Comment on Harmony - Yet Another Discord Alternative
ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 4 days ago
I’m sure there’ll be lots of bugs and I don’t think it will scale well.
The lack of scaling and even more critically, lack of federation, unfortunately makes this not a viable alternative. And without meaning to sound harsh, I think it’s mostly a duplication of effort of both Movim (XMPP) and Fluxer (which plans federation in the near future).
The Discord-alternative landscape is filled with people vying to take its place, but I think we would be better served rallying behind Movim and XMPP as a whole, IMHO.
The XMPP ecosystem is a mess and matrix has a ton of security and metadata issues.
We shouldn’t be using discord-likes anymore, it was a bad idea the first time.
Personal IM/VoIP should be separate from game party chat should be separate from communitt IRC/forums
briffy@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Thanks for sharing, that’s an interesting read. I hadn’t come across this when I was looking (to be fair, it might be been posted after I looked, I’ve been mostly on stack overflow for a month).
I’m in agreement with many of the author’s points (I’ve ticked all of their requirements except markdown support and the only stretch requirement I don’t meet is being able to scale up to thousands of users - but I never wanted to do that anyway).
I am really torn on “everything needs to be federated” though. I feel like credential fatigue/ease of joining a server is largely solved with SSO/SAML or magic links with guest access. I want to love federation, I really do… But my own lived in experience with matrix has soured me on it. It was a pain to maintain and the eventual tipping point was one of my “trusted” federated services (Arch btw) flooding me with CSAM.
I think there are many discord users that use it for voice/text/screen share with a core group and don’t really care about all the extra stuff or having these huge servers filled with people they’ll never interact with. It’s just the only realistic option right now to chat with their friends. Those are the people I’m hoping to attract. I’m not saying what I’m offering is a perfect solution but what I am offering is that core functionality without the gradual enshittification and constant slurping of your data.
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Federation is just the current gimmick fad of the foss world.
Everyone has a massive boner for it in everything even when it makes no fucking sense or only harms a project.
Is it cool? Yeah. Is it actually important? Not at fucking all. It’s at best a secondary feature that’s nice to have if it doesn’t harm the project.
Getting an actual product that’s safe, secure and most importantly functional. Is infinity more important then federation.
End to end encryption is kinda the same problem. Not EVERYTHING needs that level of security. You don’t and shouldn’t be talking about things that require that level of secure in apps that aren’t designed first and foremost for that level of safety.
And you can’t expect everything to be secure and user friendly. They go against each other frequently.
Again a nice thing to have, but functional usability comes first.