this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I never understood why everyone moved to discord. Regardless of this, it actually just sucks and is hard to use. Discord really gives me hope that the fediverse will succeed, just because the UI sucks so fucking much.
What did people use before discord?
For voice, TeamSpeak
For text chat, IRC
For forums, phpBB or any other forum software
Discord replacing the third is the saddest. It completely isn't fit for purpose. Part of the reason you can't find anything on Google now is that forums died, and Discord is unsearchable.
Discord just switches it's business model yearly to clone the one thing it hasn't killed yet. Started out to kill TS and IRC, then went on to kill the forum, then it tried to kill Steam/GOG but failed, now it's trying to kill Patreon.
Discord is pretty great for video/voice chat - the things it tries to do outside of that can be frustrating.
It's miles ahead of having to use Ventrillo, Teamspeak, Skype like we had to in the past.
Discord voice quality is significantly worse than TS3, and it has way less features actually related to voice chatting.
As for Vent and especially Skype, it's an improvement.
I never used Discord but used google hangouts before switching to Telegram and Matrix (the former for family and the latter for everything else).
Also, weirdly, a lot of people seem to use Discord for things used to be (and I would say should) be on a forum (or community, magazine, etc.)
Trying to follow the thread of a discussion about some obscure point you're interested in is much easier when it's in a thread, instead of an undifferentiated chat log with a bunch of unrelated cross-talk.
Does matrix have a voice/video functionality or is it strictly text chat?
I plan to check out matrix since the /r/firefox group has been chatting through that.
Teamspeak, Skype. Funny enough up until redesigning a year to two years ago they advertised themselves as being the replacement to these.
Discord provides free hosting.
Everyone talking about alternatives like Revolt or Mumble does not realize how big of a deal that actually is.
Exactly, I can go to discord and create a new server with a few clicks. Even as a somewhat tech savvy person I am not that confident about setting up a server, securing it properly, making it scalable for large amount of users, handling data storage and backups and all that.
because skype was worse
I mean I guess? Aside from the calling it's fine imo. UI was also easier for me to use
wasn't the calling the main thing Skype was used for tho?
Eh, it's the only voip number provider I've found that will sell me a number despite not being a business buying 1000 numbers and that isn't Google
Versus Slack, it was an easier sign-up process for ad hoc communities. You could just have people sign up instead of going through an approval process. (Slack's approval process could be automated with third-party tools, but it was a hack. Slack was meant to be a specific group of known people.)
I always thought Slack was just for businesses
It's definitely marketed that way, but I'm on a few Slacks that are just small, private groups. It's private by default while Discord is public by default.