I don’t think Nostr can take on Discord. A big part of Discord is the voice chat channels, which, as far as I know, Nostr just isn’t built for.
Comment on Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O.
AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
I wonder if Flotilla on Nostr will be ready in time. The nostr community can unfortunately be a bit iffy right now, but I like the tech, and I’m always excited to see someone taking a good stab at Discord.
hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org 2 days ago
AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
It’s true that nostr as a protocol doesn’t seem to have any real capacity for voice, but given a Discord-like community would probably “live” on a fixed relay, that server could also very easily provide something like a TURN server like Matrix clients use for voice and I think video support. The client could integrate support for it, and the typical clueless user wouldn’t see the difference. For the more ephemeral nature of most voice communications, there’s no real need to publish voice chat through Nostr events. It could be done, sort of, for any talks that need to be archived, but it’s not a requirement for the vast majority of the voice chat happening on Discord anyway.
boonhet@lemm.ee 3 days ago
Soon as you hear the term instance, most people are out.
AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Call it a server, then. Tons of people already call them Discord servers. And it’d be a lot more true of Flotilla than Discord. Functionally, from a UX perspective, there’d be VERY little difference to an end user. You’d get an invite somehow, probably through a link, maybe combined with whitelisting your identity for more private communities, and you’d be in, using a client remarkably similar to Discord once it’s in a good spot. For most users, they can fully ignore the technical complexities.
boonhet@lemm.ee 3 days ago
Is there one very central, singular instance/server that everyone can join from, without causing performance issues (like if everyone on Lemmy was on the same instance)?
That’s required for normies. Look, 90% of people won’t ever move from reddit to lemmy because they’d have to CHOOSE an instance. It’s not that the choice even matters TOO much. It’s just the fact that there’s a choice. It’s a problem.
When Steve Jobs said Apple restricted your customizability and settings because users are dumb and don’t know what they want, I always thought he was an arrogant dickhead. And he was an arrogant dickhead, but he was also right. Average users don’t want choices, they want the OOTB experience to be as good as possible.
AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
That’s a moot point because Discord doesn’t even have that. Community discovery happens almost entirely through users sharing invite links. There are third party websites that aggregate and categorize public communities with long lasting or permanent invite links, and that’s about the only other option. Functionally, a user can ignore where the community is hosted. All that matters is that they get the invite they want, just like today with Discord.
I think you see it as a federated system like the Fediverse, but that’s not really the case. Nostr relays are under no obligation to propagate content between each other, and for a Discord-like community, there’s no real need to. Clients are free to connect to as few or as many relays as they like. For something like this, the relay used by the community would be baked into the invite so users can connect without worrying about it. From their perspective, the only real difference is that the link doesn’t start with the Discord domain name.