this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Good. Discord is the cancer of the free searchable internet.
If you really need communication, use XMPP or Matrix.
And for everything else use stuff like forums and Lemmy and mastodon reddit Twitter whatever. But not closed walled gardens that are not searchable on the net. It's astonishing that so many people gatekeep content behind this Discord crap.
It sucks that Discord is being used for a bunch of large communities that would be better served by a forum for future access, but for just groups of friends, it's way easier to use than anything fediverse. And if I'm chatting with my friends, I don't NEED my shitposting to be easily searchable on Google.
I'm not against using Matrix, but I could only get select people to join me. Discord is where all the more tech-illiterate gamers live and sometimes I wanna hang out with them too. It's not the same as Lemmy, where I want to talk to complete strangers, so it doesn't matter too much if more than half a community is lost by migrating from reddit to lemmy.
Seriously. The worst is when developers distribute their software on Discord. WHY.
lol, that, or when they insist discord is the best place to store documentation.....
🤮
Why does everything need to be free searchable on the internet?
Call me crazy but I don't want my group chats publicly available on the internet. Discord feels... private. I know they have access to all the data, but it's not like a public website, forum, or even an open irc chatroom. It's my walled garden to chat with friends, stream games, game chat, post dumb memes, etc.
That's like saying signal is cancer to free and open internet. Or hell, email because it's not indexed and searchable?
I don't get the sentiment.
undefined> Why does everything need to be free searchable on the internet?
imagine everything is behind a gateway of account + phone number. you wouldn't be here on Lemmy because you would've never heard about it and couldn't search about it, or reddit etc.
It's not hard to get your head around why searching the internet is the most important part to get things going. You wouldn't get ANY information if you need to get your phone number out for every single site/forum/whatever.
And if you have no experience with Discord and how it evolved over the last years, I can't help you. Discord already replaces many sites and forums, or give support via Discord only... now these things are no longer searchable because people somehow like to idle in Discord servers and search for things in there.
If you can't see the issue with this, even right now already and especially in the future if it continous like that, then I can't help you, sorry.
You cherry picked one line of my post and didn't address the entire context or intent of it. Im not defending companies or businesses using discord as a drop in replacement for forums or support pages. Imo that's a mis use of the tech.
I think that's stupid.
But discord isn't designed for that. It's a chat app (voice and text). I don't want my chats with friends publicly searchable on the internet. That's dumb. Having my emails publically searchable on the internet is dumb too.
If a company started using Signal or Whatsapp for support, would you be clamoring for all signal and Whatsapp messages to be searchable on the internet?
That doesn't make any sense. You seem more upset that companies are misusing Discord than mad at Discord.
This is not how it's been used for the vast majority.
Companies and big communities use it as a forum, sharing knowledge more or less important.
For example, i dabble in modding games, nowadays i need to join a game discord server and ask there hoping that someone is kind enough to repeat for the nth time something asked already, probably several time a week.
Most often than not, you don't get an answer due to several factors, one of which is that if you ask when the people that can help are not online, nobody answer really.
On a forum you could have searched your question and find some answer anyway.
THAT is a very big problem. Knowledge is walled in and the search provided is the equivalent of digging in the sand with a spoon.
Not all discussions should be public.
XMPP is mostly dead these days. The protocol is very inefficient (it's all XML) which isn't ideal on mobile devices since it uses more bandwidth to transfer and more processing power to parse.
I work at a big tech company, and at work we use Mattermost hosted outside our data center for cases where our internal stuff doesn't work. It seems fine and I think it's open-source, but I don't know a lot about it.
I've heard about Matrix but haven't tried it yet! Is it good?
What about IRC?
This couldn't be more wrong actually.
Xmpp is far from death. Just because many started to use matrix instead doesn't mean it's dead. Even though matrix is a Ressource and performance nightmare much more so than xmpp will ever be.
I'm an IT specialist and work in IT too. I also selfhosted a lot of stuff publicly.
XMPP is used by many companies like Facebook , Google, Nintendo, GitHub, zoom, WhatsApp, Apple etc.
Xmpp is a an official Standard.unlikr things like matrix.
And if you think that xmpp has battery issues.oeadays then that tells me you used any xmpp app like conversation/snikket etc. like many years ago.
My xmpp Apps use way less battery than any matrix app ever could.
XMPP is fast, reliable and just works. Matrix is a nightmare to selfhost, too.
IRC? Irc has no E2EE whatsoever. Therfore isn't even comparable to xmpp with omemo or matrix.
Facebook doesn't use XMPP; they use a custom protocol built on top of MQTT. WhatsApp was using a binary equivalent to XMPP (keeping the same stanzas but removing the XML), but I'm not sure if they still are. Do you have a source stating that the other companies use XMPP?
How is matrix a performance nightmare? been running a matrix server for years with almost no issues. I guess the only exception was the few times I ran out of hdd space, but that's it.
What's an official standard? Matrix is a protocol just like xmpp and the specs are public, just like with xmpp.
It's literally as easy as running a docker container and editing a yaml file, at least for synapse.
It is very well known that Synapse is a ressource hog. Heck, you can't even enable presence because it would kill your server ressources. Why do you think almost all instances have it disabled? Cmpared to an XMPP server ressource usage, Snypase is a nightmare to host. I also hosted a public server for a long time.
XMPP standards: https://wikiless.ftw.lol/wiki/XMPP https://xmpp.org/extensions/ https://xmpp.org/about/technology-overview/
just like xmmp is, difference is, matrix snypse uses like 20x the amount of ressources. Just try to host a public server for more than 100 people and you will know.
There is a reason why people make stuff like Conduit or the matrix team works on Dendrite as a new server.
Matrix is searchable through https://archive.matrix.org/
Discord is a chat and the default setting of every server is that to see the content of it, you need to join the server.
It make sense for a chat.
However, companies and communities have largely misused discord and basically turned it in forums.
Lots and lots of knowledge is spread on these chats with no way of finding it unless you know which server to join and provided they do not shut down at some point.
On top of that, the discord search feature is barebone at best.
This is the problem with discord.
What has discord to do with privacy? you really going the privacy route here while using Discord? Is this a troll or should I need to send you their privacy policy and tos? Nobody is talking about private chats you have with your buddies on Discord. Nodoby want to see this anyway. (expect Discord ofc) we are talking about PUBLIC discord servers with thousands of people in it, where content is posted that only is accesable via a gateway of making a discord account + phone number and is in no way searchable on the internet.
Now imagine, everything would be like that, you wouldn't even be here arguing with me because you would've never known what Lemmy is or even reddit. Because nothing would be searchable on the internet.
Not sure what is so hard to grasp about that.
Yeah, Cinny does look like Discord anyways but it's lack of voice chat is a bummer
I really disliked my cinny experience, element was much superior
Totally, I too think that one should prefer Element for multiple reasons (feature richness, app availability, ... I mean, the web widgets absolutely rule imo), after all, it's UI is similar to Discord/Slack but it also feels somewhat different here and there. For the first 1-2 hours it can be a bit overwhelming for newbies. Cinny's UI is much closer to Discord's UI, and it seems fine for chatting as far as I have tried it.
the encryption broke first just for the desktop app, later also for web browser several times, people couldn't see what I was writing to them, all while it worked in element. I was able to create nested rooms but nobody could see them for joining.. the overall experience was painful and it probably cost me my one chance to convince people to get away from discord after their policy change to record audio from calls
Oh shoot nvm then. I only used it for like two weeks before I went back to Element because of it's feature richness. And even during the time I used it I rarely chatted.
Weird, when was that ? In onboarded 6 non-tech people recently on element and it went fine and easy.
Yes element works, I use it still. I had issues with cinny as a discord replacement. This was in the time from march-april.
yeah, I particularly hate when mods and romhacks require you to join a discord server to download them