Yeah I remember saying this when all online communities seemed to be going to discord and people seemed to mainly laugh at me in response at the time.
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Most of these communuties using Discord are better served by something that isn't a chatroom. So, so, so confusingly many of them use them as a store of permanent information. Like a website+forum.
Many times the benefit of Discord is the ability to paywall parts of it with Patreon integration. We need more foss and federated options that do this.
Isn't there any solution for that yet?
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I'll have to take a look, I have synapse running but I can't actually connect to my server at all, need to set up the database and sign-ups and all that shit.
Are you using the dockerized version? If so it sets up (a) database etc.
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I quite like Discord, but I really only use it for it's original purpose - a place for groups of friends to hang out, play video games with voice chat, and maybe watch shows/movies together. For these purposes, Discord is great!
I have found very little value in how Discord gets used for anything and everything else - forums for video games, support channels for businesses, 1000+ member communities, etc etc. All of those use cases feel better served through traditional websites and forums... but it's so much easier to set up a Discord server for the average person it has turned into a weird default.
In that regard, fuck Discord.
Yeah anything ephemeral is fine like chats and what not. But this idea of using it as support platform is just dumb. You end up with people asking the same question over and over and it either doesn’t get answered because no one is around to answer it or likely because they’re annoyed at the same questions over and over. There is no organization and no institutional knowledge. It’s like it ends up being set up by people who think it’s what the cool kids want. And these giant communities just exacerbate this issue. Everything ends up being noise. It’s the reason I usually ended up turning off the world or general channels in WoW. It just ended up being annoying and distracting.
When I’m trying resolve a situation that I need some sort of support I wanna be able to search if others have had the same issue and see discussion around that topic. I don’t need synchronous communication for that. I don’t care if it was 3 months ago someone had the problem if they figured out how to fix it. The way to do that is forums, Reddit (well before the enshittification), or even Lemmy.
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Are you using the dockerized version? If so it sets up (a) database etc.
I was being a bit lazy and tried this first https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=elementsynapse
I do have a few docker stacks running so I should just bite the bullet and go that route instead probably.
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Yeah I remember saying this when all online communities seemed to be going to discord and people seemed to mainly laugh at me in response at the time.
Fuck Discord
I despise discord from a user interface and business practice perspective. What a piece of shit
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Telegram is not a secure messenger.
Yes to multiple platforms, groups etc.
So, I'm going to say that I don't use telegram and only know it as being presented as a secure messenger platform. As a result, I am just asking follow-on questions to further discern what makes Element preferable. And this is no different because I feel like this is exactly the problem lemmy and other platforms like it have. There are people who love them, but when people ask about them, they don't offer any really informative data to support why they like them.
What makes Element (matrix) a secure platform, and how does that differ from telegram or signal or whatever. Like. What is matrix good at? That's what I'm asking. Why suggest it over something else?
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How large is large? A few hundreds? Not seeing any performance issues.
If we're talking about Matrix as a Discord alternative, then that would mean thousands of channels, each with hundreds or thousands of users, many with constant activity.
I'm not sure if anybody actually uses Matrix at the scale of the average Discord user. Sliding sync is supposed to help, but I don't think the Matrix architecture can realistically scale that high.
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So, I'm going to say that I don't use telegram and only know it as being presented as a secure messenger platform. As a result, I am just asking follow-on questions to further discern what makes Element preferable. And this is no different because I feel like this is exactly the problem lemmy and other platforms like it have. There are people who love them, but when people ask about them, they don't offer any really informative data to support why they like them.
What makes Element (matrix) a secure platform, and how does that differ from telegram or signal or whatever. Like. What is matrix good at? That's what I'm asking. Why suggest it over something else?
As a result, I am just asking follow-on questions to further discern what makes Element preferable.
If you are against a change in the first place you won't switch, anyway.
There are people who love them, but when people ask about them, they don't offer any really informative data to support why they like them.
Please, ask.
What makes Element (matrix) a secure platform, and how does that differ from telegram or signal or whatever. Like. What is matrix good at? That's what I'm asking. Why suggest it over something else?
Simple. It's fully free and open source. The server as well as the apps. Therefore, you can trust it as a privacy friendly solution a heck of a lot more, than any other solution like WhatsApp.
Signal is secure as well, but the server is centralized.
And Telegram is not considered secure because of their implementation and shady practices.
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If we're talking about Matrix as a Discord alternative, then that would mean thousands of channels, each with hundreds or thousands of users, many with constant activity.
I'm not sure if anybody actually uses Matrix at the scale of the average Discord user. Sliding sync is supposed to help, but I don't think the Matrix architecture can realistically scale that high.
You might have a very different definition of "average Discord user" than the average Discord user.
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You don't....you go back to forums. They're searchable. Discord and Facebook and well anything self hosted isnt via search engines
But many people don't want to have everything completely public, even if privacy is a illusion there.
We have to accept that and provide a solution for both.
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If I'm talking with people about the topical thing which is why I joined a room in the first place, the last thing I want is a looping autoloops fruityloops annoyance. Plus, not autoplaying and autolooping them saves battery.
I hate to break this to you but that means you're not normal. If all you ever do in chat is talk about serious things that are of such earth-shattering importance that it would be incredibly rude and obnoxious for someone to post a silent looping video you're not normal, and no fun at all.
The way Element currently works, it's made for people like you... A strange minority that probably only thinks about "chat" in terms of communicating for an end goal and not for the pleasure of conversation.
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You might have a very different definition of "average Discord user" than the average Discord user.
Or perhaps you do not understand how Discord is commonly used.
People join dozens of servers. Maybe one for every game they play, every TV show they watch, every podcast they listen to. Everything has a Discord.
Even small Discord servers have many channels. Bigger ones will have dozens or hundreds of channels.
Some servers have millions of users. Most of the servers I'm in have thousands.
Many channels are default for all users in the server.
Not sure what the mathematical average is, but this is certainly common at least, and any alternative that can't handle this is no alternative at all.
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Yeah I remember saying this when all online communities seemed to be going to discord and people seemed to mainly laugh at me in response at the time.
Fuck Discord
I once had my account banned because I was a member of a server that was banned in that hugely discouraged me from using it for that purpose. I might be in the half dozen servers at the moment none of which I've looked at save for two in the last year and I primarily use it for offsite DMs and even then I strongly prefer signal for people I know.
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Companies putting their stuff into discord is like all the businesses that ditched a dedicated website and moved to facebook however many years ago. Yay, now it is on a format that doesn't work well for presenting static information and will inevitably require account registration!
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I don't think you can for most people that is what is so infuriating right? In my experience people who are entrenched in Discord are completely and utterly entrenched in it, to the point that I have lost contact with a lot of these people effectively since I don't use Discord.
The important choice was with all the community leaders who decided to make the move to discord at crucial moments where they could have NOT done that.
I think any shift off of Discord is also going to have to come from community leaders of organizations, projects, game development communities etc... deciding to move off the platform at crucial decision points.
However, and this is something people who happily pushed their entire lives onto Discord would confidently tell me we could easily do if Discord got bad, everyone isn't just going to straight up leave once they have built their entire digital communication around it...
Now I frequently see game developers complain that they can't accurately get a picture of their playerbase because large categories of players aren't on their discord!! and I have to keep my palm from blowing a hole through my face when the two loudly meet.
The brainworms are so bad that these developers will conclude the issue is with their playerbase not wanting to use Discord instead of it being an issue with DEVELOPERS DECIDING TO COMMUNICATE WITH THEIR PLAYERBASE WITH A SHITTY, EXCLUSIONARY TOOL THAT HAS AWFUL SEARCH.
I can't express how much this gets under my skin, it is like this assumption that if you are even slightly a gamer than you are on Discord all the damn time has become rheified and cemented into place so rigidly that developers are literally tossing away large swaths of their playerbase feedback because they refuse to use a different tool to get feedback and communicate with their community. No forum, no custom website, nothing, Discord or bust.
I have seen the effects in games like Battlebit where it is clear that the developers are catering to only a very small subsection of the playerbase that is very active and prominent on the Discord and it ended up torpedoing the game because changes kept happening that clearly signalled to large sections of the playerbase that they were basically invisible to the developers.
This is so true! I always hated the Slack/Discord format and will always do. It's just a mess.
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But many people don't want to have everything completely public, even if privacy is a illusion there.
We have to accept that and provide a solution for both.
You can lock down forums to were they're un searchable unless you have a login. Tons of forums are like this.
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Discord is scary popular though, like Facebook popular. I am really scared the enshittification will stick hard, like it has for Facebook.
they already forced ads on discord.
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RIP D&D campaign's chat service
Yeah, so many projects and companies using Discord for support seemed like such a bad idea.
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As a result, I am just asking follow-on questions to further discern what makes Element preferable.
If you are against a change in the first place you won't switch, anyway.
There are people who love them, but when people ask about them, they don't offer any really informative data to support why they like them.
Please, ask.
What makes Element (matrix) a secure platform, and how does that differ from telegram or signal or whatever. Like. What is matrix good at? That's what I'm asking. Why suggest it over something else?
Simple. It's fully free and open source. The server as well as the apps. Therefore, you can trust it as a privacy friendly solution a heck of a lot more, than any other solution like WhatsApp.
Signal is secure as well, but the server is centralized.
And Telegram is not considered secure because of their implementation and shady practices.
I did ask. Why is it like pulling teeth to get answers? I don't use WhatsApp. Never got on that bandwagon. Something being free and open source doesn't mean it's good. Something being trustworthy from your standpoint doesn't explain why it's trustworthy to a layman who doesn't understand why you think FOSS = trustworthy or good. It's FOSS and you've looked at the code and found it to live up to its claims of being secure?
I'm not sure where the hostility is coming from here but I'm more pointing out that I can use a search engine to find out about matrix to some extent, but people who use the platform and have a better understanding of its pros and cons have valuable information to pass on. But when you ask them about it they're full of recommendations but those recommendations often don't have much in the way of information about what's good about the user experience or feature set or even the code. I'm trying to show that the particulars of why you like or prefer something matter.
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Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects
Terrible how, though? That's exactly what it gets right. You have easy-to-setup roles and channel accesses, onboarding experiences for people joining a larger server, a huge ecosystem of bots for various purposes, etc.
okay, it is bad for not being indexable, but it's good at what it does and it's popular for a reason.
It's searchable but information doesn't stay pinned and available. It's meant to be a chatroom style place for gaming and as that it's fine but when you want to build a community for something like a video game or a. Product, what ends up happening is you end up making a channel for every single announcement etc. say you have a channel for FAQ? You either lock it so only moderators and admins can use it or you end up with a constantly ballooning channel where everyone can contribute. There's no in-between and because each post isn't really collated the way it would be here or on a forum the information is hard to navigate without search which often only gives a truncated section that you can't even navigate to. There's no context more often than not when you use the search function and it's a very poor substitute for a forum as a result.
I don't think discord is a good substitute for a website and I don't think it's a good substitute for a forum but it's being used as both fairly frequently.