I despise discord from a user interface and business practice perspective. What a piece of shit
Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 5 weeks ago
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
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
joshchandra@midwest.social 4 weeks ago
This is exactly what I was gonna say: I’m amazed that so many millions of people can tolerate its atrocious UI. Even now, the amount of notifications I get from the constant text channels across “servers” (which is such a misnomer for merely “communities”) is so ridiculous that I ignore 99.9% of it.
Strider@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I think that naming was fully on purpose. People argumented with me that they had their own “servers” so that was good, right?
Grrr.
tfm@europe.pub 5 weeks ago
How do we get them to switch to something like Element?
riskable@programming.dev 5 weeks ago
Element needs to be better. Discord is awesome with the way it auto-plays looping videos/gifs and has animated emojis.
Seriously: That’s all they’d need to do. The element devs need to focus on fun.
tfm@europe.pub 5 weeks ago
Fun is always great to capture the masses!
Dil@is.hardlywork.ing 4 weeks ago
thats why I want misskey the emoji reactions to anything are always more fun than just likes
Ulrich@feddit.org 5 weeks ago
Fun is the least of my concerns. I don’t know why people compare the 2 when they have almost nothing in common. One is a chat app and the other is a voice/streaming/community app.
Honestly outside of the incessant pop-ups and upsells and the whole selling everything to AI companies, it’s pretty great for private communities.
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
What would likely help a lot if it was easier to get set up, particularly on a VPS or something like that. Small businesses and or larger community projects would be more likely to jump on possibly.
Another thing is ability to easily join, a lot of the above just have an easy link to join their discord server, not sure how easy matrix on boarding is currently as I still haven’t gotten my instance functional yet (not even half done with synapse configuration seemingly)
joshchandra@midwest.social 4 weeks ago
Also, people forget that Discord’s streaming capability is, unfortunately, absolutely top-notch; no other community-screensharing platform has fewer issues, and my friends and I like to watch each other play games often.
Kichae@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
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.
tfm@europe.pub 5 weeks ago
Isn’t there any solution for that yet?
joshchandra@midwest.social 4 weeks ago
None of which I know…
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Or Matrix?
According to history:
-
Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable, or…
-
If it reaches a critical mass… You can’t. See: Facebook.
The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable
Discord is going public soon, so start the timer…
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Discord is scary popular though, like Facebook popular. I am really scared the enshittification will stick hard, like it has for Facebook.
TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
RIP D&D campaign’s chat service 😬
lena@gregtech.eu 5 weeks ago
Or Matrix?
Element is a Matrix client
Samskara@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Matrix/Element has shitty usability and reliability compared to Discord.
For lots of communities, they could use modern forum software like Discourse with better results.
tfm@europe.pub 5 weeks ago
larger population seems hopeless.
But what is the barrier? We have a functioning infrastructure. We need to solve the last piece of the puzzle.
People need an easy way to join!
Mastodon has already shown that this works. Even if they aren’t as big as others yet, they still make up about two-thirds of the Fediverse. Now we need to replicate this for Lemmy, Pixelfed, and so on, and share our findings along the way.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
You mean drag them from platforms that have a vested interest in keeping them locked in and squashing competitors like the Fediverse?
In platforms that spend billions on engagement optimization algorithms, with the sole purpose of keeping users addicted, basically with government and business landscape backing?
Look, I’m optimistic about the Fediverse, this is a great refuge in the hellscape that is the internet. But you can’t make people want to change. I’ve learned this IRL, but see it with (for example) persecuted people continuing to use Twitter even though its owner basically has a gun to their heads. There’s a big gulf between being a fantastic refuge and taking the internet from Facebook and Google. Even if every phone on the planet had an easy button to switch to Fediverse alternatives in one click… many would not take it, and that’s an utter fantasy.
-
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 5 weeks ago
XMPP / Jabber is better.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 5 weeks ago
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.
ogmios@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
I think your argument relates closely to something I’ve noticed happening over and over with more than just game developers. Far too often I see people expressing frustration that the Internet doesn’t give them more accurate information about the real world. Way too many people, apparently including many of the richest and most powerful people alive, have come to see the Internet as a magical machine that will do anything they want it to do… if only people would use it differently! Like, they legitimately seem to expect the entire population to post their entire lives online, unfiltered, so they can be used as automatons by people they’ve never even met.
Glitchvid@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Further hampered by the Steam “discussions” that are an incredibly unmoderated cesspit.
tfm@europe.pub 5 weeks ago
This is so true! I always hated the Slack/Discord format and will always do. It’s just a mess.
SupraMario@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
You don’t…you go back to forums. They’re searchable. Discord and Facebook and well anything self hosted isnt via search engines
tfm@europe.pub 5 weeks ago
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.
Ilandar@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
But many people don’t want to have everything completely public
This isn’t true at all. Most people do not care about privacy; those that do are an extreme minority. You (presumably) and I are part of that minority yet even we still comment here, in a public space. The issue with forums has never been about privacy because most are content with pseudonymity. It is a big mistake to think we need to cater to the extreme minority in the privacy space when tackling big issues that involve a majority who do not care.
SupraMario@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
You can lock down forums to were they’re un searchable unless you have a login. Tons of forums are like this.
DioEgizio@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
Matrix sucks. It barely has usable apps and it lacks basic moderation tools
XpeeN@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
When we can have push to talk option (client side, which can be done relatively easy) and proper 30+ FPS Screen share for gaming features, I think it’ll be much easier to convince people to try it. Everything else IMO is QOL features that I don’t mind about.
We also tried to use mumble, but the lack of Screen share moved us straight back to discord eventually…
atrielienz@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Tell me about Element. This is the first I’m hearing about it.
noodlejetski@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
tfm@europe.pub 5 weeks ago
It’s a secure messenger
atrielienz@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
What are its pros and cons? What does it offer that telegram or similar don’t offer? Is it good for group chat? Is it available on multiple platforms?
simple@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
Yeah I remember voicing this concern when all online communities seemed to be going to discord and people seemed to mainly laugh at me in response at the time.
Because there hasn’t been a single proper alternative until very recently
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 5 weeks ago
Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects, I don’t know what you mean by an alternative to Discord because my argument is that Discord is shit for organizing.
Discord is great for chat, both voice and text, it is a great live space to have for a community. I don’t dispute that. Sure there hasn’t been good alternatives to recently for that specific usecase…
What I dispute, and what I am pointing out is that Discord ate forums, it ate all kinds of public, publically accessible formats for online communities that were much more easily searchable and collatable into useful information for everybody.
Discord is a fucking hallway of a thousand fractured silo’d conversations locked behind an account login. I hate Discord for destroying the internet before it which I could freely browse and learn so much more from.
simple@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
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.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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.
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 5 weeks ago
Excuse me, Jabber / XMPP is about as old as I am!
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 5 weeks ago
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.
maho@lemmy.funami.tech 4 weeks ago
online communities seemed to be going to discord
That can also be seen as “nature healing itself” in context of giant AI botnets scraping the whole internet every second. It’s only natural to go private nowadays.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
No, it isn’t.
Make no mistake a primary monetization vector for Discord is to scrape the shit out of everything said on its chats.
By suggesting Discord for privacy you are effectively only giving corporations the benefit of a commons while denying that to the people.
Discord is NOT private, it is a corporation and your data is valuable.
maho@lemmy.funami.tech 4 weeks ago
I agree that Discord shouldn’t be trusted and might turn out to be a bad actor some day. Anyway, the more general tendency of moving away from public spaces is a right and natural thing. So it’s best to do the same as with Discord but without Discord. In the upcoming era of AI hiding knowledge is a good thing to do, and I’m personally not used to this yet.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
Anyway, the more general tendency of moving away from public spaces is a right and natural thing.
Let me emphatically say that NO it isn’t.
If you need to anonymize or disguise your identity because you feel threatened, I never want to make you feel like you shouldn’t take whatever steps of protecting your privacy that you feel you need to.
That being said, no, I fundamentally consider societal progress to be roughly equatable to how open the systems are in a society both in the material and ideological realm. Public forums are progress because they allow anybody with an internet connection to read through conversations, learn and eventually participate and add to a general collective benefit and community. This is the power of the internet.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
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!
mars@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
Newest iteration of “this meeting could have been an email” has become “this Discord could have been a wiki”.
Dil@is.hardlywork.ing 4 weeks ago
wiki + ai search = discord reddit + google was once good, nowadays I click on the other results since the reddit reply is its already been answered use google
skytrim@reddthat.com 4 weeks ago
And someone (on the Far-Right) is always trying to buy Wikipedia, monetise it, X-ify it, or take it down. I think Wikipedia is abusive - exploits volunteer unpaid labour - should have been created by an NGO like UN and kept safe for mankind like our Library of Alexandria. But it is what it is. Preppers download the whole site regularly in order to have that knowledge under their control in case is ever gets taken down or spoilt and they are rebuilding civilisation post-Armageddon. I keep meaning to download it myself (note to self: do that soon you lazy b. no more excuses!)
mars@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
Take a look at Kiwix. Makes it super easy plus some ideas for a good Raspberry Pi project.