Discord going public. Plz help a future refugee.
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Honest question, but on a technical level isn’t discord basically IRC with some bells, whistles, emojis, and a some WebRTC Logic wrapped in electron with a large marketing budget? Throw in some cloud storage and a CDN for images. What am I missing? I’m not saying it’s “easy”, but I’m curious what it would take to build a solid streamlined FOSS alternative built on combining existing technologies.
Edit: I’m not familiar with the ecosystem… is the issue with existing FOSS bad UI and complicated onboarding? Missing features? Or is it simply a critical mass issue?
In addition to the replies you got already, discord has screen sharing/streaming. An experience kind of like zoom (I don't use it and dont see the appeal but maybe someone who does can elaborate more. My partner uses this feature sometimes).
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Its popularity is more inertia based
I'm not subject to intertia. I could move my friends to an alternative in a week. Tell me which alternative has all those features and I'll switch.
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There is a single instance everyone is on
Ah ok, yeah in that case yes. Only solution to this would be federation. But matrix is nowhere there yet in terms of normie usability.
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Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.
Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?
Right now I'm on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can't find a clear "winner".
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Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.
Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?
Right now I'm on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can't find a clear "winner".
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Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.
Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?
Right now I'm on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can't find a clear "winner".
Alternatives to discord, open source or not:
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Most of the discords I’m on never use screen share for anything.
All the ones I'm on, around 30, it's the only thing it's used for.
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Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.
Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?
Right now I'm on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can't find a clear "winner".
Me and my brother are using teamspeak to this day.
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Is there any option to stay on discord but better? Like vencord or something similar through Linux? I cannot imagine being able to get my friends off of discord ever.
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You know the app still works if you deny it loc permissions, right?
still means they’re willing to collect data
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Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.
Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?
Right now I'm on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can't find a clear "winner".
TeamSpeak exists too
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Why would an optional feature be a deal breaker?
It also seems like an issue that could be easily solved by whitelisting.
Why would an optional feature be a deal breaker?
Because the person they're responding to said the lack of the optional feature was a deal breaker for them on a different piece of software.
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Honest question, but on a technical level isn’t discord basically IRC with some bells, whistles, emojis, and a some WebRTC Logic wrapped in electron with a large marketing budget? Throw in some cloud storage and a CDN for images. What am I missing? I’m not saying it’s “easy”, but I’m curious what it would take to build a solid streamlined FOSS alternative built on combining existing technologies.
Edit: I’m not familiar with the ecosystem… is the issue with existing FOSS bad UI and complicated onboarding? Missing features? Or is it simply a critical mass issue?
Does IRC have performant voicechat?
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Does IRC have performant voicechat?
That would be the WebRTC logic.
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Ah ok, yeah in that case yes. Only solution to this would be federation. But matrix is nowhere there yet in terms of normie usability.
Revolt != Matrix
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it's Element/Matrix if we're lucky. Revolt is just another Discord - surely this single company will last! With Element/Matrix being an open protocol, it won't be a "platform" you have to leave when it goes corporate.
Revolt is FOSS though. That makes a whole lotta ifference.
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That doesn't really change that it's one company hosting it. Unless you're willing to make 10 different accounts because your super-FOSS friends aren't willing to join each others instances?
I guess the easy solution here to to make it use oauth2 authentication. Then you can just authenticate using one account elsewhere. If fediverse services also at some point become oauth2 providers, then even better.
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If you're self hosting, it's Revolt. But the default instance limits you to 20mb or something for files, which is a problem for me, personally.
Just use croc to share files. Then size doesn't matter.
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I've set up Lemmy, Forgejo, Nextcloud and Mastodon. Forgejo is unbelievably easy, Mastodon and Lemmy both are complex but if you follow the instructions you get there pretty quickly.
Matrix is like "Follow a book of documentation, then when it doesn't work anyway, spend hours of your life troubleshooting a bunch of stuff that's NOT in the documentation. Why is this so hard?"
Sounds like this is part of their business plan. Make hosting it so onerous, you're better-off using their servers, or paying them to do it for you.
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The bloat that it had tacked onto it since then is egregious.
VCs gotta make back that ROI...