Co-founder Jason Citron is stepping down, but will remain with the company as a member of the board of directors.
Fuck you, byeeeeeeeeee
im on a year paid sub but ill be cancelling that shit
Great time to plug that https://revolt.chat/ is coming along nicely! The Android app is being reworked and is in rough shape at the moment, but the biggest feature missing from the desktop app (where I figure it matters most) is screen sharing. Otherwise it’s an entirely serviceable Discord clone that is FOSS and would benefit greatly from additional support. I, for one, will be taking the money that was paying for my Nitro and donating it to Revolt instead.
Does it have e2ee messages (even in group chats) and calling? One reason we never used discord is because it lacked that.
No, it should be treated as what it is: a public forum. The only app I would trust to keep my messages truly private is Signal.
They are working on it: https://github.com/orgs/revoltchat/discussions/597
Also we disagree as not all groups on even discord are public since many require invites or accepting requests to join.
I certainly won’t say no to additional privacy! But until I see cryptography experts call it secure, I’m going to continue to treat it as a public forum.
Fair enough
Did they fix the self-hosted option? If it works well, I would immediately jump to it.
I don’t believe so, and honestly I don’t think it needs to be. It’s already FOSS. And honestly self-hosting would just complicate the process more for normies who apparently can’t figure out Mastodon as it is. Maybe if we have at lest one thing that’s dummy simple and familiar that’s FOSS, maybe it’ll be the foot in the door to getting them more comfortable with the FOSS world and out of the corporate sphere.
And honestly I just really want my friends off of fucking Discord, and the more Revolt continues to literally, in every way be “Discord but open source,” the better the odds of that happening is.
Whenever there is a single party controlling critical infrastructure, there is a potential for enshittification - even if it starts as a FOSS endeavor.
Ability to self-host a full copy of the service is the best protection we have so far.
While that’s true, the nature of it being FOSS also ensures the potential for forking and going our own way. So for right now, maybe it’s better that it’s not self-hosted, long enough to get a large number of Discord users on-board, then fork it if it does enshittify and make the fork self-hosted. At the very least, again, this is an opportunity to get a large number of normies to see the value of FOSS projects and enter the FOSS world. And that has immense value not just for Revolt, but for the FOSS world as a whole.
I see your point!
And I do see yours as well! I agree self-hosting gas greater resistance to devs going rogue when all the hosts can just stop participating. But the beauty of Open Source is that if it’s ever truly so bad, the project can always just fork.
if revolt puts out a ppa repository they’ll already be better than discord
It’s not an official packaging, but it is on Flathub, so maybe they have somewhere?
How is this app supposed to ensure its continued existence? I see no mention of donations, federation, or advertisement
The desktop app has a donation button in the settings. There’s also links to their donation pages on their github, but I do think in both instances they should have their donation link more front and center; it’s proven to work out well for multiple other FOSS projects.
Ah, I see. I was only looking at their website
It’s joever fellas 😔
My friends and I can always find 50 other apps for voice chatting, texting and screen sharing. What pisses me off royally is the thousands of companies/groups that decided instead of making forums or websites or GitHub pages, they would just host EVERYTHING from within Discord’s walled garden.
While it sucks for us users, I do hope discord will continue to get more and more shit and force these losers who chose to host documentation on Discord to rethink their choices.
The thing is that discord has fostered fantastic communities in the way that forums never could have. I have personally witnessed no less than 5 communities that are thriving due to primarily using discord. Their forums were an utter shit show.
The fact that you can’t seem to understand why people have done this means that you do not understand the fundamental issue at hand.
Wild response. Why don’t you kindly suck both my dick and my balls?
I apologize for sounding ignorant but what do people use discord for exactly?
It could be that I don’t enough friends on it to replace text messaging.
I tried to join a bunch of communities to replace Reddit with discord but the stream of consciousness design of the channel posts kinda muddles everything since you can’t really separate the replies from the submissions.
I guess I should be happy I didn’t get invested in something that looks like it’s changing for the worse but kinda curious when I see people get really upset about change and wonder what I missed out on haha
what do people use discord for exactly?
Too much.
It’s a chat platform geared towards gamers, with voice chat, screen sharing, and streaming options… that’s been coopted by vloggers… but most unsettlingly, it’s being used for customer support and documentation.
A lot of knowledge bases are buried in the walled garden of servers, and a labyrinth of chat rooms.
im in a bunch of twitch streamer communities
For me, the huge value-add of Discord is for gaming (and is what Discord was created for). In college, my friends and I were originally using Skype calls when we’d play League together, but it was super annoying; essentially in order to not have to create a new call and add everyone who happened to be playing every time we just had one giant call with everyone we’d “redial” when playing. The downside is that if you were on Skype but not part of the game (in class or something) you’d get the Skype call invitation and have to decline it.
Switching to Discord was fantastic. We’d just have a persistent voice channel for different games, and you could chill in there to indicate it’s what you were playing or wanted to play, and if someone wanted to join they just jump on the call. It was also nice for organizing our text chats into different subjects (using different text channels), so if you were trying to ask if anyone had any advice for a certain class, you wouldn’t have your messages drowned out by people talking about news about a upcoming game. We just have a “games” text channels and a “classes” text channels and a “weekend plans” text channel, etc. This became particularly important as the server grew from friends to friends of friends and would’ve been overwhelming to have everyone stuck in one chat.
That’s pretty much been the extent of my Discord use, and I’m continually amazed to hear how others have been using it. I’ve seen the “join us on Discord, X, Facebook, etc.” for different games coming out, but never thought much of it or ever considered doing that.
Sounds like a fantastic way to use the app. My wife has a friend who does that playing online games and I guess I always thought they just called each other haha.
But actually sounds like an interesting idea to try and get my friends (all in our late 30s) to talk a little more and maybe actually get some plans together.
Thank you!
Personally? The vast bulk of my interactions with people online. Voice chat, DMs, servers for pretty much everything. Being involved in roleplaying communities in DayZ and Conan, the vast majority of the behind-the-scenes stuff is taking place on discord. Servers for particular game servers as well as groups make up a pretty big portion of my list, along with smaller private discord servers of networks of players from various other servers. It’s how I stay connected with dozens of people I’ve known for years.
I’m also in quite a few discords related to modding and game development. Nearly every modder has their own discord, which is extremely useful if you’re running your own game servers and need to be in contact with them or if you make mods yourself and want to seek advice or information for compatibility. The same is true of a lot of other non-gaming software, with many developers having their own servers where they post updates and where you can find advice or post suggestions.
I’ve got a few queer community servers on my list, which were particularly helpful when I was early in my transition before I really had gotten around to rebuilding my social network and finding accepting people. There’s even a discord for a group of animators I used to spend a lot of time with back in the mid 00s; back then we were using forums and IRC mostly, and a little bit of Skype, but these days it’s been a good way to keep in touch.
If I’m home and on my computer, I’m almost always in a discord voice chat. It’s basically the modern equivalent of AIM or ICQ or Facebook, but with loads of added features and without Meta being involved. I even use it for note taking and storing images and screencaps.
Even something like Matrix, at the moment, doesn’t really cover all the voice and video chat features that Discord does. It’s close, but it’s missing essential components like push-to-talk, and it requires workarounds to enable things like screen sharing.
Discord turning to shit would be a real pain in the ass.
A former Activision CEO. Can you announce “hostility to our users” any louder, Discord?
Well, that’s that ruined then.
And so the hell-loop continues. Matrix seems like the closest successor, but having used it for awhile I would describe the experience as janky-but-workable. Signal’s good, but requires a phone number. I hear that Mumble’s good, but it’s overly focused on VoIP. Hopefully the alternatives polish themselves up before the enshittification gets too bad.
I use Matrix, but like a lot of the Fediverse (I know it’s technically a different protocol, but still), it’s not normie friendly. If it were more plug n play it might take off. I just don’t look forward to when they’ll have ads or start making us pay. It’s so tiring shuffling from platform to platform because of some greedy CEO.
There’s a huge opportunity not just for Matrix, but also for other open source or distributed players here, if they can move quickly enough.
They won’t, though.
You can nowadays create a signal account without a phone number, you’ll get a user name instead
Oh? When did they change that?
I also thought you could create an account without your phone number nowadays, but since I already have a phone-connected account, I haven’t tested. Only thing I found in their blog was this: https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/
Until now, someone needed to know your phone number to reach you on Signal. Now, you can connect on Signal without needing to hand out your phone number. (You will still need a phone number to register for Signal.) This is where usernames come in.
There are some newer post about other changes, but I haven’t checked them in detail.
So glad I never got into that thing.
Just doesn’t understand why so many people prefer Discord over forums. In terms of information preservation Discord sucks!
I hate how discord has replaced this forum culture in many places for this reason, but overall it’s incredibly good for participating in communities in real-time, especially smaller ones. I agree with the forum part, but aside from that it has also replaced IRC, Skype/MSN/ICQ, TeamSpeak, etc. all in one place, while even expanding on their features. It’s unbeaten for friend groups or smaller communities to create a space just for themselves that features text chat, voice chat, screen/video sharing etc.
Unfortunately though the open source alternatives, even the ones trying to be fully compatible with discord, have not yet reached this featureset and usability level. Also one big issue with communications tools like this is they rely heavily on adoption. Doesn’t help me when I can convince my closest friends to switch to Matrix for example, when there’s so many more people that I interact with on a daily basis through discord who I have no control over. Especially when the alternative just doesn’t cut it for all these normies who don’t understand the implications of big companies controlling such exclusive spaces.
It’s even become mandatory by communities in some games, which is something I hate with passion. For instance, many MMORPG communities are on Discord these days (e.g. Guild Wars 2, more specifically the raiding scene).
So I subscribed to these communities and started using Discord. I still don’t get the appeal, it’s a cluttered mess all over the place and it doesn’t feel intuitive to use. Maybe I’m getting old…
I think the main thing is that it’s the lowest friction for just sending a message, making a “post” gives people pause, but sending a message people will do no problem, so small communities get more activity in Discord than anywhere else
Note that when you join a Space, you are not automatically joining all the rooms inside it.
this is going to be a bit painful for people who are used to Discord
Hey, listen I know it’s bad and all but discord makes it really easy to create your own channel, customize it however you want and organize study/gaming with friends.
Since it’s convenient and easy to setup and use, people use it for things they really shouldn’t.
To bring back forums we need another equally easy to setup and host forums system that modernizes the bbs.
Gonna go ahead and show my ignorance here, but why is this such a bad thing?
Shareholders want quick profits & they don’t care if the service shuts down in 10 years, or becomes largely unusable in 3-5.
Cause things that make most money for shareholders make the worst experience for the end user.
Public companies have to account for the shareholdres’ expectation of, well, making money (and more money, and more money, and growing the numbers as much as possible). Shareholders have some degree influence on how the company works, depending on how many shares they own, e.g. they can vote for the CEO. This usually leads to the company to introducing more aggressive ways of making money off the users/customers, enshittification, etc., as it has to satisfy the shareholders and not so much the original customers.
That sucks
Lol IRC knockoff
Any good options recommended for self-hosting something similarly functional that doesn’t take too much effort to get up, audit, maintain? Discovery isn’t really important for me, so federated isn’t really necessary, but a cool extra. I’d love to host something or contribute to hosting for my gaming groups, my class or multiple classes at my school, or otherwise. Voice, chat, screen share, camera, would all be great if possible, but range of options would be good. I’m still using Mumble for gaming…
Haven’t tinkered much with Matrix nor do I know much about Revolt, but I’m curious before I look into it deeper if anyone in the community has experience hosting any communication platforms for small, invitational groups.
Matrix is probably be the best bet atm, although I’m hoping for Spacebar to get more mature as they are aiming for feature parity and compatibility with discord. This way you can host your server with Spacebar, use their client and still be friends with discord users/be in discord servers that haven’t switched yet. Only thing impossible with Spacebar is discord users joining your self hosted server, but once they reach feature maturity (esp in regards to voicechat and videochat) it’ll make switching super seamless.
Nothing comes close to the feature set offered by Discord, Matrix’ bad priorities unfortunately made sure of this. There currently is a project to fix their shit even if it means to break some bad decisions, Tuwunel, however it’s neither ready nor is it clear where it will end up. The previous project it forked, Conduwuit, got bullied into giving up.
You’ll probably be best off with a classic 2-way approach for now. Stick with Mumble for Voice and get something nice for Chat and Organizing like Mattermost or Revolt (or even IRC if you’re a purist). With some luck Discord’s strong enshittification will give projects like Tuwunel the necessary push it needs to force Matrix to finally care for more than just the needs of governments and their perfectionism that gets them nowhere for years now. That or we’ll see some kind of soft-fork with even more bad blood.
This just sounds like FUD.
What should the Matrix developers have prioritized instead? Chat programs are complicated, especially when you’re making them distributed. You’re comparing an organization and a MSP with like $1M/yr revenue with a soon-to-IPO company with $600M/yr in revenue.
What feature is missing from Matrix that is preventing Discord users from joining?
Is this a joke? Even if you ignore the overly fancy stuff like those Forum-like features Matrix can hardly do the basics correctly. The encryption constantly causes issues, Voice feature is still beta, the UX is a mess, the UI is lackluster, basic features are missing (you can’t even set the Voice Activation level, wtf), there are no integrated admin tools and the third-party UIs are either wonky or lackluster, the software (both server and client) is a bloated mess that takes aeons to do anything and is awful to develop (a friend looked at it and quickly decided it’s not worth all the hassle)…
Of course there’s a difference in size, still they could’ve figured things out way better in the last decade. People ask for voice channels since 2017, and not just did they have a working Jitsi integration, there also are WebRTC frameworks ready to use they could’ve picked. And even now with that Beta feature it is more than obvious they do not want it to work as simple as Discord, but more like a professional software for meetings (that or they just really love creating convoluted UI).
There’s no way to get any majority of Discord users to use this mess. We discussed this once in our local hackerspace, and while the general opinion of course was more complex given some people know how complicated the protocol is, there also was a consensus that the software as it is is “not great to use”. And if even hackers / enthusiasts are saying this there’s no way in hell to convince casual users.
[sarcasm] Who could gave ever seen it coming? [/sarcasm]
Honestly, the writing was on the wall for a long time, it had no clear business model and was a mess. It was always going to go this way and I tried pointing out that it was a bad platform but nobody either cared or believed me. Whelp, looks like I was a Cassandra yet again.
Hope Open Source people can make something to fill the gap, there really is nothing else (yet). Matrix really doesn’t have the features and that which it does have is often bad UX and doesn’t work everywhere. Not seen anything else which will fill the gap and I’ve been looking but I guess nobody thought discord would go down or just don’t really know how to make something that would fill the gap, or didn’t want to.
