Online software development life cycle in a nutshell:
Startup - Geeks are in charge and you’re creating a cool communications platform.
Mature - Accountants are in charge and you’re gamifying ad clicks.
You know, I’ve seen this image at least 15 years ago and thought it was a joke.
Now that I’m older now, I’m guessing this is an actual diagram for implementing and perhaps patenting interactive commercials?
We literally reward people in our society for being as shitty as possible. Can we stop doing that?
Yes, this is real.
🤢🤮
I’m waiting for the day we get the Black Mirror technology where the ad stops playing when you look away and doesn’t start again until you look back at it, forcing you to watch the entire ad all the way through
And the ad is like my dead mom selling me dick pills
How in the hell has that app gone so far down? This must be a record in enshittification.
Yeah, di$cord has definitely been speedrunning the deterioration of their platform.
It’s a shame because they started as a darling of the gaming community with a lot of loyalty when people were switching to micro$hit like $lack and team$.
I guess capitalism and endless growth don’t actual translate to improved products for the rest of us. Go figure.
It’ll be nice when our species moves to decentralized platforms like Matrix, but every day we wait is another day I don’t get to enjoy it.
Mark my words, any free service that hosts images is on the cycle. I saw it happen to Reddit and Imgur
Promising to host everyone’s data for free forever is a promise that only a devil at a crossroads can make
Don’t forget to tip your instance admins!
Well they changed CEOs a month ago
It’s over
We’ve never reached levels of Joever this high and Biden stopped being President in January, so you know its bad.
I warned my friends that Discord is looking to go public. Just wait, it’s going to get a lot worse.
I don’t know if you saw the news last month but Discord just replaced a founder with a former Activision-Blizzard exec as CEO.
Well that fucking sucks.
The end is coming
How do I bot this so I don’t see the ads and get free nitro so ads are removed?
No need, use discord canary.
Fuck this shit.
Next thing you know the ‘orbs’ will be NFTs and we’ll all be expected to grind away at their ‘quests’ (probably training AI) to earn ‘real money’.
RIP Discord.
how good of an alternative is matrix to discord?
Not as feature rich, quite buggy, inherently more private but also less usable.
The above compounds when trying to get the non-techies to use it, because sometimes it doesn’t just work
Started running a homeserver recently, trying to get non-techy friends to join, can confirm this is difficult (the main one right now being people using old software on their phones, one friend was running iOS 14 for crying out loud)
Once set up I find it OK as a user
Unfortunately, the official desktop app is essentially unusable.
Fractal is pretty good but less features.
Not great. It’s missing discord features like screen sharing and voice rooms (only sort of has them through a third party app, Jitsi, but that experience is… not great).
It also has moderation issues, lacking tools needed to keep spam out and easily control it when it does get in.
I recently deleted my account because there was a spam wave sending out room invites to anti-trans named rooms, and there’s no way to mass ignore, you have to click on every invite, click ‘ignore’ and wait like 15-30 seconds for the server to process.
Related to the above it has performance issues, a lot of UI actions wait for the server to respond, so just have a long delay to them making the user experience feel really crummy.
There are also a bunch of different client apps all with their own features, one will support X but not support Y and the other way around for another app, and there’s no guide on what app to use so that’s confusing.
Overall it feels like alpha or very early beta software, it works if you’re willing to deal with a lot of headache.
Matrix suffers from some pretty poor design decisions and implementations.
I expect its flaws to get ironed-out over the years, but right now people switching from discord to matrix will find their experience severely lacking.
To give some examples, video chatting is not as inuititive in matrix. You can’t even test it on your own without being in a server with specific permissions that allow you to use your camera when nobody else is around. Really fucking stupid design decision.
Another example is the lack of channels. It’s mind-boggling to me how they’re not implemented yet. Matrix will never be competitive with discord until that changes.
I made a few friends switch earlier this year and for our use case it works
Minding we only need a text chat during the day for shitposts, cat GIFs, and the occasional “Gaming tonight ?” “Fuck yeah” “For the Emperor !”
Then we use it for voice chat during the gaming session
To be honest, I don’t think we could have switch if they weren’t a bit tech-savvy and willing to struggle a bit with the encryption at first (but now it’s setted, it works with no issue)
I like it, personally, but I don’t use voice chat.
Chortle my orbs
Jesus Christ (● ˃̶͈̀ロ˂̶͈́)੭ꠥ⁾⁾.
There is one community I’m active in on Discord, and it’s a very wholesome and positive one id hate to lose, but damn I’m hating Discord.
Is there a CLI Discord client for Linux? I could tolerate that.
You can host your own matrix instance then bridge discord (and everything else from LinkedIn messenger to WhatsApp) to matrix with double puppeting so people won’t even realise you’re not on discord.
Hmmmmmm that is an option. I am a user of matrix
enshittification is full force now
Oooh yeah, dust off the hotline auto clickers.
The lesson of Pay-To-Surf will keep being taught by reality until it gets taught in business school.
Is there a peer to peer equivalent to Discord? That feels like it would be the best option, since it wouldn’t rely on a centralized company that could enshittify the product.
Only option available is Matrix. It has its problems, but they’re being worked on.
Right now it lacks the gaming/voice chat parts of discord - so for an OSS alternative for that part of discord specifically, there’s Mumble.
For everything else, Matrix is a good alternative. Just be sure to pick a discord-like client. (E.g. Commet or Cinny)
Damn, I’ve been thinking about checking it out, but if it doesn’t do voice at all (and I would also really like streaming) it’s just not worth it to me. Text chat is nice, but I spend 2-3 hours evenings hanging out in voice with friends and I don’t want to lose that. Messing with two separate apps is just not worth it atm, so I’ma keep steadfastly ignoring Discord’s bullshit until Matrix is where I need it to be to switch. Although then the problem will be getting everyone else to switch, of course.
Technically speaking, Element does have “voice and video rooms” available as an experimental feature, but until it’s out of prime time it totally makes sense to wait.
Gotta remember that Element/New Vector (the company spearheading Matrix’s development) is getting funded mostly by orgs who are looking for a replacement for internal comms like Slack or WhatsApp.
i self host matrix and some other docker runs the voice for it, so it is there if you got a server. which i mean, not everybody does so that sucks. it was a bit of a pain but im not the best at server stuff
Yeah, my primary concern is I’m part of a community of ~350 people who games together, and while there’s probably some folks in there who could swing a server, right now discord isn’t costing us anything and does everything we want (chat, voice, streaming, etc). If we were to consider moving we would probably need a reasonably beefy server and some software with all of those features, and right now that just doesn’t seem feasible.
yeah you could all pitch in and get one hosted on a server farm somewhere. hard to beat free fitty tho. ive got friends who wanna stay on discord too so im still on it. as long as its free. mostly did the matrix thing to move family chats off off whatsapp. only used whatsapp bc ios sucks about sharing full quality pics and videos with non ios.
i say all of that bc i didnt host it to move from discord, but now that its up i got an easy out if discord goes all in on enshittification
This is outdated and no longer preferred, it now has its own internal system called Element Call (aka an implementation of MatrixRTC).
i use coturn for voice on mine
I meant for video. The classic coturn connection is fine for voice - though I wish it had push to talk. 🥲
oooo yeah video is the one thing i have missing to have more or less feature parity with discord. wonder if theres gonna be like a coturn video type thing anytime soon
I use Jitsi for my voip / screen share
Works great if you don’t want/need PTT.
That’s what we’ve started using my friends and I, can’t complain, sure it doesn’t integrate all the gaming shit but we just have it running in the background so we can talk anyway
Yeah, I’ve done the same and it works quite well.
The only thing I was really missing from Discord was Ai noise cancellation like Krisp - and I got that by installing Easy Effects
Seems like you have to keep something running for it to work. Some obscure service relied on it as a support channel and last thing I remember is that matrix server stopped working. Though it would help so much if it would be p2p.
“something running” - do you mean the server binary? Because, yes, if you’re using your own server you do need it to be running. Same for the client, I guess? I guess I don’t really understand what you meant by that.
Some obscure service relied on it as a support channel and last thing I remember is that matrix server stopped working.
That’s an issue with any federated service, yeah. If the server is down, it’s down. But as a bonus, unlike Discord, when a server is down you can just move to another. So, honestly, I see that as a boon.
As far as p2p goes, there was an effort to make that a while back, but it looks like people lost interest.
Though, personally I think federation is good enough. That’s why I’m on Lemmy/the Fediverse, after all.
I only mean that the requirements are high enough for someone to stop using it at some point, losing users of that server in the process. It might be different if it didn’t require running a server. Or they could choose to host their rooms on some existing server, I guess.
Or they could choose to host their rooms on some existing server, I guess.
I mean, that’s sort of the point, right? Don’t host unless you want to.
There are lots of great, long lasting servers with open registration out there. This blog post has some good examples:
I’ve never used Discord – is it similar to Mumble? I tried Jami but found it too unreliable to recommend. What about Nextcloud Chat? I do use that though it is kind of clumsy.
It serves the key purpose of Mumble, in that it provides a reliable way to get in a voice chat with people. The other features (text chat, video calls, screen sharing, “servers” that let people aggregate for a dedicated purpose/community) come together to make a legitimately good product that’s hard to replace.
What a funny coincidence that I’ve heard about this discord alternative in a post just a couple before this one in feed.
