Technology

The issue with this change was, that someone who was previously named Mike for instance with a discriminator, has to now choose something else for instance: "Mike372". Discord claims this is a better and a less confusing system, when it really just boils down to the same thing. Making matter worse they claimed all Mike usernames are taken, so #0001 to #9999 which also later turned out to be false, it was just their site choosing a random discriminator, which when it was already taken told you: "This username is already taken.", when in reality there were still available discriminators.

Whether or not it's a good change is likely mostly subjective. I'm guessing Discord made the switch to be more in line with other mainstream social media platforms, and to reduce confusion.

Personally, I kind of like the old way more. It means there could be 10000 different people with basically the same name. Other than paying for a specific number, there is no issue with a person grabbing a handle and then it not being available to anyone else. Otherwise, eventually, a lot of handles will be used up, maybe even dead, so people have to come up with increasingly creative ways to get a unique handle – or just settle on adding some numbers to the end.

I'd even go a step further myself and remove handles completely. Just use a random unique identifier, like a hash or GUID for the user – which a lot of platforms do under the hood anyway, since you can change your handle in many of them – and use invite codes, QR codes or similar to add friends. We don't need this username / handle rotting that just gets worse over time.

Users are NOT happy

I was lucky enough to be a Discord early adopter, so I was able to keep my username. But not everyone else could. So right now there's a lot of people having to part with long-established handles and it kinda sucks.

I'm going to be standing up a Revolt instance, but I'm giving myself a break after spending days and nights getting my lemmy instance up.

Self-hostable but not federated. Still in construction though, specially doesn't have all the voice capabilities of Discord yet, but looks quite decent so far

Is it self-hostable? That's the thing I'm missing from the Mumble / Teamspeak days.

Have you been able to get screensharing with audio to work on Element? I haven't been able to determine if it's in Element Desktop or not. My understanding is that it has worked on some browsers, but I'm not sure about the electron app.