With Discord announcing age verification globally, people are searching for alternatives. But a Discord alternative on the open social web might just look structurally quite different.
Gonna say it aloud for the unweaned masses in the back.
The main problematic issue with most “we need an alternative for Yplatform in the Fediverse!” speech is the use of the singular. We are never going to get a good thing going if we push for “everything-app” platforms because they’ll be everything-apps, and the push of power is irresistible. Also, everything apps are much harder to develop for the same base feature set (“share a message” is easy in text, quadratically much harder on video), which is why VC-funded capital can do it.
We have to accept that what we need is alternatives, plural, to the various things that Discord and other platforms centralize. Because half the point here is we are against centralization. And allowing each project to focus on each problem separately allows them to take advantage of their own strengths, up to and including funding and provisioning (“get storage for a million items” is trivial on text; quadratically much harder on video).
We need a text messaging platform? XMPP already exists. Let’s go help.
We need audio chats? Mumble already exists. Let’s go help.
We need instant notifications? Surely something already exists. Let’s go help.
We don’t need “a walled garden but on the Fediverse”.
psycotica0@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I think this is the important part that’s missing from a lot of these discussions, including from users themselves looking for a new place to go. Some people use discord as an IRC chatroom replacement. Some use it was a small group text, essentially, between friends or co-workers. Some people use it as a Patreon perk to get access to a community around an artist and interact with that artist and their other fans.
And I’m in some “servers” of all of those. So anywhere that’s using it as IRC can be replaced with XMPP or Matrix no problem. Or IRC, but with gifs. Cool. But my other group that hangs out in there async every day and the occasionally jumps onto an ad-hoc voice chat when people are available to game, or sometimes shares my screen so someone else can watch what I’m doing? None of those things do that. But mumble kinda does, but not in a persistent or integrated way. Mumble is a great way to talk, but an awful place to hang out. Jitsi does screen share, but is not casual and also isn’t a good hangout.
And we could limp by with an XMPP room for chat and then a link to a Jitsi or Mumble or something when it’s time to do something. But there’s something tight about having the “just call” button right there, tied to the chat you’re already in, and in being able to see “huh Alice and Bob are playing GAME right now. I should pop in!”
But if you’ve never been in a discord server like that, you make a recommendation of IRC or something, and a gaming friend group user checks it out and is like “this is even close to doing any of the things I need it to…”
mapto@feddit.bg 19 hours ago
How I miss the “do one thing and do it well” attitude in commercial services. Why do they have to convert any nice product into a s.itshow? It can’t be that investors want good services to become worse…
littleomid@feddit.org 14 hours ago
But my other group that hangs out in there async every day and the occasionally jumps onto an ad-hoc voice chat when people are available to game, or sometimes shares my screen so someone else can watch what I’m doing? None of those things do that.…but Matrix does that.