Tbh I don't mind proprietary apps, so long as the user experience is good.
I don't mind the ui nudges to buy nitro - the server costs have to come from somewhere - but if discord starts seriously serving ads, I'm gone.
jokes on you i got overwhelmed by every channel being split into a gajillion chats anyway
I only ever joined Discord for friends. Leaving would mean losing all friends, not even a select bunch. They're not moving and while some may care that it's upsetting, it's a collective bunch that needs convincing. Friends of friends of friends. People aren't jumping ship for one person to also not have their other friends not jump ship.
Reddit is a community but doesn't have the more casual chat that friends use (well they have it now, but it was never good).
Discord pretty much has to burn bridges like Reddit did before anyone moves.
We start by mentioning software freedom in everyday converations, in plain english, over the long term. We should not expect anything without creating its foundations.
It sure would be nice if development communities would stop locking their content behind Discord.
So annoying when you run into an interesting project and you realise that the only documentation is a link to Discord.
Time is a flat circle. We’re going back to IRC, boys.
Never left. Just slowed down :).
I knew you'd all be back!
/me slaps 1993_toyota_camry around a bit with a large trout
Discord doesn't really block 3rd party apps. Technically, they are against ToS, but unless you're doing something bad, it's seen as okay by the discord staff.
But yes, it's quite the closed ecosystem obviously. There are no 3rd party clients that implement all features, mostly due to the fact that it's all closed source.
I've been excitedly following the matrix project for years, but I'm in a lot of unique discord servers that would never move short of catastrophe. The network effect is too strong to shake the apathetic. We'll win the long game with matrix, but it might take a while.
Nah. Discord is the most accessible, if we’re talking about blind folks and accessibility. I tried using Element, and yikes!!! No. Cant read a single convo. In Discord, I can go back as far as necessary till I catch up. Tried other apps, too, and they all do the same thing.
How is the vision-impared accessibility with Lemmy? Obviously good enough that you're using it but I'm curious how the experience is.
The Mlem app keeps crashing all of a sudden, so I hate that. And making a community is kinda strange. I get to the “create” button and when I press it, it says, “match the…” but I don’t know what the rest is cuz the screen reader stops.
Not sure if my comment went through, but the site is ok for replying to comments. The app, Mlem, is good for browsing communities except when it randomly crashes.
Thanks for replying, both comments came through! I'm not shocked that mlem is having some issues, since it's in like the Apple version of early access. Thankfully, it seems like the community here so far are the kind of people who care more about accessibility than Reddit ever did.
Oh absolutely! I have contacted Reddit a few times and all they would say is that they think Reddit should be used by everyone, and they’re working on accessibility. Yet, when I update the app, it somehow gets worse! Clearly, they don’t care, or they’d have made the exzemption to third-party apps that focus on accessibility sooner, rather than when blind folks were banging on their door, wanting better.
Element is a great client for matrix. It functions similarly to Discord.
@lynny I wish it supported Custom emojiz
This is the main reason we use mattermost instead :/
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Honestly I'm leaning on discord as a crutch to avoid going back to reddit. I suspect discord will ruin themselves one day as well, but I plan to continue using it for the future until options like Lemmy are more developed.
There's not really any good alternative for large communities. The amount of tools available on Discord in the form of bots is so useful, any other platform they move to needs to have that as well.
Discord didn't have this at launch but it grew.
Yeah but now that it has it people aren't going to leave. We need the alternatives to be good before they leave, they can't migrate now and have it be good later.
While I love the sentiment, I have to say leaving Discord was one of the worst choices I ever made, not because Discord is inherently better, but because of the friends on it. I was in a very different state mentally and left without warning, and I regret it everyday, even though I'm back on Discord and some of my friends were willing to accept me, I still get a very intense feeling that what I did was unforgivable and I shouldn't be given this chance to talk with them again. It feels like leaving someone waiting for a high five and returning it months later when the hype is gone... I'm mostly inactive because I feel so wrong and I really don't deserve friends that are so nice. While I made the choice to leave and I knew the consequences, I don't wish anyone else to make that same mistake, leave with confidence, not with a cloudy mindset, worsening depression, and way less friends.
The part about it being unforgivable sounds extreme. How can there be "consequences" for simply temporarily opting out of a chat app?
Losing touch with friends for a while definitely sucks but if you need a break from literally an app then real friends will accept that.
I left way more than once, so leaving several times and expecting people to accept you again and again sounds like a chore and not everyone is going to keep accepting you.
I don't think other people see it that way. It's very common for people on discord to disappear for days/months then pop back in.
Yeah I suppose thats true, I was very much in a different mental state when I left, so much so I deleted my account, one person I was good friends with checked in with my phone number and made sure I was okay. I only wanted to share my experience because some others viewing might be in a similar state I was in, terrified of technology and *almost left it all behind. I have very good people though and I couldnt be more thankful. :)
Don't be so hard on yourself man, your friends accepted you back because you provide something that they don't want to give up! Social Media is not healthy for us humans. You were able to take a step back and realize that maybe you made a mistake in how you executed moving away from a platform with your friends on it, mistakes happen and it sounds like your friends understand that and you also now understand how much they mean to you, it's growth
Thank you for the kind words! Stay safe, friend.
It is so far a slightly different situation. First it gets revenue directly by the users instead of advertisers. This changes everything at a fundamental level.
Second, the type of community is much different. The communities using the full feature set are generally limited in scale one way or another. The issues with Facebook, Twitter and reddit arose also because there is a gigantic userbase which interacts with each other. Toxic policies are more likely to be forcefully accepted due to the massive social inertia.
Type of content hits differently. As a lot of communication is real time, or moment to moment, there is less lost value if things go haywire. Now this absolutely does not apply for servers which directly act as a forum replacement run by the companies themselves. Some use it as a website replacement for some reason which is also a terrible idea.
I think a future migration will be a lot more fluent and less hurtful overall. The moves away from TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Skype were never impactful. With the monetization model I also view it as less probable.
Can be hard to migrate to Revolt or Matrix communication apps depend completely on the user. I see it the same as how not so many people migrated to Signal after realizing WhatsApp and Telegram are not really private.
I really wish there was a selfhosted E2EE chat, video, stream app with client for windows, linux and android. Already tried element but it's a pain to make it work just fine, even when i tried to federate it, it took so much time to get into other communities. Maybe I'm used to simplicity and 'optimization' that discord has but i would like a selfhosted clone tbh. I really dislike the way the discord is taking already. Same as for reddit it's hard to convince ppl to move over and then again scatter everyone to other apps/places. Geez, fck this, please.
Wouldn't just voip and an irc channel replace discord? I don't use it so maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like that would do it
Every community should own their own communication infrastructure, or they don't actually own the community. It can disappear in a second. Matrix, Rocket.Chat, Mattermost, IRC, whatever. An online community relies on the connecting tissue, so if you care about your community you need to own it.
Discord came around after I had already gone FOSS as much as possible, so I've never actually used it. I host two Matrix (Synapse) servers, one for friends and family and one for work. I don't use it for large public chats, just friends or work, so my largest rooms are 10ish people each. The server side of things has never given me a problem, I easily run it on a 1 vCPU VM with 3 GBs of memory (I'm sure I could give it less if I needed to).
On the client side, Element works well enough, but I do wish it felt a bit further along after all of these years. Calls work reliably if one end is a computer (so computer to computer or computer to phone), but phone to phone calls are a complete roll of the dice if they will work properly. Notifications are a complete mess. I have Element open on my desktop right now with zero notifications, if I turn on my laptop and open Element (same exact account) it will show a handful of rooms with notifications until I go mark those as all read. The worst is when you get a call that isn't actually a call but a stuck notification from somebody that called you days ago.
I mean I do love it, there is no alternative for me. I simply don't even think about Discord or other proprietary apps as even a choice. I hope open source, decentralized software keeps gaining momentum and the rough edges are touched up a bit.
How the hell did you get people to show up? My fiends took forever to be convinced over to discord.
Work was easy enough - this is our messaging platform, use it, haha. For family and friends I would just take their phone and set everything up for them, join the rooms, set their avatar, everything. Minimize the work they need to do. It helps that none of my friends use Discord, maybe they do for games or something but they don't use it socially to communicate with friends. So even though Element has its fair share of bugs, it is still much better than MMS between iphone and android users, so my friends and family do see the advantage there.
Do we also have alternatives to Discord?
Easier said than done when your communities are all on Discord. I would love foss, but I'm not ditching my friends for it
i dont have any reason to ditch discord, but I will be homing on FOSS and using the bots I can run for next to nothing to replicate my content out to the other spaces. The places I really care about Ill still stalk but going to make the home here.
I'd love to leave discord, but I know to many people that use it and will not budge on leaving. I am stuck with it.
So unless discord makes a very serious boneheaded mistake and double down on it like Reddit did... I don't see many people leaving.
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