether in the ascendency or the fall, the moderators trying to maintain complete opaque control will fight to the death to keep it that way.
And where moderation is done more by feel than by rules people start self censoring and then disengage entirely.
But then you go to a discord that has moderation figured out, and its just... a nice place to be?
That rings true to me and probably has some truth on other platforms as well. We’re trying for transparency but it does feel like there’s a gap in perspective and goals that could only be reconciled by making space for two really different objectives or, as we’ve been doing, remain focused on the original goal and hope that users who want to pursue other activities in the space do it on one of the other forums for the community, like FB or Reddit.
Can you elaborate on what features they were demanding?
Are you a partnered server? Are they even still doing those?
I've never been a mod. I'm just an adult who understands Discord's general operations.
No just a community server.
What features are you talking about? I admin a server of 9k. The new onboarding stuff, automod, opt-in roles?
I’ll assume it was pronoun roles unless we hear back
Not sure why you would assume that.
GP was on track - they wanted voice channels, many of them, before we had any demonstrated demand for it at all.
They wanted additional, opt-in roles, so anyone could @ a cadre of self-appointed ‘question answerers’ if they, I guess, (and this still isn’t clear to me), felt as though their question was more important than the questions of those who didn’t elect to do so.
They wanted auto-mod stuff that would maybe somehow automatically answer people’s questions (‘AI’), etc
The software in question (TouchDesigner) is a complex, idiosyncratic, node-based programming environment with a tough learning curve and a GUI dependency that makes question-asking and -answering more onerous than non-graphical programming.
As mods we’ve put a ton of effort into helping the torrent of new arrivals ask better (often less lazy or broad) questions and thus get better answers, more often. Many of the requests we get are well-intentioned but seem to think the reason questions go unanswered is because no one saw them, when it’s obvious to us that in many cases, they’re just extremely lazy questions.
Unreal has a similar problem, in my experience, with the difficulty of asking a question with sufficient information making it common that those willing to help are still only inclined to go the distance with people who are willing to meet them halfway.
I'll bite. What's the moderator LARP-ing thing?
I've tried looking it up but among irrelevant results (general LARP info) I just found this comment again as the third result...
A more accurate phrasing would be "moderator power-tripping."
The moderators pretend they are vastly more important and significant than they are.
Discord is shifting focus back to gaming [1]. What was it before? A moderation simulator, of course. That's what I mean by LARP.
You wouldn't stick a kid in the pilot seat of a real Boeing 747, would you?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167147/discord-gaming-f... (2024)
EDIT- Second hint: To summon Galrog the Destroyer, say "Live. Action. Role. Playing." and clap your hands 5 times.
But fear not what is ahead; the entire moderation team's activity status has shown "Playing Roblox" for 8 hours. Luckily, it's just a simulation, and none of this is real.
I can't piece together what you're trying to say. There's something to do with disdain (the remark about putting a child in a position with lots of responsibility) but being a "moderation simulator" makes little sense in the context of chat software (you don't go to a chat to be a moderator but to... chat). For that to make sense, they'd have to generate fake messages for you to moderate or something?! Then the LARP reference, does that also have a negative connotation in your head? Eyeing the pilot comment, should one read it as "childishly playing at"? And then something in the last sentence about everything being a simulation... is that a theory of life or are we still on the topic of Discord? You'll have to give more context for this to make any sense (the linked source didn't provide any I didn't already have/know), although the shards I'm piecing together so far make it seem like it's a destructive personal campaign that I'm not sure I should be interested in being recruited into
I'm frankly wondering whether I should ask if you're okay. Idk if you have a legitimate dispute with Discord or some people on there (I dislike Discord as much as the next self hosting open source non walled garden fan, but this is next level), or if it's something else. Wild guess / legitimately concerned: do you have a heater that can leak carbon monoxide? Or maybe I am just extremely bad at understanding what I've just read
Sounds to me like you're hanging out with the wrong people.
So basically Hacker News.
I think they might've meant "mean girls" energy... :)
I started a channel with some friends last year for game servers we started running. It's been so much fun. We were worried about what you're describing, but we've had the exact opposite experience. People are friendly, they go out of their ways to help others especially new joins or people asking questions, and they try to protect the channel from the few people who break the rules.
The deceptive nature of Discord's "servers" has always made me wary. You're trusting one service with everything, it's Reddit all over again.
The nature of Discord "servers" is exactly why they won.
For now, until they inevitably enshittify their service to increase profits, and a competitor swoops up most of their market.
> The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects.
Ease of use is also up there. (Compared to IRC)
The combo of ease of use and rich feature set makes services like Discord hard to resist for users and hard to compete with for FOSS software/services which prefer to take more focused, more technologically-inclined approaches.
It’s a major factor in what made Reddit big, too. Spinning up a subreddit is effortless and takes practically no knowledge and similarly easy for users.
IRC doesn’t seem terribly complicated to me, but I came of age when using computers seriously required a higher level of knowledge. I don’t find it restrictive either, but when I started communicating with others online, being able to send “just” plain text was amazing. Things have changed since then… the communication styles popular with young people haven’t been strictly text in many years and the overarching expectation is to be able to start using services in seconds after discovering them with as few clicks and as little research as possible.
Yes but compared to things like Zulip it loads pretty slow.
that's like selling email with gpg as easy to use compared with newgroup.
anything win when compared to the ultimate underdog. but that's hardly a valid comparisons.
discord only win from other opensource forums because you don't have to own a domain, i guess.
Like reddit or Facebook groups? Discord being realtime chat is an important part as well. I don't think it was necessarily competing with traditional forums that are post and thread based.
Do you though? Do you drop everything to answer notifications as they pop up, or do you answer them at your convenience?
discord as opensource support forums compete with irc (the ultimate underdog) and discourse et al (all which require a domain)
the real time part of irc was taken over by matrix.
I mostly use Discord for real time chat. And around that time Discord got big it was IRC that filled that roll. Or skype for some.
I noticed that, but I also noticed the quality in those "servers" (really groups) is kind of shit? There's way more random off-topic discussion than about the thing you're looking for, and you still have to search through it. And when there isn't, there's nothing (due to fragmentation) and you stop checking.
I think the biggest selling point is clearly the community.
Without the community revolt.chat is just another Mattermost or Matrix.
Discord is popular for one reason and one reason only, all the young people are there. The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook.
I've been trying to explain this to a friend recently. You're only on Discord because they took a huge loss for many years with the hopes of building up a massive database of users.
Yeah, it is the chat program treadmill. Spend investor money to host a completely commoditized program. Of course it is better than the version that costs money by virtue of being free. Eventually run out of investor money and do something unpopular to raise revenue, leaving the opportunity for the next iteration to come in for free and take your spot.
The only thing I don’t really understand is why investors keep falling for this? The only real business model is giving their money away. Maybe they get some good ad network profile data in the time between the heel turn and the point where everybody ditches the service.
Investors aren't falling for it. Users are falling for it.
Leaking millions for years pays off in the end, or even half way through. Some investors would exit at some stage. Taking profit due to valuation going up, despite no revenue/profit.
At the end of the tunnel is acquisition by a major player who is basically buying the users.
Typical examples: Skype, whatsapp.
But also LinkedIn. GitHub.
Businesses that offered some (basically) free offering for over a decade until reaching critical user base, then sold off for billions. Reason being precious data along with millions of daily active eyeballs.
Skype is ending this year. Some founders and investors won but only thanks to greater fools.
(notable that three of the four greater fools in your post are Microsoft)
May not be clear, even to finops at Microsoft. Skype tech ended up in Lync subsequent versions, aka Skype for enterprise. The user base also became a free ad target (to buy the entire consumers tool suite) I remember being constantly nudged to sign up for the free 30 days One Drive to backup Skype pictures and the jazz. So creative these heads of sales at MS.
It's shocking really that Microsoft didn't buy Slack and drive that into the ground too.
I'm glad to see WhatsApp is proceeding relatively slowly down the Shit-en-slide, since it's completely entrenched in some countries. I've had companies who just assume that I have WhatsApp and it's cool to message me on it instead of sending a text or email.
you can make something free and still profitable. Google search for example. I've been waiting for years to see something replacing it
I haven't used Google search in over a decade.
> they took
They are more than likely still taking, based on the 17% layoff a few months ago
As is Snapchat, miraculously (Snapchat is the most wildly mismanaged social media company from a fiscal perspective it’s wild)
> The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook.
In 2015, when they first got started, they marketed towards gamers (i.e. boys and men in their teens and early 20's). Even though the company's tagline at the time was that it offered a better Skype, Discord was more inclined to be a better replacement for a moribund Xfire and an aging Teamspeak. Word of mouth marketing on Reddit didn't hurt either.
They also have ties to Universities with their student hubs. This part is great if you're a student, as you can find clubs and people with similar interests. There is immense power in what an older sibling does, and soon the younger siblings are using it to chat with them. They can chat with their friends from any mobile device or a desktop without the dreaded green bubble or restrictions of SMS / iMessage. In groups, they can hide their identity.
It gives the server "owners" the ability to enforce rules, ban those who are disruptive, and has an impressive bot API. I can see why it is immensely popular.
Skype was also still popular among gamers when Discord was first available. That's what my friends and I switched to Discord from.
These days I refuse to use Discord for political reasons though.
What political reasons? I googled for discord political controversies but didn't find anything too shocking.
I don't like depending on a proprietary commercial product to facilitate my personal relationships. I don't like the fact that they can (and are likely to) ban / block me from talking to my friends for choosing to run a client other than their proprietary web browser wrapper on my computer. I don't like that it's a single point of failure (that often does) for something as easy to host as chat. These reasons probably fall under the "not too shocking" label, but they're important to me.
Curse was becoming more popular than TS at the time, but Discord offered a better quality of audio and stable connection. That's why my group of friends migrated to Discord around 2016.
TeamSpeak was usually the default option at the time (with some on Mumble). Skype had some presence, but was usually grumbled about beyond 1:1 calls. RaidCall was starting to gain some presence because it was free but otherwise followed TeamSpeak's UX, but was still pretty niche.
Curse Voice was absolutely nowhere to be seen.
> The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects
True. As it also hits a local minimum in terms of user experience (to the point that the average user does not care), I don't think it is possible to make a new centralized (even self-hosted) alternative on technical merits alone, since you necessarily incur a cost in the form of signing up to every server.
The only hope is a decentralized alternative like Matrix which is enshittification-resistant. I actually think the server part of matrix is more or less ready for a good Discord-like client, but the client side is lacking.
Cinny exists as a discord-like client, thing is, Matrix is mostly the text chat part, it doesn't implement voice chats or anything. Also, the space/room system works differently to discord server/channel
> Matrix is mostly the text chat part, it doesn't implement voice chats or anything.
It's in progress. Keywords: MatrixRTC, Element Call
https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/#3-nat...
fwiw, Matrix has had video rooms since 2022: https://element.io/blog/drop-in-drop-out-chats-with-video-ro... - and VoIP calling since day one in 2014.
Does it have persistent voice channels with simple app/game streaming for free?
I've never used it but Matrix does seem to support conference calls, if not natively then via Jitsi. I'm sure a good app can paper over the differences to get a voice-chanel out of it if this is what people are after, though I've never really used this much on Discord.
The same can be said of space-room vs server-channel. Of course a space has different semantics, the space doesn't own the rooms, etc. But they can be made to be nearly the same for an end user. In general organization of resources is much looser and less opinionated on Matrix. But an opinionated app can also paper over this to force a stricter hierarchy, while offering advanced users the ability to make their own spaces, etc.
If it only works per-client, then it almost doesn't exist. That's one of Discord's strengths.
I mean from what I can tell a lot of its recent success is simply because Slack is terrible. Most of the discord "servers" I use which aren't actually gaming related would be almost the same on slack, but slack has a less generous free tier.
I don't think discord has much of a real network effect, it's just a good value proposition. When the screws tighten that may change.
Slack's UI sucks for multiple different "server"s. Good for work, but no gamer wants to juggle around the Slack UI for 2/3 different game servers, not to mention DMs being isolated. Imagine DMing the same person with 2 or 3 completely separate chat histories, depending on the source server. Many people have multiple servers that share a subset of people, and talking to them would be absolutely insane, not to mention the amount of people that primarily use Discord for DMs that don't care about any server at all.
> The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects.
The biggest selling points of Discord are 1) unified login and 2) phone access.
I, personally, consider these to be negatives. However, the majority of people do not.
"Weary" or "wary"? Or both?
The selling point to me was it's sophistication in handling moderation issues. But they enshittified it to be like Facebook moderation. Maybe that's why they're going public.
I couldn't agree more
Looking at https://rvlt.gg/discover/servers it seems that all reasonably active servers are either turkish[0] or anime related.
[0]: Turkey banned Discord in 2024: https://www.reuters.com/technology/turkey-blocks-instant-mes...
So like Mastadon then.
Every time I’ve looked into it, every server I’ve checked has been filled with furries and anime-avatars.
I mean, I’m glad they’ve found a community where they feel at home, but it kinda makes it a hard pass for the rest of us ;)
Love it or hate it, furries make the internet go. A lot of them are very early adopters and developers themselves. Source: I've had more than a few friends in and around the community since I was a teen.
I'm on fosstodon.org. Never noticed anything like that, but I also can't say I spent much time checkout out the avatars.
Well, I guess it's better than the reddit alternatives that are full of communities who got banned from reddit.
Out of curiosity, I've just looked at the front page of lemmy.org, and its community seems virtually indistinguishable from reddit.
I think I'm using every chat platform that has wide adaption in tech circles. The one trend I'm seeing is that most of us just use the platform random communities insist on us using, we don't use them out of preference. And those communities choose the platforms because of the support they're getting from companies like discord and the amount of work needed to moderate and administer the community under the platform. My point being: community admins are the real consumers of these products, not normal users.
If I need support with an open source library of some sort, I don't mind using IRC , MS Teams or anything in between. But if I have to run a community, I will chose whatever platform requires the least effort while integrating well into all my administrative and devops workflows.
If I could speculate a bit, I think discord webhooks and bot api has helped it succeed a lot. But things can be improved upon. Making it dead-easy to integrate into github actions, alert/monitoring platforms,etc.. is a huge selling point. It should be easier to use a platform like this to send notifications than with email. And it should have at minimum one "bridge" type integration that is natively supported: for email! It's really mind-blowing to me with M365, how I have to switch between teams and outlook. How come they haven't figured out how to get and respond to emails from within teams? (the reverse is possible but doesn't work well).
>If I need support with an open source library of some sort, I don't mind using IRC , MS Teams or anything in between.
I honestly cannot think of something worse. Chat applications are not forums and they generally suck at replacing them. Not only does this make topics harder to follow and much harder to find to begin with, it also makes the maintainers bother with the same questions again and again, because users can't find their results in search engines.
it sure beats mailing lists. look at LKML. I prefer discord over LKML any day. But some people prefer them over anything else. That's kind of my point, I don't have the time or energy to complain about this, I just want to talk to the right people. No one asked my preference, so in practical terms, it doesn't even matter.
> it sure beats mailing lists. look at LKML.
You mean the the 31 years of simple text anyone can index or search using any search engine? How awful.
Few people care about going 31 years back, and indexing stuff themselves. Most users are casual users, and want to have their problem solved right now, with as little effort as possible.
Not that power users don't matter! They do, especially at places like LKML, where everyone is expected to be quite tech-savvy. But most users in the world are not nearly as tech-savvy. For them, zero-friction solutions are a clear win. even if not the only accessible way, despite any other shortcomings.
The LKML is no gold standard.
After searching on lore.kernel.org, do you click through individual messages with such insightful subject lines as, "media: camss: Format configuration per hardware version," and, "rcar-vin: feature enhancement and fixes?" or do you read through the nested results, which on a test search related to a recent problem I had, gave me 2.5 MB of text across 74K lines?
Even then, I didn't find exactly what I wanted and would need to browse the kernel source (and will it be mainline or next?) and click through. The frontend for git.kernel.org does not have per-line blame (unless I missed it somewhere) so I have to checkout just to find the commit I want or browse the log until I find the changed line or hope that the expanded log is verbose enough to match my search term.
lkml.org is certainly no better, with no method of searching or grouping related topics.
Or... Do you refer to a third-party search engine doing the heavy lifting of indexing and deciding the relevance of a problem?
As opposed to most chat clients, where you just search and get a preview of all possible matches, and then go to that conversation. Sure, with Discord it involves opening the client and the potential for security mishaps and other problems of modern software (ads, useless features) but it is generally not difficult to search through a half-decent channel.
You get similar ease-of-use and searchability with a git repository with a half-decent frontend plus it makes it significantly easier to track proposals, changes, feature history, etc.
... except when a merge request or issue suddenly has more than 5 participants or a branch is building a new feature, where it then makes sense to take it to a chat where you get an instant notification and tight feedback loop between all participants, rather than rapid-fire updating the bug tracker and its associated merge request comments and the reported issues in a dependency's repo.
Gotta go; a coworker is asking me in the chat to push a fix to nightly.
Do you use any GUIs to see the emails as a tree of replies? I tried using LKML and even subscribed to some FreeBSD mailing lists.
Its absolute trash. I don't know who's talking to who in what topic. Using ">" as a quote without any coloring and having to judge what level of indentation this is. Its horrible.
discord's search functionality has actually been incredibly useful. Many forums are notorious for having awful search. This is somewhat made up for by the fact that they're indexable and you can google search that forum instead.
There's also a wide spectrum between chat sites and forums. Threads-centric tools like Zulip can be amazing for a community like that. Some, like rocket.chat, are even search-indexable
EDIT: it was actually Zulip not rocket.chat that has the option to make channels public to the web
> Many forums are notorious for having awful search
But google/bing/etc index (basically) all of them. Forum search is great for finding exact title matches, and sometimes useful for exact content matches. Google with site: is better for finding conceptual matches. And, if you don’t know what forum you’re looking for, adding “forum” to your search engine term searches all of them.
Discord is not (and likely will never be) indexed by any search engine. The level of discoverability is almost as low as it can possibly be; you can’t find the community by searching general terms, you have to know the community exists, join it (agreeing to both discord’s and the community’s rules), and then search, only with discord’s search itself.
>Many forums are notorious for having awful search. This is somewhat made up for by the fact that they're indexable and you can google search that forum instead.
I think this really depends on the content. Projects that use discord as their primary community support create a significant barrier for users doing preliminary troubleshooting. I have a huge folder of discord servers of projects I took a couple steps into before passing on. Those should have just been internet searches. Once I have an agent doing that research for me, I assume it will have to register with discord servers just to do its job.
Technically, I think you can make a chat application's chats archivable and searchable, but nobody is going to do that. Discord actually does a better job than I expected, but the text is stuck in the app. It would be great if somehow the chats could be archived in text based format online, but then you would need to write a security model to handle the privacy aspect.
I've landed at AnswerOverflow from Google before. It's a bot you can add to your server so that your server's threads get indexed. I haven't added it to a server myself but it seems decent enough. See https://github.com/AnswerOverflow/AnswerOverflow
I actually despise using forums, so this is a good thing for me. Chat is a lot more casual, like how you might walk up to a colleague in the office for some advice.
My experience with many forums is that most moderators spend too much time making the forum perfect and less time helping me with my problems. My experience with chat is that I post a question and then someone has an answer pretty quickly
pretty much this, you go where they have setup camp. For instance, I have one tech group that uses telegram, the dumbest tool for a tech discussion that you could choose, but there they are, so that's where I checkin now and then.
I dislike discord because it's a clumsy UI. Usually you want to be able to research what you're interested in. Not a great experience on discord.
Discord tip - if ever you need to rewind to the first message, append /0. Used to be a pain to get there, maybe they've fixed it.
I've accidentally typed https://revolut.chat/ instead https://revolt.chat/. Apparently I wasn't the first one...
Revolut (the banking service) and Revolt are both British I believe...
Seeing as Revolut has been around for a number of years, as a British person I wouldn't have chosen a name so close to Revolut (for any product).
Revolt isn't some random made up word. It seems ridiculous to class this as an obvious name collision.
Doesn't anyone else miss the old days of forums like PHPBB and VBulletin for collaboration?
They had everything I needed, and nothing I didn't. Easily searched by Google. Actual pagination instead of stupid endless scrolling.
All the new forums are going to Discord (synchronous) or Discourse (asynchronous) which I find to be much less useful.
I am thinking about that time and hosting a forum myself all the time. But there are a few issues connected with it: (1) If I hosted one, I could only do it invite only, because I don't want to be responsible or held responsible, if some shithead posts illegal stuff on it. (2) So it is back to friends only. But my friends do not show motivation or interest in being very active initially in such a media. I would have to artificially create topics and discussions around them and ask them to comment or so. It feels like it would require a lot of initial investment to get something that sustains itself by having active people and good info on it to be worth it for people to interact through it.
I do terribly. However you needed SysAdmin skills to administrate a *nix box.
System skills to run the forum and webserver configuration.
And money to pay for the webhost/vps/cloud minus any malicious actions such as DDoS or bandwidth stealing.
All three are sparse now and not forgetting the laws of the country. UK has become a pain to host anything community oriented.
There is cheap managed hosting for forums. I use one such for my BBS.
[dead]
Can we stop building communities in non-indexable locations? The death of forums and hence “google-ability” for problems and solutions is so depressing. The UX is worse in every way
I think this is largely a consequence of the escalating commoditization of human attention, political polarization, marketing yadda yadda.
Communities disperse, and are drawn to solutions that make them a little trickier to bot into and be absorbed by the marketing apparatus. A little friction that makes it harder for sock puppets / gpt bots carpet bombing your communities wholesale is an ephemeral competitive advantage right now. Not a perfect defense, but what is anymore? Is it even possible to build an effective captcha now?
Tell you what would really gum them up, make some communities require people buy a physical X$ RSA token. Sure you could make bots for that, but how long to automate the unboxing of those tokens? It could become an arms race where the packaging becomes the captcha.
Some humans are going to always try to keep moving ahead of the noise wavefront. I'm rooting for them.
Wanting all things to be index-able these days kind of feels like asking early 90's internet kids to be normal and go hang out at the mall.
Nowadays "indexable locations" mean "crawled by big tech to feed your likeness to their AI". It's hard to advocate for now.
Bingo! I changed my mind about this after AI. (Specifically that they are allowed to train & commercialize any IP they want without license - I have nothing against AI itself)
Negative. Communities need not be findable by bots on the public web, in fact many should not be. Nobody has a right to read, index, analyze, or resell my conversations with friends. Anyone who wants to has plenty of options for posting in public forums, and the movement away from that behavior indicates a growing awareness of its problems.
I'm 100% sure that people using forums less and less isn't about data privacy. Especially when the discussions moved to Facebook/Discord.
Not arguing with what you said (not agreeing either) but i want to add a perspective.
Not all human discussion can happen in forum-like format. Quick disposable chats are also usefull for when you're in a state of "figuring things out" where quick and short feedback help you navigate a problem rather than reading long well-researched well-formatted replies.
There must be room for both modes: the "thinking about it now" is in chat and the "having thought about it" is in SO, forums, documentation etc etc.
No. "AI" companies, business model: Uber for IP theft, have ruined this for everyone.
Or so I've heard.
The github https://github.com/revoltchat
This is sorely lacking on the homepage! All FLOSS is expected to link to the source from the homepage.
May even be required, if you have a license that requires sharing the code along with the product (AGPL). Still not sure why that license isn't more popular, isn't it in the open source spirit that you can get the code whenever you use the product? Same as when you get the binary with GPL license, that you have a right to see what code you're running?
It's only popular if you want to avoid big biz to use your software under that license. Big biz avoids AGPL like the plague.
You could do a dual license model, where a traditional license can be bought if you dont want to go with AGPL and have the money.
There's a considerable amount of FUD around AGPL. Mostly around never being able to actually redistribute exactly what people are accessing, IIRC. I remember conversations about it being rehashed on here constantly a few years back.
Yeah, I had to click around a bit to find the link. Oddly it was only on the discover page for servers I found it. Bottom left corner https://rvlt.gg/discover/servers
But now I also know where to go if I'm in need of a femboy community.
front page, scroll down, there's Developers - Source Code
Agreed - I usually scroll to the bottom of landing pages to see the Github link - which Revolt did not have. Perhaps a suggestion to the developers?
It's an unwritten rule :)
Not at all when the software is not developer focused.
> All FLOSS is expected to link to the source from the homepage.
Says who? I don’t see that in the OSI definition
Nobody but I don't believe any company saying their product is open source if they aren't willing to point me to where to find the code right away.
Go to ten FLOSS project and check. Some want to be able to quickly assess some tings (is this JS/PHP/Python, or is this Rust/Go -- my interest).
Someone posted the github link here on HN: why would that be?
So you have the chance to redesign Discord and you decide to stick with the unicorn-puking emoji-littered eye-scorching UX/UI garbage that Discord is? Interesting.
I think Discord, especially when it was new, had amazing UX and UI. Nowadays it definitely became bloated and new features don't integrate that well into the existing UI, but it is still on a perfectly useable level, currently.
Discord's UX is a testament to the fact that people will learn complex systems if they believe all parts of the system are valuable. This is the same truth as, for example, spreadsheet software.
The only thing "bad UX" means anymore is that you have parts of your app that people don't find valuable, and you're showing it to them anyway.
Spreadsheet software don't have bad UX? I'm not sure what you are trying to say.
I prefer IRC over Discord any day but it's very hard to convince other people not familiar with it to make a move away from Discord to it.
When people get used to certain features they generally don't want to give them up.
> When people get used to certain features they generally don't want to give them up.
Yeah, I would find it hard going back to not having a offline history and drag 'n drop file upload.
Having to host your own bot for pagetitle preview and user management was also not fun.
You can selfhost your IRC client, which eliminates som of the drawbacks but that also only works for a small portion of people.
> Yeah, I would find it hard going back to not having a offline history
It's funny but I personally prefer that the IRC server isn't required to store every chat log indefinitely. You're right though, these are solvable problems, BNC for example but we're getting a little off topic.
> So you have the chance to redesign Discord and you decide to stick with design that appeals to normal humans rather than turbonerds? Interesting.
I saw 100+ community force migrate from Telegram to Discord. Most of the people complained about UI/UX, me included. And Telegram is not even very good in that area. Normal people are not fond of Discord UI specifically, they just get used to it.
And do you think a Discord community force-migrated to Telegram wouldn't have their own UX complaints? This is gonna happen almost no matter what platforms you're talking about, people are used to their thing and don't like seeing it forcibly changed.
> Normal people are not fond of Discord UI specifically, they just get used to it.
Disagree. I think most people are pretty okay with it, maybe not in love with it, but they don't see it as particularly bad in most respects either. I use Google's corp chat for work and my god, Discord is SO much better than that it blows me away.
I came over to Discord in January 2016, from a combination of TS3, Forums & Skype for the purposes of both online and personal gaming groups. It decimated all the competition in gaming spaces for voice chat, async text chat and sync text chat within 6 months. Every single guild or group moved over almost overnight. That should go to show how absolutely revolutionary Discord was, and that it was an actual, huge software innovation. People _loved_ the UX & UI. Users loved the chat and channel interfaces, admins loved the fairly easy to understand moderation tools. Its gotten a little less loved as the app has gotten less and less reliable, the VoIP quality has been reduced (especially for non-nitro boosted servers) and new, unwanted features are added. However, I don't understand how the core UI is bad. Its not puke or emoji ridden beyond what users make of it -- avatars, server icons & banners, role colours, emojis in channel names etc are all user defined. Everything else (beyond the shitty new features they rollout for 6 months then kill) is pretty standard contemporary electron app design, and honestly minimalist in some ways. It is certainly minimalist and easier to navigate compared to something like Element.
I think that HN users seem to not fundamentally understand the needs of online groups beyond what is necessary to carry out an asynchronous open source engineering project. Much of the "bells-and-whistles" that discord offers are _essential_ to both the day-to-day communication of these groups as well as to moderators. Element does not come fully replicate some core features offering an outright less stable experience. Slack/Teams are not accessible to private users. Telegram has even less features than Element/Matrix.
I mean, if you are looking for a Discord alternative, isn't the design/UX part of what you're looking for? If you want something that is the opposite of what you describe, IRC still exists and works well, but not sure many end-users would call it an alternative to Discord.
That and I assume if its open-source you can make clients that look like whatever you'd want.
> isn't the design/UX part of what you're looking for?
I think this applies to the original target audience, namely gamers, but as a general purpose chat application, e.g. as a support channel for software projects, the UI design of Discord is indeed atrocious.
Of course, this begs the question why these projects adopted Discord in the first place. I guess the lack of a better alternative (that is not self-hosted)?
They use it because Discord works well and simply, with a rich feature set, that's largely free. And yeah, there aren't FOSS alternatives that actually match up.
> as a support channel for software projects, the UI design of Discord is indeed atrocious.
Why is that?
I don't have an issue with the UX, but the design of the user interface seems to have been copied almost pixel-for-pixel.
I wish this project a lot of success but also that it ends up devloping its own identity.
Honestly I much prefer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat
Edit: Bonus, it comes with its own font!
The nicest thing about Discord is that there are so many servers for every topic you can imagine; the rather sad thing is that when a server goes away, all that valuable content is gone. It should really stop companies from using it or make sure there is a bot offloading/indexing the content.
Forums are a lot better... but less engaging
Importat is funding for these projects. Plenty of them start as open source with donations which can led to frustration and burnout of developers.
Or prosper fine and then end up being sold anyway to some crappy corp for a few million $$$ leaving users stranded there, we need better models for both ends of the risks.
A British company making a chat app. What’s the privacy policy? 5 eyes first then you?
It's open source and you can self host it.
You know it includes a backdoor for the government.
it's open sourced and self-hostable
The bigger question mark for me is. Is this still at risk from the online safety act that seems to be killing lots of smaller UK communities/games?
Slack belongs to Salesforce (US), Discord is based in the US, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple...
Not saying this is better, but is definitely not worse. At least in Europe there is the GDPR, whereas in the US there is a president officially supporting corruption [1].
If you care about privacy, you have to go for open source end-to-end encryption. Probably Signal. At least this you can self-host.
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-fcpa-anti-bribery-law-exe...
The self hosting instructions aren't that friendly imo.
The backend seems to be a fairly standard Rust project, you basically run `cargo build --release` and then deploy the binary. For the frontend, it seems like a pretty standard frontend project, you install dependencies, then run build command and you have a bunch of website assets you deploy to your server.
Overall, seems pretty standard and easy to deploy. Most complicated would be to also run the various services that are supporting the backend, but again, not overly complicated.
Is there something specific that is missing to be able to self-host this?
I think it's pointless to selfhost if you have to recompile an app in order to connect to your server. The team should have a field box to add a server URL.
It doesn't look like this is the case? I'm looking at https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted/blob/master/README... where you are told to update 2 config files.
I'm sorry, but what??
The self-hosting guide even walks you through setting up the VPS on a specific platform. What more do you want? One could even argue that if you need your hand held through setting up a VPS, you probably shouldn't be self-hosting anything, so from that viewpoint, these instructions are a lot more friendly than they had to be.
> ...if you need your hand held through setting up a VPS, you probably shouldn't be self-hosting anything...
Since when does IT tell corporate what to do?
You and I both know that corporate calls the shots, and if they tell someone to do this, and that's not their field of expertise, they'll need their hand held.
There are plenty of non-profits and other orgs that have IT staff of 1, and that guy is IT because he knows how to format a word doc.
Your argument is a bit disingenuous.
I couldn't even find them. Do you have a link?
https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
Is this still centralized? Or can you self-host without needing a separate client instance for each host?
https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
As for clients I don't know.
8 GB RAM minimum for a non-graphical server software?! This thing must have more components and services than my desktop OS while having a few website open in Firefox and Chromium each
Synapse, after a reboot and the cache is cold, uses less than that. I don't think our synapse server even has 8GB allocated to it.
But that's for private chat, we can't join large rooms because I deployed our server as a test, alongside Mattermost and rocket.chat. I haven't felt compelled to switch to dendrite or whatever, nor split the synapse microservices out, nor install postgres on a dedicated VM, and so on. All of which would make someone else's matrix experience better but my life ^ that much worse.
9 services, 5 theirs, 4 other OSS
The compose file specified a service for the web app
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edit- shit, it was rocket.chat, i'm so sorry.
Ignore the below, it is for a different "FOSS" discord replacement.
i did self-host it for a week to test it out - and honestly i was put off immediately.
What happens when you set it up according to the docs, is that it automatically "registers" for a license - the free license being limited to 5 users, even if you self host. Ridiculous, and just right out the gate shows me that whoever makes this does not have the user's best interest in mind.
the UI is also full of stuff that requires an expensive license, and i did not see an easy way to remove that stuff when self hosting.
License? Isn't revolt open-source, so you could have as many users as your server can handle? https://github.com/revoltchat/backend uses the AGPL, I assume whatever other things a revolt server requires have similar licenses.
sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss" discord replacement.
Rocket wasn't that way when we used it, but it turned into a snap or flatpak or something, and as me, I won't maintain opaque software.
Matrix does everything we need, to where the group on matrix and the people I talk to on discord are a two separate circle Venn diagram.
Matrix also lets you inline files, do threads (y tho), voice chat, video chat. I don't know if it does conference calls or screen sharing as we don't use that.
I had to sign everyone up in my family. Because "change the server to 'matrix.whatever.com'" is impossible for nearly everyone.
Discord? Click a link you're in.
I don't like discord that much - I don't have it installed on my cellphone with a SIM.
I read the FAQ, searched google and the documentation and could not find a single ting about any license.
sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss" discord replacement.
What are you talking about. Revolt is a donation funded FOSS project
A benevolent assumption would be that GP tries out a lot of stuff (according to their other comments) and therefore mixed something up, unwittingly spreading FUD about Revolt
sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss" discord replacement.
maybe you're talking about mattermost?
sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss" discord replacement.
Note that there have been rumours about Discord preparing to go public, I reckon this might be made in preparation for it. I think it is a wise move to offer an alternative.
The design is very similar to Discord, could this possibly even go to a copyright breach or is the bar for that set too high?
> I reckon this might be made in preparation for it
Revolt has been in development for many years
> could this possibly even go to a copyright breach
Ianl but I’d imagine this would require discord to prove they own the “multiple groups, with subchannels” paradigm, which would be difficult when slack exists
even then it would be a potential patent infringement, not copyright.
but there's prior art for literally every feature Discord has so as long as they aren't copy-pasting Discord's source code I think they're just fine
I'm not a lawyer either but I am an SWE and I've had to read and been expected to understand so many goddamned licenses that at this point I feel like I'm expected to be one just to be able to navigate this field
When I first saw Discord (est. 2015), my first thought was that it looked exactly like Slack (est. 2013) except was in dark mode.
And with good audio chat
I remember a gitea update where they said in the release text something like "new github-like ui" and they basically copied all of it (check some screenshot of the latest version)
I would lie if I said I did not ever do something similar, and I am not really aware of any court cases or litigations based on copying a design. Core functionalities, sure.
There is many an open source software that could actually use a little bit of copying from the thing they are trying to emulate. GIMP is still one of the ugliest programs I have installed on my computer.
> I am not really aware of any court cases or litigations based on copying a design
Apple tried it in the 90's with the infamous "look and feel" lawsuits against Microsoft. They lost.
They've had more success suing Samsung over phone design and UI (which was about more than "rounded corners" to be sure, but a lot of the patents are still questionable).
Lol, the design of discord is identical to about 9000 chat apps no?
There really is no other app in this space on the same quality as Discord. Discord was born out of Skype, Teamspeak and similar being so awful to use. Discord took the complaints from these and made a product which was the best version of them all.
Quality? I see it as extremely bloated, very sluggish and clunky (on M3 macbook pro), search sucks bad and I can not figure out how I should keep track of multiple chained replies (like threads in slack). It's not as bad as teams, but talking about quality seems out of place.
Discord also has threads, if the server has enabled it.
I personally haven't really encountered performance issues running discord
I feel like Discord was born out of Slack. Slack was actually once popular for gaming groups but they decided they didn't want to capture that space and focused on business only. Teamspeak and Ventrilo were the alternatives and while they are still solid and arguably still popular with certain groups, they were a bit behind the times.
Discord has always seemed like a Slack clone with better voice chat to me.
With an emphasis on the gaming space and open communities, whereas Slack focused on corporate and closed communities.
I've been in the Go community for a while and they had to write a bot to get access to it (as Slack works invite only) and iirc had to work with Slack engineers to work with the scale they had. Meanwhile Discord's success is down to it being open, anyone can create a new channel and get instant access to things like voice chat.
Of course, this has its downside, and I'm sure Slack deals with a lot of abuse, ranging from porn to doxxing to it being used as a C&C server.
I think it’s a good product. The problem with all these chat apps (as companies to invest in) is there’s no moat; as soon as a more convenient or better option comes along, people will switch. There’s not a big integrated community or advantage to sticking to one app. Which doesn’t mean they can’t and won’t make plenty of money, just that I don’t buy into any hype around them.
'Awful' seems awfully subjective there. Can Skype even reasonably be grouped with Teamspeak? If all you want to do is quickly chat with a group, is Discord not actually far more annoying, all else equal?
Windows isn't beating out Linux in the desktop space because Linux is awful. Network effects are much more significant.
They must have been super crappy them because Discord is terrible to see and terrible to use.
All clans' voice chats that I've been in were via Mumble, hosted on the server of whoever was the Linux nerd of the clan (nowadays that's me). No complaints about that software, but I heard lots about Skype and Teamspeak indeed. Mumble also uses TLS for encryption and authentication so it was more secure than anything else at the time as well, and more secure than Discord because the admin could maybe listen in but that's another team member and not a stranger working for a commercial entity
I hate the Discord UI/UX as well (e.g.: sluggish add hell; need to press a few specific pixels on mobile to show the mute button and other controls that automatically fade out if you don't touch them for 2 seconds) but apparently what they do well is filtering out super loud eating noises, or that's what a friend said when I asked them to mute when they were eating crisps with the mic pointed directly at it as well as blowing on the mic with every breath. Apparently they never got complaints doing that on Discord
I feel like an old person when muttering something about mute button etiquette to myself while writing this comment. If machine learning can fix that (if it doesn't require proprietary datasets from storing millions of peoples' conversations), I should let it ^^'
> The design is very similar to Discord
And Discords design is very similar to mIRC.
> Note that there have been rumours about Discord preparing to go public
That’s disappointing, but even now it’s hard to imagine they’re particularly profitable. The core functionality of Discord is entirely free and I doubt that Nitro / other paid features earn that much.
I would like to know this, too. What makes it profitable, then, considering it has little to no ads?
Pretty cool. I just wish it had its own identity and didn't look like Walmart Discord.
Mom: "We have Discord at home"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdUWZga7T7Q
I'm all for good UI/UX spreading as much as possible for the benefit of users.
That said, I've barely used discord and thus can't rightly say if it has good UI/UX.
Do you have other opinions about the UI/UX of apps you haven't used?
It's been in development for five years. https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/tags?after=0.2.6
Are they using exiting protocols and networks? Or is it entirely bespoke protocols?
Looks like their own protocol: https://developers.revolt.chat/developers/events/protocol.ht...
The last release was 3 weeks ago (https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/releases), and it looks like they changed their tag formats to YYYYMMDD-X. https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/tags?before=0.2.6
The homepage has no explanation of where the server is in all this? Github page doesnt help either?! Where is my data stored?
https://revolt.chat/legal/community-guidelines#jurisdiction
According to another comment itt it is federated.
I didn't see federation mentioned anywhere, just self hosting. The difference:
- Self hosted means everyone has their own server, people need to register for the server they're interested in using. Websites are an example of this: you host your own system independently of anything else going on (though there are hyperlinks to cross-link content, which aren't necessarily present in other self-hosted software). Git servers are another example, like Gitea or Forgejo or Gitlab or gitweb
- Federated usually lets you connect servers, so that if I'm on HN and want to post a comment on a Reddit thread, if they were federating, I could just do that without logging into reddit specifically (let alone registering a completely separate account for the other server). The best example may be email, where I don't need to register with Google (yet) to send a Google user an email but I specify @gmail.com after the user's name. A more recent popular example is Mastodon
Each has upsides and downsides, like having to moderate content from other servers and having a much more complex protocol (federated) versus being independent and simple but also being another walled garden (self hosted)
Edit: confirmed by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43278375
> > As of right now, Revolt does not feature any federation and it is not in our feature roadmap
I cannot find anything on the website about Revolt's end to end encryption story.
This doesn't give me much confidence.
So, how does it compares to matrix/element?
I was wondering whether this was just a matrix client the entire front page. I dont see why you wouldn't utilize the matrix ecosystem with an already usable userbase when trying to recreate discord. If i would want something opensource i would also want something decentralized.
> I was wondering whether this was just a matrix client the entire front page. I dont see why you wouldn't utilize the matrix ecosystem with an already usable userbase when trying to recreate discord.
Judging by the FAQ, they see Matrix as a protocol as "obtuse and unstable":
> Does Revolt have federation?
> As of right now, Revolt does not feature any federation and it is not in our feature roadmap. However, this does not necessarily mean federation is off the table, possible avenues are:
> Implement the Matrix protocol (unlikely, obtuse and unstable)
https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html
It is hard to get E2E (device 2 device) right. I get matrix is not perfect, but I have jet seen an open source alternative with both server/client implementation that get it right.
One thing about matrix is that every device has a key in addition to the password, that key in in addition encrypted with another password, it makes it very difficult for average user, but then just use matrix in unencrypted mode to get the slack/discord effect.
If Revolt is a Discord alternative, then they may have chosen not to implement E2E because their intended audience generally doesn't care for it and the UX is too confusing for a marginal perceived benefit
Matrix definitely has problems. I'm not sure if Revolt solves them (and it likely has problems of its own) but I'd say there's room for multiple approaches.
Because matrix isn’t the savior everyone makes it out to be it’s rather the opposite.
Why don't you allow OAuth / social login via Google, GitHub and yes, even Discord? Seems like it would make adoption much easier.
We started a contribution towards that end: https://github.com/authifier/authifier/pull/63
i wish they picked a more unique name. to me, it just seems like they're a copycat by picking a name that's a synonym - or at least of the same nature - of the word "Discord"
same with the streaming platforms Twitch and Kick
looking at their UI, it's the exact same UI as Discord. no improvements while also inheriting the same flaws that make using Discord neurotic
Revolut OTOH is a bank https://www.revolut.com/
It's tough to compete in a market like social networks, you need mass adoption for high value. Although this looks cool, I'm interested to see how it differs specifically to provide more value than Discord already does (ton of people, various servers, great integrations, etc.)
I think it doesn't necessarily have to be dominant to be considered a success. It's good for people to have the option to choose a free alternative if they want to, where they can be in control of their own data rather than it being centralized and at the mercy of some company, much like with software forges. Of course mass adoption would be cool but I don't think it's necessary to justify these types of projects
Similarly I'd wonder how this compares to e.g. XMPP or matrix for messaging. Those are the big names in open source and have been for some time now.
It's unclear if voice/video are supported or not?
Voice is kinda supported, in the sense that they implemented the feature years ago and then proceeded to decide to do a huge rewrite that they've also decided blocks any sort of improvement or iteration on their voice chat features. Last I checked we're like 3 years into said big rewrite with 0 improvements to voice chat.
Yeah, this is the part I care about.
I'm not a big Discord user, but the one thing I do use it for is voice chat and game streaming with friends.
I am surprised that it is written in Rust. Bi-directional long live connections don't require Rust's raw horsepower. Maybe it's needed for audio/video streaming?
Is the API discord compatible? That's basically necessary for adoption.
> Bi-directional long live connections don't require Rust's raw horsepower.
If you're an app dev who's really and truly serious about lowering the barrier to self-hosted services, then you need to consider what the install and deployment step looks like. For languages like Rust that default to producing a single static binary, that's as easy as it gets.
Likewise, you need to consider that users might want to self-host on a potato, which is where Rust's efficiency shines even for small services.
These are both things that Mastodon got horribly wrong, for example, by choosing to use Ruby.
I would pick Rust for 9/10 of problems today.
what do you think it should be written in? golang?
Golang would have encouraged a lot more contributions, e.g. https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost (I am not affiliated with them).
I don't think that correlation of number of commits implies causation.
I'm also building a FOSS Discord alternative, but this one's based on nostr: https://flotilla.social
Flotilla.social and Chachi.chat are both amazing, yet early, Nostr alternatives.
I use Discord for three things: text chat, voice chat, and screen sharing. Looks like screen sharing isn't supported yet, but it's on the roadmap at least[1].
[1] https://github.com/orgs/revoltchat/projects/6/views/4?pane=i...
Interestingly (and sadly) the largest deployment of this was probably on Andrew Tate's grift course website thing, see the dev's blog: https://insrt.uk/post/andrew-tate-stealing-software-revolt
The largest Mastodon deployment is truth social.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2021/10/trumps-new-social-medi...
It's not exactly an instance though. They just stole most of the Mastodon code. In theory it could be opened up so other instances could subscribe to the Truth Social feed but we don't really know how feasible that is and how much of the protocol/code was modified
How does it compare to Element ?
It looks like this is still a closed platform, isn't it?
Is there a way to just browse the chat of a public server without signing up? I would like to have a more open, low friction, internet searchable alternative to Discord. Revolt doesn't take it far enough.
What do people find upsetting about Discord? It's free, there's no ads, it's reliable, it has many established communities, it's cross-platform and even works in the browser, supports voice chat and screen sharing.
What more could you ask for? Or, are you asking for too much?
What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?
> there's no ads
This is a patently ignorant and ridiculous statement. They absolutely shove their own store garbage every release and upsell Nitro at every opportunity. Here's an article from last year about them explicitly introducing third party ads.
https://techbriefly.com/2024/04/01/discord-introduces-ads-to...
I would define ads as promoting other businesses' products, as you would see on YouTube etc.
Upselling is basically just unlocking additional features. If you object to that, then you're objecting to the freemium model, not to "ads".
> I would define ads as promoting other businesses' products, as you would see on YouTube etc.
They do that, they call them "quests". Companies pay them to promote their product/service and users get rewards for doing a task (like playing a game, watching a video, etc.) https://discord.com/ads/quests
The article that parent linked even says it.
Are they personalized? Is Discord in the business of selling user data to feed personalized ads to them?
Wow,
* please drink verification can
A freemium service advertizing it's premium offering hardly seems surprizing or objectional. They're not a charity
"It has no ads" and "it's not surprising that it has ads" are basically opposites.
Is this apropos anything? I was pushing back on the claim that there were no ads, though your username suggests the reason.
Why are you belligerent?
Well, concernedc1tizen, I don't like it when people spout of misinformation. Especially when it comes to deep societal issues like pervasive advertising. Making thoughtless and inaccurate blanket statements hurts the overall discussion.
"Belligerence" as you call it is direct, unambiguous, and will probably be remembered.
That's fair.
But I've never seen these ads myself, so it's surprising.
The Americans do take pervasive advertising to the next level though, with product placement, "influencers", and other deceptive tactics. Their behaviors are a major cost to the legal system, because more legislation has to be introduced to govern against their obviously anti-social and exploitative behavior.
> What do people find upsetting about Discord? It's free, there's no ads, it's reliable, it has many established communities, it's cross-platform and even works in the browser, supports voice chat and screen sharing.
It's an information black hole, as someone else mentioned in this comment section. Otherwise, it's a nifty communication tool.
I personally come from running and using {TeamSpeak,Ventrilo,Mumble} servers. Started using Discord in winter 2015, it was just trivial to open a browser tab and join a group session with your friends. The audio experience was an order of magnitude worse when compared to other solutions, but the overall UX and ease of use made up for it.
> What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?
If you'd allow me to, I'm going to address this question from a different perspective, as this post is about Revolt: What could Revolt do that would make me, at least, start using it alongside Discord?
I'd love it if I could self-host a server, place it online and let people find it and join seamlessly, similar to how Fediverse works for other social networks. They don't seem to be interested in adding this: https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html#admonition-does-revo...
Other than that, I'd see myself using it to run a workspace. Having used Discord as a work-related communication platform in the past, I've come to find voice-based channels very useful, these seem to transmit a better feeling of productivity somehow. Other tools (e.g Slack, Teams) make me feel kind of "alone" when working. Even if it's just for body doubling, I'd argue voice channels are underrated and actually quite helpful for remote workers.
That's exactly the question - how does a free communication app achieve a multi-billion dollar valuation despite not having ads or directly selling user data?
Discord's business model relies on attracting a massive user base to secure substantial investments and potentially a lucrative acquisition. We've seen again and again and again what happens once acquisition takes place.
Also a big existing investor in Discord is Tecent which, under Chinese law, could grant the government access to Discord's extensive user data.
So yeah.. it's not about features it's about freedom.
And there's no way to delete your chat history basically. You can delete your account, but that doesn't destroy your messages.
And as for privacy: Your username is anonymous, but your email isn't (to Discord), so the % of users that didn't create a separate fake email, or ever connected with a trackable IP, basically aren't anonymous at all. They also record your voice. Every user's voice is recorded in isolation and can be used as training data for identification algorithms. Including unusual characteristics like breathiness, diction, accent, and so on. Probably it can estimate your age as well.
Even lower-level Discord admins can basically any user's entire chat histories across all servers ever. There is zero encryption
Data on Discord has never been safe really. I don't know how it is nowadays since my memes have gotten less edgy/dank but you could get banned for private messages for a long time.
They use your messages for AI training, even if you disable the AI summaries "feature". I kept seeing events related to AI summaries on a custom client, even with them turned off in the only server I was in.
They'll hold your account hostage until you give them a phone number if you happen to trigger their "anti-spam" detection. And sending a message with a number below 13 might be all it takes for Discord to withhold your account for age verification as well.
They basically track every click, every action you take on their client. You can see that if you request a data package.
Abuse is rampant. There's no way to report servers, channels, or individual users. Things that were all possible in the past, through the Support form, until they made in-app reporting the only option, which relies on reporting individual messages and has a very low rate limit.
> What more could you ask for? Or, are you asking for too much?
Let's see...blocking that actually prevents you from seeing messages from the person you blocked. A native client. Better reporting tools. Better message deletion tools - you still can't delete every message along with your account. The ability to opt out of having messages fed into AI. None of these are unfeasible.
> What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?
The network effect is the reason why technologically inferior solutions like Discord are still thriving.
Many platforms have followed the trend of first offering a legitimately good product to build up a userbase, then squeezing out profit with increasingly anti-user changes, exploiting the fact it's difficult to switch (network effect and intentional lock-in).
It's not impossible that Discord stays more or less as it currently is, with a few features locked behind its paid subscription but generally a good experience, but it seems prudent to have a backup option for if/when things go further downhill.
> What do people find upsetting about Discord?
These are the most common complaints I see from people
- They don't allow third party clients and some people have various complaints about theirs (e.g resource usage)
- Some people think discord is too popular, to the point some things that "don't belong there" have moved to discord. This is usually about being search indexable and requiring an account.
- Fear of monopolostic behaviour ( "enshittification" )
- Some people are mad that they killed public urls for files uploaded to discord. Mostly this is people running into links to images online and being unable to see them, usually not the uploaders
- Discord is centralized and you cannot host your own server
- The only client they allow you to use (See above) is propietary, and some people would rather run something open source
As for me personally, their search functionality drives me insane. I feel like the exact same query gets completely different results depending on the time of day and phase of the moon, making it super unreliable.
It's very, very badly performing. And yet every time I want to start it, it requires another 15 updates.
Sounds like your average web development project though; frequent releases are a good thing, although I suppose for each individual they'll want to slow it down a bit.
I just wish there were more native applications instead of all the web desktop stuff. But, visual design options and developer availability is a huge factor there. Native iOS designs come the closest to what I'd like to see on the desktop.
I agree about the updates, but I'm in a shit ton of servers and performance is fine for me. Can you talk to the issues you've had a bit?
An example of the worst-of-both-worlds 'always needs updates' like a website but 'takes over your screen (while strobing your taskbar) so you can't multitask' like a desktop program.
The web client is fairly well behaved and does away with the need for constantly installing updates: https://discord.com/app
Let me preface this by saying I use Discord daily to keep in touch with friends. It's a great digital campfire where you can relax with people, talk with them over voice and video or just post random stuff.
The issue is that Discord has replaced things which it shouldn't have, the internet forums. Discord is the epitome of a golden cage. It is a prison for information, a black hole.
I'm not even talking about the absolutely atrocious search functionality, but the fact that information inside the Discord walls is impossible to find from the outside. You can't search across discord communities, none of the content there is indexed by web search engines. Entire communities have FAQs and knowledge as pins inside threads inside Discord servers. Things which used to be on the web.
15 years ago, these discussions would've taken place on forums and on IRC to a lesser extent. IRC itself was a really bad information black hole, but at least the forums were great. They supported long running discussions and were easy to search.
Now everything disappeared into effectively hidden Discord chats and youtube videos where you need to watch 8 different idiots bramble on for 10 minutes before you find the 30 second segment of information that you were actually looking for and could've been a single paragraph.
Even IRC was better for data archiving and searching. We usually had local logs we could grep and web-indexed/searchable logs from bots.
It's really insane how much information is on Discord that is both impossible to discover and will silently disappear at some point.
> We usually had local logs we could grep and web-indexed/searchable logs from bots.
But only IF you are good at regex.
On discord you can easily filter by date or date range, if it has media, if it contains an URL or what user/roll got mentioned.
Only if it's in the discord search index, which sometimes doesn't include all history, and it does some fuzzy elasticsearch query that works ok for most cases and awful for anything that isn't most cases.
The metadata filters are nice but they're also what keep it usable at all.
Discord search won't even surface partial word matches or typos or matches in URLs (eg you share a facebook.com link then later on you search for "facebook", it won't show you that post).
Maybe there are some secret incantations I don't know about, but Discord search is positively useless most of the time and I have to manually scroll up until I find what I want (or give up).
I still use IRC, irssi in particular. My go-to for searching local logs is `less` rather than grep. I have the date on every line in the log file. I can jump to a specific date easily, then search a different term up/down from that spot, and I see context of surrounding lines easily. No regex needed.
How would you search for a messaged that contains an image that mentioned you?
I guess this is like a dunk and I shouldn't even respond, but I'd probably (from less) do /nick.*http and then hit n or N a bunch to jump around. Yeah, it's technically a regex, I guess, but I think it's probably the easiest/most common form. You don't really need to remember much of anything or understand how it works. You could be used to wildcards from a shell and just think "I gotta put a . in front of it sometimes for it to work".
I would not get more advanced than that, personally. Sure you'll have matches that aren't exactly what you're looking for, like that'd match both lines I said and lines mentioning me, and URLs that aren't images (better than trying to account for all types of image URLs, IMO) but I'll probably find what I'm looking for fast enough for it to not be worth looking up more complicated regex. Often I'll remember who posted something, too, so then maybe I'll throw their nick in the search as well, before mine. Or at least I could narrow down who posted it to a few people and just try a few searches pretty quickly back to back.
I would also say this particular search you're talking about would be fairly uncommon. I might even remember something like "oh, Bernie said that image was the funniest thing he'd seen all day, I'll search the word 'funniest' starting from the end of the file since it was under a month ago and should end up near the URL".
You would then also need to search for /http.*nick, as he might mention you after the link.
IRC had so much potential, but somehow we fumbled it. A simple search based on local logs and for the user hidden reg-ex could have been implemented 10+ years ago.
Discord search still sucks a lot because by nature discussions are largely unstructured. It's not really suitable for discussing specific topics - only perhaps types of topics. Discord threads could ostensibly fulfil the forum topic role, but their implementations is so utterly incompetent that it is genuinely puzzling. You can't search specific Discord threads, they often disappear from the left hand nav bar even if you subscribed to the thread. Whoever implemented the Threads in Discord should be kept away from computer systems because they are a danger to any application.
But even if Discord search was good, it still doesn't matter because it is not only a walled garden, it is a hermetically sealed chamber from which no information can escape.
Discord search thinks it knows better than you and won't let you search verbatim.
There are ads in discord now. They just call them Quests and the notifications for them can't be turned off.
Not open source.
They want my phone number and email address just to look at a forum I don't plan to participate in yet which information I would like to access is siloed in.
Discord is American. For many in Europe this is a downside now.
indeed... Made in Europe, motherland of GDPR.
Closed-source, dumb stuff hidden behind premum,and premium ads and popups almost every time you launch.
"Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/discord-ipo.ht...
Enshittification is inevitable, indeed mandatory.
They have been trying to get to IPO for a while. 2 years ago they deleted a huge swathe of accounts to cause those people to create new ones to boost their growth stats and frankly having been caught up in it that was the push I needed to get off Discord. It caused a huge discontentment at the time as it wasn't clear if it was a bug or intentional but Discord didn't fix it.
They will do anything to get to a successful IPO including cooking the stats but they aren't there yet.
I've recently heard it said that there's a better alternative to Discord called Gilded, but no reasons were provided. Anyone has insights?
The problem with Discord is that it doesn't allow for servers in the same way a protocol like IRC does. Some commenters have alluded to this.
From a quick glance, revolt.chat doesn't allow for server creation either. Am I mistaken or is this pretty much a joke (Discord replacement with the only real benefit being a 'trust us bro, we're European' sort of promise to not do bad things)?
There is server creation in the sense that you can host the whole backend on your own domain: <https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted/blob/master/compos...>.
Not sure if their own hosted offering has a "click to spin up new server" button. Probably not.
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
What you classify as a problem is exactly why Discord was a smashing success.
Financial success, undoubtedly. Successful at distancing users from the systems that underpin their interactions, certainly. As far as granting users more agency over their digital existence, it has been an abject failure, a state consistently exacerbated by the number of tech communities that could easily exist on IRC or a custom platform.
It really hurts when a con is so solid that even the 'enlightened' are ensnared.
A success in terms of popularity, in terms of creating something that regular users enjoy and find value in using.
> It really hurts when a con is so solid that even the 'enlightened' are ensnared.
It's exactly this sort of sneering attitude that so often causes FOSS projects to fail to catch on in the mainstream.
The framing isn't "people like this feature set", it's "people got conned". For a certain type of user, they must see others' preferences as beneath them, as lesser.
I'm not an elitist and I don't have problems with 'regular users'. What I do have a problem with is all the technical users who know better and turn everything over to Discord corp anyway. How many 'hacker spaces' do you know that use Discord as a primary communications channel?
They could just as well run a primary communications channel on something sensible, durable and self-hosted that ties in to discord intake for newcomers. Come in to the discord, say hi, chat a bit and then graduate to where the real content is.
Discord should have been a on-ramp for technical communities, not the foundation.
I would move to Revolt in a heartbeat, if it had a PluralKit equivalent. Currently the only thing keeping me trapped on Discord.
Nice and I'll try it out, but I can't help but to wonder what about all of the open-source Slack alternatives like Ferdi, Franz, Rambox, etc. Is it just because Slack is just no longer in vogue that there's a market for this?
I don't see anything about funding/pricing, how is this going to stick around for the long term?
Discord alternatives have a hard time because of network effects. Does revolt has a bridge to Discord?
Both platforms have good bot APIs. Should be trivial to create a bridge through bots
Is it built on Matrix?
I used Riot (now Element) back in the day, but like others have said in this thread, without a network effect these things don't really take off. I haven't heard of anyone using Element for years now.
I have over a dozen people I regularly talk to on Matrix, though I prefer to not use browser/electron apps, so I only use Element on my phone (separate codebase from other Element), and Nheko on my PC. FluffyChat on Android also seems decent and recently added multi-account support.
Not being built on Matrix is a plus, at this point, given the historically poor moderation of that platform.
They will have a better stack than Discord once they migrate to Tauri.
It seems the progress for that stalled. (Last commit 5 months ago https://github.com/revoltchat/frontend/tree/main/packages/de... )
At first glance it's hard to even tell them apart, did they copy literally all of the CSS and layout?
Donation page to Revolt before Discord succumbs to platform decay or (enshittification) after being owned by Wall Street soon.
https://wiki.revolt.chat/notes/project/financial-support/
https://ko-fi.com/insertish
Truly built with us in mind....Until they get so big someone with a fat check approaches them and then we just have another Discord.
Why even build an app? This app should've been a website. Better pester browser developers to implement "Add to desktop" feature.
Hard disagree. I'm sick and tired of web apps. Please give me more desktop applications not based on electron.
There is a webapp version. It's the grey button just to the right of the download button. Looks like their main desktop client is the same as their webapp.
3'000+ lines of code <- this seems pretty low
Lots of comments on Discord here, but is anybody saying this new service "Revolt" is better than Discord?
Just a bit of critical feedback: the landing page isn’t responsive to a horizontally rotated iPad. Otherwise, awesome project!
I'm at a total loss why social chat boards want to have the most antisocial names.
Some would consider a commitment to overthrowing oppressive power structures extremely pro-social
Would you call the French Revolution antisocial? Massive demonstrations? What about the Hong Kong uprising?
It's all a matter of perspective. Those who live a stable life might see a threat to the system that grants them that stability as "anti-social" while those who do not benefit from the current system can see revolting as "pro-social"
This is as centralized as Discord right? No running your own server, should you choose to.
They publish instructions for self-hosting a server:
https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
Oh nice. It wasn't clear at all from the front page that there is a server available for self hosting.
Discords performance is unmatched. I hope that’s one of their goals as well
There's a massive shady component of discord inherent to how access and security are at the whim of ar arbitrary discord mods. All manner of illegal activity thrives behind custom access control.
The most notable instance in media is the leaking of classified materials, the creation of swatting/ddos communities which gave us the 'BigBalls' hacker employed by doge,
But more sickeningly, recently it allowed this doctor to successfully target countless children, including convincing a 13 year old girl to hang herself in a live discord call. [0]
There is a problem with too much protection of freedom and secrecy.
[0] https://youtu.be/GgfGhzkq8FE?si=nFahQlTUTsY5WEuI
I guess my point is, do we as a society want our children's Roblox communities to share a platform with virtually every cyber criminal, behind security and secrecy measures completely at the will of arbitrary discord owners?
EDIT: moved this to a global comment as it was too tangential to where I originally replied
Still waiting for a new web replacement for phpbb
Really nice. Perfectly timed for enshitification, and love that it's open source. Now just need some sort of federation and it's good to go. And choosing to go with an established UI will make adoption that much easier when TSHTF.
[just had a longer look around. Is this a Russian project?]
Love to see this! Worried about Discord's future, with its monopole position greater enshittification is definitely a real risk.
Would also love to see some solution to Discord's problem of being an information black hole here as well.
Friendly UI. Looking good!
Putting your data in a centralized instance may eventually just lead to enshittification and/or data loss.
Why not use a federated group discussion such as Lemmy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)
>To ensure users stay safe on the platform, we explicitly disallow:
>Misinformation & Conspiracy Theories
>Spreading false or misleading information that can cause harm to individuals or society is prohibited. This includes conspiracy theories that have been debunked or lack credible evidence.
Why? That sounds so dumb to waste resources policing it.
Who determines what’s credible or not? This sounds like “if we don’t like what you have to say, you’re gone”.
And why is that a bad thing ? That's the free market. The business owns the platform and you don't have an innate 'right' to be there.
Why is it a good thing? What's the motivation behind it? It just seems like a really unnecessary restriction to have when you're trying to launch a FOSS alternative existing software.
It’s a good thing because it gives companies autonomy to do what they want (within the law). It’s your responsabilità to take it or leave it.
The alternative is an oligarchy type model where you are bound to the whims of some external party.
Why are you opposed to running your servers the way you want? Why do you support people that don't run your servers controlling what you can and cannot say?
This is for content on Revolt.chat itself. You can download and host your own servers and allow people to lie all you want. But on the servers they control, they can decide what they allow.
Why are you opposed to running your servers the way you want?
This sounds like a violation of freedom 0, if this extend to the software you run (self hosted).
They did not say they are policing it.
What is the point of disallowing without policing?
Probably same as most other social platforms. Selective enforcement, virtue signaling, a tool to use when they get bad press for a server.
I mean, bad press will chastise you even if you actually enforce stuff
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It’s really fucking boring how every platform that hosts speech tries to nudge you in their direction these days.
I don't know why everyone think's they have a right to say and behave however they want using someone else's services.
If the platform or provider don't want to associate with you, that's their prerogative.
The hubris to assume otherwise is ridiculous.
No platform can allow you to 100% say whatever you want, just how it has limit to what it can enforce. Every platforms has to balance this fact. It is impossible to enforce clear borders on this as well, as human interaction is endlessly complex.
They can allow you to 100% say whatever you want as long as the law allows them to host your speech. If they try to limit you beyond that, they are censoring you, which is what is occurring here.
Anyone that feels this type of moderation is censorship can use/host an instance with different rules.
Why are you opposed to running your servers the way you want? Why do you support people that don't run your servers controlling what you can and cannot say?
Is it using Matrix? And if not, why the need for another protocol?
So... it's not based on Matrix? So yet another non standard/non interoperable protocol? Why?!
If you wanted Matrix you would use Element or something.
Discord has a totally different feature set than Matrix-based software
Reminder that discord is an app for kids. Is your open source code and volunteer run project going to keep kids safe? Is it an advantage that the comms protocols are open and everyone can build bots? Or a disadvantage for this usecase?
Also, how is it an alternative for Discord if it's in a whole different jurisdiction?
This is an outdated perspective. A lot of open source projects are picking Discord now that Slack has become hostile to small projects. The vast majority of the Discord groups I am in have nothing to do with gaming
I mean the logo is a game controller. If your company uses discord as a tool to communicate, it gives the message that it's like a game to you, that it is not serious, that you are relaxed,etc..
Certainly not the right register for serious stuff like an IT company, tax company, weapons, etc...
And it's not just semantics, the app was built for gaming, it has features and design choices built for that, one of them being kid safety, another being it shows what game you are playing. Not a corporate tool like slack.
If you are into that great, but it's what it is.
Slack is being enshittified after the acquisition. I use it less today than beforehand. They have shown they no longer care about small projects and groups, so those projects have moved largely to Discord.
There are so many tech companies with Discord. Are you saying companies like Cloudflare are not serious companies. Know what they know that you don't? You have to meet your users where they are. The open source projects I care about are there.
It's cool if you want to maintain your outdated perspective though
Crazy that CF has a discord.
Recent news have shown that they are publishing a product to red team website automation: https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-rendering/. So they are now on both sides of the red blue counter.
Looking at their product offering it seems they have branched out from their original product that earned them their reputation (IP hiding DNS Servers and proxies), now it looks like they are branching in all directions, including random AI products and generic cloud offerings.
Definitely not getting a "we are a serious company" vibe. More like a "try to appeal and sell everything to everyone banking on our reputation because reputation doesn't pay the bills" vibe.
So yeah that's my take.
Not sure about that one. There's a ton of minor edating/esex/grooming going on. You have massive community servers that essentially work like gaiaonline back in the day and tons of servers of 18+ communities. Horny, curious kids will always find a way so I can't blame Discord for not having a magic wand but I would be monitoring its usage if I were a parent. Only 1 of the servers I'm in is what I'd consider kid safe and it's a company's community server.
Yeah I get that it would have problems. But I'm saying that being a closed source product with staff is what allows it to fight against that.
Foss on the other hand just clones an app offers a download and calls it a day, "self host", sometimes they encrypt stuff so that not even devs or admins can see the content, they would think of this as respecting privacy, but then when they get a subpoena for a sex offender case, they can't turn up anything.
> Reminder that discord is an app for kids.
Why is that?
Have you seen the UI? Nothing fit for adults, who value their attention and time.
Sorry, I don't see it. I can quickly jump around channels and server with shortcuts, the UI looks similar to other chat apps. Auto-Embed can be disabled, if that steals your attention. Or what do you mean?
They just don't like the design and are choosing a condescending way of framing it.
Because it's a video game accesory.
They market to kids, and have kid safety features.
I don't use discord in combination with games at all. But you can use it that way. That does not mean it's only for kids.
I mean the logo is a game controller.
If your company uses discord as a tool to communicate, it gives the message that it's like a game to you, that it is not serious, that you are relaxed,etc..
Certainly not the right register for serious stuff like an IT company, tax company, weapons, etc...
And it's not just semantics, the app was built for gaming, it has features and design choices built for that, one of them being kid safety. Not a corporate tool like slack.
If you are into that great, but it's what it is.
Yeah, it was build of gamers. I would also not use it for communication in a tax company.
That does not mean it's for kids only.
hmmm
haha i had to laugh at the language selectors:
I also spot "That’s the website, you can’t scroll further." in large, helpful letters. These people seem to have a pretty solid sense of humour. Mild enough it is difficult to take offence to, playful enough to add character.
Hope they do well; I dislike closed source chat programs.
Rather than open or closed source programs, let's have interoperability. Then everyone can choose. I believe Facebook was aiming for something like that with Threads, and was playing to have WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger be open to a specific standard as well?
I fondly remember the days of Pidgin and Adium..
Proprietary services are interoperable in the beginning and then stop.
Both facebook and google supported XMPP but that's no longer the case. Slack supported XMPP and IRC, but that's no longer the case.
It's completely pointless to expect proprietary stuff to be interoperable. It requires constant reverse engineering and remember that they have money to throw away to hire developers to make breaking changes to the protocol constantly.
One of the highest confidence outcomes I predict from LLM use in software dev is more use of open protocols. It is going to become difficult to maintain a network if you don't use them.
XMPP isn't dead either. Here's an open source project of an XMPP based Slack - https://prose.org/ (I have no association to this, was amazed how much digging it took me looking for Slack/Discord alternatives to find it.)
The most damage to open communications software probably came from the closed mobile app stores. The barrier to maintaining a working app simultaneously on iOS and Android is high. Almost every iOS game I bought 10 years ago is inaccessible and no longer downloadable. Those barriers are in the process of being torn down too, with or without AI's help.
Facebook never federated so their implementation was just an API they couldn't control to them:
> Facebook Messages are evolving to allow people to share rich content beyond text: photos, videos, audio and even stickers. We want to ensure the best possible send and receive experience where all these rich forms of content are reliably and consistently available on every platform. XMPP doesn't support all these (and future) content types, and it's difficult to ensure an XMPP client is rendering them appropriately. As such we've decided to sunset the XMPP Chat API.
> XMPP doesn't support all these (and future) content types, and it's difficult to ensure an XMPP client is rendering them appropriately. As such we've decided to sunset the XMPP Chat API.
This is such a lame excuse, and reveals how much they're control freaks. One of the main points of an open, federated protocol is that people can choose clients that behave the way they want and render things the way they want. "Oooohhh, we can't guarantee with an iron fist that our stupid 'stickers' render correctly on all clients, therefore we can't deal with it!"
This same mentality infests the web, and is why companies insist on slathering JavaScript into everything to force browsers to render their pages exactly as designed, rather than just letting the user agent serve the user's needs.
The push for messenger interoperability is a reaction to the EUs Digital Markets Act (DMA), which requires certain gatekeeper services to allow interoperability with smaller platforms.
Threads is working on implementing ActivityPub for interoperability with other platforms that already use it. ActivityPub is an open standard for implementing the Fediverse, a group of federated social platforms heavily based in the open source community.
Nope, Matrix has been pushing interop for years (since the late teens).
Not like it's new, though? The Internet is literally interoperating networks, emails hop from server to server until they reach the user-specified destination server, DNS delegates zones to other servers. These are protocols older than I am, and I've had a driver's license for longer than Matrix exists. Their push is amazing but not by any means unique
> let's have interoperability.
Should be mandatory. Things like facebook took off because of network effects not because of the quality of the platform. Being able to migrate all your contacts/ chat/ tweets/ etc somewhere else seemlessly should be enforced by the gov to allow for actual competition. else you end up with first player advantage and network effects being unsurmountable and creating de facto monopolies with 0 benefit for the customer, in an environment that has low set up costs and you should see fierce competition.
> I fondly remember the days of Pidgin and Adium..
You may like https://www.beeper.com/
And if you are nerd/privacy conscious enough, though their app and cloud service is proprietary, it’s based on Matrix and open source bridges which you can have a full list here : https://github.com/beeper
This is literally the old Microsoft playbook for destroying open source software. “Embrace, extend, extinguish”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
They did it with XMPP and Windows live messenger in the 2000s.
At the end of the day these companies have no incentive to be responsible stewards of open protocols. The moment they have a tough quarter they’ll eviscerate it if it means they’ll make a buck.
MS Comic Chat was built on top of IRC.
I’m happy IRC is still around in spite of that.
I feel like that was Discord's style also, being playful, fun, childish. Maybe they're just imitating that appeal?
Since US English retains more historical features of English and has fewer of the newer ones (especially in light of Received Pronunciation, rhoticity, and random u insertion), one could argue that US English is the more traditional one.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-p...
I live in a region of the UK where rhoticity is alive and well. It actually means I've an easier time understanding some words when Americans speak them, compared to the English.
On the broader point I'd agree up until I notice that you'd write 'defense' yet also 'fence', and ponder why the verb 'got' is so overused.
I'll just say that I sometimes use defense because the Firefox spellchecker seems to prefer UK spellings even when US English is set in the language settings and the red squiggly lines bother me.
Sssh, you weren’t meant to notice! We have a man on the inside.
The article you linked says it's a myth.
Isn't that a myth?
Wonder where that idea even came from, the BBC article even says as such "“It is a delightful and attractive myth that Shakespeare’s language got fossilised” in parts of the US, [the dialect anthropologist] says."
I mean; we have old runic languages that match northern English pronunciation really well- along with "olde english" spelling which is clearly a rote writing of a southern English accent (likely from somewhere like Gloucestershire).
An attractive myth, perhaps, but I'm not sure how much truth there really is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/bofu3g/how_did_ame...
> even if Americans do speak more like the Elizabethan English than today’s Brits themselves
I get the sense that the article very much believes Americans speak more traditional English.
You know it's way more traditional because they democratically pushed themselves into an oligarchy ;)
Sounds pretty European to me, honestly.
An old joke, but a good one.
Shoutouts to Noah Webster for "opinionatedly curating" British English from an inconsistent crufty unspellable mess to a randomly tweaked version of the same thing.
Yep, simplified by removing all those silly extraneous ‘u’s
Other way around. The British wanted to differentiate themselves from colonial hillbillies so they tried to assume the appearance of culture by making the words look more French.
they might have to update their translation to (limited) soon based on how the current admin is blitzkriegeering
u wot mate
u havin a laff?
ight m8 shank u bruv
you taking the piss innit?
How to quickly lose a few potential users.
Other people might say it's a great way to self-moderate its network.
Can't handle "locker-room banter"?
You won't be missed.
How to quickly show you have no sense of humor.
Fragile egos that can't take such a innocuous joke are not really a loss in the overall scheme of things though.
It's not a loss.
With emphasis on few. I'd wager less than 0.01% of potential users would be butthurt enough by that joke to avoid the platform as a whole. And the ones who got butthurt, probably better off not having them on the platform in the first place.
It's open source.
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It seems strange that someone would be offended by the US variant being called "simplified" spelling — wasn't that the whole point?
Maybe they meant people who don't want to be considered traditional...
I’m an American and not offended in the least. It is simplified (color vs the obviously incorrect UK variant colour). Gray va grey. y’all is a great addition to the Simplified English.
Despite being told long ago by a drunk English visiting student that “the language is English not American” I’ll stand by our American simplification! Lamentably this simplification seems to be backtracking our political system…but hey we’re going from Discord to Revolt!
> It is simplified
Still waiting for American Football to be renamed to Handegg.
lol, or how to easily filter out a few users who can't take a joke.
Ones that are offended by a lighthearted joke. Sounds like a plus
Pushing what used to occur on web forums into Discord chats has been a net loss for the Internet.
"Push" is the right word, because moderating web forums was always a labor of love, and automated trolling/spamming has only gotten easier and more prevalent, not to mention anti-mod culture.
It's just too hard to moderate a space with so little friction, and any friction you add chases away all but the most dedicated users -- and the most dedicated users are often the ones more likely to get entangled in some insane drama and try to burn the whole place to the ground.
It's a difficult problem. I've always wondered what it would actually cost to actually, properly moderate a reasonably sized forum if you paid a professional mod team real wages and gave them proper tools. Probably way more than we would guess.
No. A readme on GitHub that only says "documentation on discord" is an active push by the developers to contain everything within discord.
Way to miss the point entirely. GP was talking about why that happens. And yes, it's almost entirely due to going places that actually provide effective tools to deal with bad-faith participants.
Agree 100%. Not the most important example, but I used to be heavily into World of Warcraft. The go-to place for discussion of high end play was a forum run by the guild "Elitist Jerks". Everything was there out in the open, to be read and indexed and discussed and preserved indefinitely. The forum eventually went away, but the info was still available thanks to the Wayback Machine.
Fast forward to 2020 when Blizzard put out WoW Classic (basically the original 2004 state of the game again, as a nostalgia trip). I was bummed to find that all discussion of the game had moved into discord servers. And not just one. There was a separate discord for every single class (mage, warrior, priest, etc). Sometimes more than one if the community couldn't agree on which was best. Every guild had their own discord. Special purpose servers existed for niche topics. If you wanted to find a piece of information, you had to hope that a helpful moderator had pinned it somewhere, or else rely on a crappy search feature. If a server is shut down or you get banned, all of that info is lost forever. It's a nightmare.
Discord is a perfectly good tool for real time chat. It is a TERRIBLE tool for summarizing and preserving knowledge. But unfortunately it's increasingly being used for that purpose and I do not for the life of me understand why.
Yeah a lot of things are going this route unfortunately. RIP to the open internet. Ill still be there when everyone decides they have had enough.
Absolutely. Information can no longer be retrieved via internet search. Discord and Slack are effectively silos.
A lot of sites now block non-Google search engines from accessing their data.
Honestly, I find it easier to check a Discord server than to get useful results from DuckDuckGo these days.
Google has done whatever it takes to incentivize people not to use competitors. It sucks.
Same thing can be said about Twitter and most of Facebook
For now at least. Some day everyone's relatives will be digging through databases of their ancestor's grand wisdom filleted wide open. Maybe it'll even use all that info to recreate an Ai version of them. Sorry just thinking out loud.
That sounds awful. But there's no reason why Discord can't go the same route.
Some chat apps like Zulip have the option to open a channel to the web. It can even be indexed by search engine bots
Sure but you can search for communities then use the platform-native search. Not as convenient as a search engine natively supporting, though.
you have to have an account, with mobile number
until the discord server goes down
The real loss for the internet is the puritan approach to federation and decentralization. It's either that or app-centric solutions like matrix. Even forums weren't discoverable easily. I'll say this, matrix really has the right idea, it just does too much too fast. An SRV DNS record indicating your matrix server should be enough, then browsers should auto-discover the 'matrix' for the website, and via matrix you can comment on a site, leave reviews, chat with visitors, post forum-style,etc..
But as I mentioned in another comment, what's more important is how easy it is to administer and setup. The experience for site/community owners is the critical factor for adaption.
Forum posts were indexed by search engines - doesn’t that alone provide a minimum level of discoverability?
Based on how search engines behave to day, not really. These days, you'll have to fight spammy forums who game SEO, reddit, stackoverflow, ML digested output,etc.. it is discoverable as in technically it is somewhere in the results, but people never see it. If google paid discord like they pay reddit and searched discord servers that allow for that, that might be a nice compromise.
Also, ancient forums without https seem to be excluded by Google more often than not. I know they have their rules to push TLS but I still want results regardless.
Add forum or “forum” to your search term and you’ll get results from tons of forums. Yes, you have to know to do that, but once you do, your results will actually be good.
thanks, i didn't know that keyword was special.
Don't forget IRC. My previous employer [very reasonably] blocked Discord with their MITM. This meant that the numerous developer/package discords were inaccessible to me.
Gitter exists, and they use Element. As well as many other open source alternatives (including IRC, but I can understand the apprehension with nicserv and all that ceremony).
This is why when we wanted to build a community around our product we went for Discourse instead of Discord (even though many people asked us for Discord instead). It certainly feels a lot less "lively" than a Discord server, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Ironically internally we still use Discord for comms.
All about the right tool for the right job.
I started a Discord 'server' for my JS Canvas library thing a couple of years ago because - apparently - it was a "good way to build a community". Not only have I failed to build a community, I've grown to hate its UI and confusion of channels.
I think Discord is overkill for my requirements. But I still want a (free) venue (which is not GitHub) where people can ask questions and - maybe, just maybe - form a community around the library. I keep staring at PhpBB ... but it feels too oldskool, so: nope.
I am beginning to like the idea of a self-hosted Discourse[1] thing; there seems to be a fair number of active tech-related communities... maybe if I have some time over Easter I'll investigate further.
[1] https://discover.discourse.org/
IMO, you should have different channels of communication: A wiki which has commonly requested information; A manual for references; A bug tracker for issues. I strongly believe that IM should be reserved for active contributors. Forums should mainly be user to user help and support.
Seeing as this is closely related to [1], which I also commented on, and in the hopes that someone finds this useful regarding Discord's ownership of your data (where your messages remain even if you delete your account):
If you'd like to delete your Discord messages en masse, I made an open-source tool for that [2]. It leverages a fairly undocumented process using your Discord data package, providing a UI to explore it and choose what to export. The tool gives you step-by-step instructions and a CSV file that Discord expects when you contact their privacy team. It works across all channels in both servers and DMs, even those you no longer have access to.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276504
[2]: https://discorch.org
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At first I thought you were being brutal but...a GitHub page with a screenshot would be better. The aesthetic of the website is...unique
Every time I see one of these projects, I wince because 2/3 of the time the backend is in PHP (no offense). The backend is in a typesafe, memory safe language!
https://github.com/revoltchat/backend
[edit] seems like it's federated
Their FAQ makes it seem like it's not:
https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html
The offering in its current form (https://i.imgur.com/zcmEOhr.png) does not feel truly communal.
What's not communal about it? Should they allow anyone to participate without limits?
Discord scale “communities” have tens-or even hundreds of thousands of members
Can you elaborate?
I like a good ejabberd fork!
edit: oh, this isn't an ejabberd fork. Why didn't they just fork ejabberd like normal people? Seriously, _rust_?
How is open-source supposed to compete without access to Apple's certificates? If you are constantly forced to override the warnings about unsigned software, assuming your system even allows you in the first place, how much friction before less technical users give up?
Code signing is good, I like it, I approve, but it is a big obstacle for me personally and others who cannot afford Apple Developer Credentials.
> How is open-source supposed to compete without access to Apple's certificates?
Does the license of your application somehow prevent you from following whatever Apple wants to do regarding signing? I think there are plenty of apps/games out there built on FOSS technology yet they're still signed and run like anything else signed on macOS, but maybe I remember incorrectly?
It might be nothing technical.
Some developers avoid paying for the Apple dev program on principle. Joining it could be seen as supporting Apple's attempt at building walled gardens.
There's also the operational challenges for open source like who will sign-up and how to secure or maintain the signing keys etc. It brings in lot of friction.
It’s the 99 bucks argument every time…
The problem is that with exception of single person projects it's not as simple as paying 99$.
Using individual developer account means exposing private information of one of the developers (which not everyone wants) and is a major buss factor.
Doing it properly with organization account means nontrivial amount of paper work to establish either a commercial company or an officially registered non profit. There are very few open source projects big enough for this.
I'm pretty sure I use many open-source projects that have Apple's certificates.
So the only question is communities desire. There is no technical problem here.
> There is no technical problem here.
Just financial and organizational one. Not every open-source project is going to do that.
Not sure why Apple had to change how Gatekeeper works. I will have to look for an alternative once my mbp dies. It gets tiresome to fight with the OS for every other app after every update now. Especially when it worked perfectly OK before.
Discord seems to be going the way of Skype: deprecating their support for Windows 7, in favor of a newer OS offering from Microsoft which harvests data in the background under the feeble guise of telemetry. Granted there is telelmetry in Windows 7, but you can disable it in Windows 7 and not worry obout it being over-ridden the next day, or even the same day, with some forced update.
If you're worried about Windows 10's/11's telemetry, you should read Discord's TOS.
Windows 7 is a 15 year old OS that's been out of support for 5 years. It is utterly ridiculous to paint Discord as unreasonable for not supporting it?
I'm not sure what to take from this.
Are you worried there is some sort of anti-Windows 7 conspiracy, where software vendors stop supporting a 15 year old years out of support OS so that an unrelated software vendor receives more data?
Or is it simply more likely that nobody wants to test their software on a 15 year old OS? When XP came out that would have been Windows 95, and the same thing happened.
> Revolt is the chat app that’s truly built with you in mind.
Is this meant to be a unique selling point? All of the features also exist in discord.
Also, "Bots some for extra spice". Might need a text review
I think the implication is that discord is designed for profit, not you.
I hope the communities/servers arent self-hosted because that would be shot in the knee, cuz this is security issue
TeamSpeak and Ventrilo were like that
Is it beyond to you seek out that information before commenting?
I didnt manage to find it on their page, so I guess it is centralized like dc
how tf can something be a server if its not selfhosted
Discord servers arent self hosted
Discord servers are not servers.
But thats the common nomenclature among discord users