this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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I never ever understood and still doesn't understand why people like Discord. It's not indexed, it's a constant background noise. It's absolutely not user-friendly. You can do better with IRC.
Discord is remarkable. It has seamless video streaming from your desktop or apps to any number of watchers, with multiple peopld being able to stream at once. Paired with voice chat, it's perfect for group gaming sessions, movie showings, desktop troubleshooting, video chat, etc. Besides some issues with input devices, it's always worked flawlessly for me. Plus, obviously, a persistent server for chat.
And the fact that it's fast, resource-light, and free are just the icing on the cake.
Some people are downvoting you but you're right. No other application is this all in one package. My only issues with input devices have been Windows' fault, too. I don't like Discord's closed ecosystem and data privacy concerns, but the feature set is unmatched, especially at the amount of polish they have and their price.
Side note, people please stop using it as an alternative to a proper forum.
Thanks for the point about the forums. I get why people use Discord: the things it is designed for it does reasonably well. The problem is people using it in ways it isn't made for, like forums or wikis. If your documentation, issue tracking, or patch notes are done via Discord, please stop for fuck's sake. There are much better options for this and you can even webhook them into Discord if you insist on it, but stop using Discord to replace forums.
Also also the voice codec is (or at least was) a noticable improvement over anything that was available for free.
As far as I understand, the sole reason is "everyone else is using it". Which also seems to be the justification for using Messenger, WhatsApp, X, Instagram et al despite knowing better. It's hard to be outside of the walled garden if everybody else is inside.
Or does it make it easier to distance yourself from those who eat that garbage up? If you value privacy, are you willing to throw it away for someone else?
All my friends are on discord, if I'm not on discord I can't really talk to them.
You're basically going wHy dOnT yOu jUsT cuT oFf YoUr FrIenDs
Use Bridges. If you still need to interact with people on legacy platforms, use bridges.
Matrix make it super easy to interact with people on Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. Set this up for yourself and you get to be the pioneer of the group who can lead them to a better way.
And how is that going to help if you're the only one in the friends group that uses Matrix? Your messages still end up on discord and half the features won't work. What do you achieve compared to using a throwaway account?
You will be the only one at first.
If you use a thrrowaway, Discord still keeps their dominant position and have no competition, so they will keep enshitifying.
If you use a bridge, more of their accounts will be just bridging bots, real users will be on the alternative networks and they will be forced to compete.
So what features do these bridges support? Does voice chat work? Can I share screen through them? Can I upload attachments?
I would love to switch to something open source, but communication with other people usually has to have the same thing on both ends.
Discord won because it offered more than mumble/teamspeak and did more and better than skype at the time and looks like even to this day. It's even better than slack and teams when it comes to resource usage.
I'm pretty that they had valid reasons to have achieved such a dominant position in the market. But we can say the same about every other platform. Facebook, Reddit, Microsoft, Google... All of them were once the underdog who got a good product and leapfrogged the competition. The problem is what they did after to keep this position.
There is no way to get out of this cycle unless we start championing open source solutions, even if technically inferior at first.
The reason open source solutions never end up overtaking these stupid services that come out and then commit suicide every 7 years is because they're always technically inferior at first, and oftentimes the open source alternative doesn't even have anything remotely close to the paid service on the roadmap.
Maybe this is because of the issues with scaling up a dev team that's formerly just been driven entirely by people's free time, maybe it's just that the ball never gets rolling to begin with, and only people who are ideologically vested in the idea of open source over even their own efficacy of use are the only people who are going to use these alternatives, who knows. Probably, it's just that venture capital is usually willing to back the private, "presentable" company, over the open source guys, for pretty obvious reasons.
It's just short term interest vs. long term interest. In our current economic layout, the former wins pretty consistently. I'd even go so far as to say that the former wins pretty consistently with most kinds of human planning just generally.
I do not have a good solution to this problem.
Do you believe then that all the work from people here is pointless, and that people are just going to leave Lemmy for the next new shiny thing?
I worry that you may be right, but at the same time I can not avoid the "History repeats itself. First as tragedy then as farce":
It frustrates me to no end to think that the average Lemmy user is carrying a very expensive iPhone, yet can not be bothered to contribute even $1/month to the developers. It honestly makes me think sometimes that they deserve all the shit that keeps happening. It's not for lack of warning.
I mean partially, yeah. I dunno.
I think in total I kinda just don't see the migration, for these things, as a big issue. Any sort of, more crystalized or important knowledge, is usually saved on some ancient forum somewhere, or a book, or the internet archive, something to that effect, so realistically we're not losing a whole lot with every migration, except for the kind of, ambient fomo and depression that people tend to have whenever they experience the death of anything, even a kind of shitty internet platform. The death of possibility that it represents.
I mean it's maybe kind of annoying, right, to see this happen repetitively, and for it to be the case that we can never have any "real progress" with any of these applications, right. Everything has to be conceived of as a totally new and independent thing, and nobody can every build on anyone else's work. At the same time, people naturally leap to whatever the next best thing is when these services evaporate, so we usually don't end up losing all that much in terms of technological progression. I'm also not too sure that you can really improve on Discord that much. It already has all your different chatting and video streaming needs, there's not much more you could do without just kinda, turning it into a totally different kind of thing.
I think maybe a more pressing issue, or annoyance, for me, is those actual monopolies which crop up. Shit like youtube, that's probably a bigger problem. They have the total power of a video sharing platform, if anything gets erased from there, it's probably just straight gone, because everyone kind of assumes that the servers are just going to remain free and freely accessible forever. I guess you could always just save your videos, though, but maybe that presents some kind of unsung cost of like, ease of accessibility, right. There's not a great way to sift through all of the millions of hours of video content uploaded every second anyways, so I don't know if it ends up mattering much, most of the time.
In sum I also think it's kind of, misguided to blame the consumer for these sorts of behaviors. They're that way because they've been propagandized too, because their friends all migrate and they are powerless to stop it, etc. The real things at work here are just like, the arbitrary forces of venture capital and the market, and the market regulation that surrounds all of this.
So far, the only reasons I've seen people switch from 1 communication app to another, be it for gaming or just day-to-day messaging is either better features/better quality or what they've been using so far turned into shit. And once enough people switch to the new better thing, the rest will follow.
Unfortunately the open source alternative cannot offer either, it's why they rarely succed.
When whatsapp first started to gain traction it was vastly superior to sms, mms was never really a big thing here.
Discord became king because Microsoft bought skype and made it shit and teamspeak/mumble were not as conveniant.
So next open source thing will have to be at least as good as discord and discord has to become really shitty before anything changes. So far, discord has been anything but flawless, but ads are the first step of the enshitification. People will likely switch to web client + adblock. And when discord decides to block that, that's when the first massive wave of people will switch to the new big thing and probably never look back.
I am hopeful the next thing will be something open, I am very much into that, I always try to look for alternatives, but average person doesn't care, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
I don't want to self host a bunch of shit and spend a week troubleshooting stuff, no one wants to do that.
edit: plus that way you're still literally just using discord through a different UI, what's the point of it anyway
there's literally one person I ever knew that used Matrix and they fucking sucked
You don't need to self host, there are servers that do this for you
Judging people based on the messaging platform (or vice-versa) is one of the most shallow things there is nowadays. It's like girls who say they don't date anyone who uses Android.
Rossman Repair moved their main group over to Matrix. There are people making the jump.
Or maybe he's saying your friends are garbage eaters. Or at least content to chow down.
Holy fucking shit please touch at least 1 (one) singular blade of grass I beg you motherfuckers
I don't know anyone who's used IRC in the last fifteen years at least.
At least back when I used IRC, it wasn't indexed either. It was just an alternative to AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo Chat.
I still use it occasionally. It's primarily used for smaller, more private communities, but Wikipedia also hosts official IRC rooms, too. I don't know of any other major companies that use IRC in an official capacity, though.
The alternatives at the time were steam voice chat or Skype, and both were awful to use.
Unless IRC has changed drastically in recent years, or maybe people are using proprietary extensions, it only supports a fraction of the features discord does.
The reason why gamers pivoted to discord is it was irc, team speak, and Skype in one platform that just worked
IRC doesn't have sub-channels AFAIK. Also no image support, search, video-conferencing, etc.
The sheer amount of features and stability.
Comparing Discord to IRC is like comparing playing tennis to baking a cake. Just two entirely different things.
The usual answer is "people are stupid", which can't be true - people spend lots of effort to be less stupid, and when interacting with those people in unusual and unexpected ways you might find out they are much smarter than they seem.
The correct answer is that people don't know what they can do with computers. So they accept any bullshit.
Stupid, no. Lazy, absolutely.
More stimuli means more being done with the same lazy person.