Side note, is there there a good open source alternative to Discord in terms of it’s exact functionality? (And I don’t mean as a forum alternative, but voice comms and streaming). After their app update, I’m kind of annoyed with them. Yet, my community is rather dependent on them despite their enshittification.
We got sucked in because you could simply link it to randos on MMOs and if they didn’t want to download an app, could still have voice comms in browser. Before that, we had ventrillo, mumble, etc, but nothing was quite as easy access for randos. But man, they kind of suck lately so… hrm. :/
I get the testicular fortitude that someone has to have to make that kind of comment here on Lemmy, that has very hardcore Linux tech-based audience, but still, the general electronics using public would agree with what I’m saying.
TIL that typing in a username, server address and hitting ‘Connect’ is a bad UX.
I’m not surprised. It’s not right for Discord to disable the servers and accounts, but at the same time, if you are hosting a community it shouldn’t be on discord since you aren’t in control of it
I really shouldn’t. Using discord is dumb. Using discord for a switch emulator, while Nintendos lawyers are waking around with their cocks out is stupid.
I think you just need to know what you are getting into.
It’s a private company, it’s closed to sourced, they capture and monetise your data.
For people who value transparency and privacy, there are better options. This emulator project, should have known better than to use is.
aaalll of that being said, it’s very popular and if you are not concerned by any of the points raised in this who threads, it’s a good place to meet people to chat about Warcraft or whatever your thing is.
Just be aware that any thing your write, effectively belongs to them forever.
Yep, I’ve known specialists that are extremely good at their job but when you hear them talk about other stuff you sometimes wonder how they manage to tie their shoes in the morning.
If their priority is to make a nintendo emulator, they have to think about keeping their lines of communication secure against corporate legal threats, because those lines of communication are basically what software development is.
Sure, but they also need to be on a platform that people actually use. I agree that there are lots of reasons against Discord, but my point is, they didn’t choose Discord because of a lack of intelligence.
Have you considered that the person you consider smart is focusing all their brain power on their projects and they don’t have time to set up and maintain a website? That’s what discord is for, an easy, quick and dirty community aggregate
That’s what discord is for, an easy, quick and dirty community aggregate
and thats also the reason why this project is now gone…
also you are pretty much “paying” with all you information and since they started heavily monetizing Discord you will pay even more as they soon will start to sell you conveniences or essential features. Also Tencent you know, which is pretty much like Nestlé, so it should be avoided.
I will say this, if you are a Lemmy user, sure probably.
But I did a simple websearch for “how to set up a freenode server.” The very first 3 things I saw (what fits on the screen) were a page full of syntax, a 13 minute YouTube video, and a page where the first thing that’s written is literally “Internet Relay Chat is a difficult thing to get used to, especially for people who were born into this world of full graphical interfaces and messaging web apps that handle user interaction seamlessly.”
For the average user, creating a channel does not “take seconds” if you need proof, discord. Its popular because it is so easy to use and the numbers back that up
Uhm, freenode already exists, you don’t have to set up another server just to create a channel.
There are clients that are embeddable into webpages as well, so joining an existing channel could be as simple as opening a page for a new user.
Otherwise it’s just install a client, select freenode and join the channel.
I challenge you to find a non tech savvy person who can do this In under 10 minutes.
Lemmy is absolutely an echo chamber of the tech minded, you have to remember most people wouldn’t be able to even get on this platform because that “little bit of effort” is way too much for them
While there’s truth in your words, there are alternatives that require little effort. Even a IRC channel would have been better.
Discord is not only a terrible bad application, it’s the equivalent of writing posts on medium. If and when they decide to gatekeep your content, there’s nothing you can do.
IRC is considered unsafe too to a certain degree with pirating folks.
Also let me emphasize this: for every discord server shut down like this, there are 100+ servers with almost the same purpose that still exist and will continue to for at least the next 3y.
If you are doing development as a hobby, you just don’t have the time to use a different system, get used to that system, and then critically convince everyone else to go there too. Just look at Lemmy, I want it to be great as well but we have to accept that a few tiny steps more in the day to say usability of a system can be the difference between Twitter and Mastodon. And before ppl are saying “well Twitter was there longer”, sure but that doesn’t mean we cannot see the trend for growth that does or doesn’t exist.
Also let me emphasize this: for every discord server shut down like this, there are 100+ servers with almost the same purpose that still exist and will continue to for at least the next 3y.
you completely missed the point here:
the issue that those aren’t around NOW, the issue is that they WILL inevitably disappear eventually and every shred of knowledge platformed there will be irretrievably lost to the void.
discord is a black hole for information:
it sucks information in and deletes it from existence.
the issue that those aren’t around NOW, the issue is that they WILL inevitably disappear eventually and every shred of knowledge platformed there will be irretrievably lost to the void.
That’s still not really the purpose of discord, and I think you have actually missed the point. It’s not an informational archive, it’s a tech support line, and oftentimes one which can be used to improve the FAQ and documentation, which is usually found on GitHub or independently hosted, and is usually light enough in weight that it can just be copy pasted anywhere or even included in software. For much of these kinds of software, creating an incredibly comprehensive and well-organized FAQ isn’t as large of an up-front priority as mashing bugs. Of that use case, what strikes you as better, the app that everyone already uses, or IRC?
Not easily searchable, only solves the problem of the user who is currently being interacted with, and on top of that a forum does everything you mentioned but better because it is indexed in the web, meaning the next person with that problem will probably find the forum post before they contact you. No one is taking these discord chats and updating FAQs with them, and if they were, they could save that time by just having a forum that is indexed by search engines. IRC isn’t the best option, but it limits corpo takedowns like this so at least what you have doesn’t randomly get nuked one day. Altogether, moving from forums to discord is a massive downgrade and much information will be lost in the Discord Exodus that will come with time as the company consumes its users for the shareholders.
No one is taking these discord chats and updating FAQs with them
Why do you think this is, though? This really hasn’t been my experience, people are usually pretty quick to add shit to the FAQ if it actually comes up ime.
You’re also relying a lot, ironically, on Google, when you advocate for using search engines as a repository for forums. Google is not that good anymore, and most forums don’t come up. For a niche software, do you think the specific forum for that software would actually come up 99% of the time, or would the results just be flooded by a bunch of youtube tutorials and posts to random subreddits and other forums about irrelevant shit that you weren’t looking for? If you were even lucky enough to get results in the first place, that is. Partially this is due to things moving to discord, but partially it’s due to Google having an effective monopoly on search engining.
If you’re just going to like, go to a forum and use the forum’s internal search. One, it probably sucks because they always have these stupid idiot rules like no common words and it has to be in a range of 4-40 characters and no symbols, shit like that, which sucks. But also, you can do the same thing with discord and just navigate to the web version and then just look up what you wanted to find on the chat logs and read an old conversation. They seem functionally pretty similar in that respect.
Moderating a forum to protect against random people spamming you with CSAM attacks is also more time-consuming for a small developer, and it’s also time consuming to redirect people to previous threads when they inevitably come in and post shit that’s already been asked about, which is also going to breed probably a more insular culture than discord, as impossible as that might seem. Again, you’re also waiting like 2 days for a response, and this is especially stupid when you’re dealing with a back and forth, because not everyone is going to put in the effort to present their problems as thoroughly as possible and present you with like an actual bug report or screenshots or anything. They might not even know what to search for or ask about, and then they’re completely fucked. It’s easier to manage discord because of it’s more active nature.
Basically, the problem is this: Forums put more responsibility and onus on the users to adequately present their problems in a more easily parsable format, and better search for solutions to their own problems. It’s not a mystery, then, why people might prefer to use discord, in my mind.
The lack of intelligence is thinking you can build a grey zone project in discord. It’s like saying you want to build a house but don’t want to pour a foundation. Like, good for you, focus on windows and paint, but you’re not gonna get anywhere.
Easy quick and dirty are not acceptable when you are trying to build emulation software based on the products of a very litigious international corporation
Not entirely true. IRC can have network splits (I believe they were referred to as netsplits if I remember correctly) where one network can drop out. You can notice this when you see like 50+ people leave a channel at the exact same time because the network they were on disconnected, it’s kind of interesting imo lol but also I’m a nerd so maybe that’s why I find it interesting.
Revolt is promising in that it’s trying to be a direct Discord clone, but it’s also being made by one person as a passion project, and it sounds like it’s their first time doing a project of this size. Last time I checked, encryption was not even implemented in it yet.
Matrix is distinctly different from Discord, but it’s certainly more mature and featurefull as well.
I guess if you like matrix thats cool, but I did just do a quick google and it looks like their clients and server backend are all open source (AGPL-3) and self-hostable so I wouldn’t say there’s much to distrust.
Until ten years ago we used TeamSpeak for voice chat, IRC and forum for text. You can host all of them yourself. Today we have the fediverse and matrix.
The problem is that kids get caught by the likes of tiktok and discord (because they are easily accessible with no other requirements than a phone or pc) and they can’t get away from them.
They don’t really need a chat though, do they? For their purpose of user-interfacing development and tracking, a forum would be much more useful when coupled with a code hosting system, no?
Can do bug reporting/tracking and development through the latter, while the former allows discoverable FAQ, dev-to-user and user-to-user support. With chat, the last point is just about impossible plus it’s not discoverable.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
“We will repeat in every sentence that we are not a for-profit emulator, we’ll be fine!”
Yeah.
Side note, is there there a good open source alternative to Discord in terms of it’s exact functionality? (And I don’t mean as a forum alternative, but voice comms and streaming). After their app update, I’m kind of annoyed with them. Yet, my community is rather dependent on them despite their enshittification.
We got sucked in because you could simply link it to randos on MMOs and if they didn’t want to download an app, could still have voice comms in browser. Before that, we had ventrillo, mumble, etc, but nothing was quite as easy access for randos. But man, they kind of suck lately so… hrm. :/
Rocket.Chat and Matrix come to mind. The latter’s element client (the default) even looks extremely Discord-ish.
There’s Revolt.chat
googled Sudachi, and its GPL 3 but:
yeah that’s gonna go real swell for them
Even beyond the point of “using discord”. Nintendo is reaching harassment levels of assholism. Are they doing even worse that with Gaty Bowser?
You all should have stayed on IRC
You’re not wrong, but also, it’s way too complicated for the regular person to use. A better UX is needed.
I used to on irc when i was 10 fucking years old. You type.in the serve and then type #before the room you want to use.
Did they put lead back in gasoline when i wasn’t looking or something?
We used to fly on planes by laying stomach down on the wing. Didn’t make it the best way to fly though.
The UX of any process/device gets improved over time, and adapts to the generation that is using it.
Would the newest gens even know what a command line prompt even is at this point?
TIL that typing in a username, server address and hitting ‘Connect’ is a bad UX.
GUI > CL. 😇
I get the testicular fortitude that someone has to have to make that kind of comment here on Lemmy, that has very hardcore Linux tech-based audience, but still, the general electronics using public would agree with what I’m saying.
UX is more than just a single login.
People downvoting you don’t seem to remember the whole “messages aren’t delivered while you’re not online” thing
hostserv
This reminds me that I need to uninstall discord. Thanks!
I’m not surprised. It’s not right for Discord to disable the servers and accounts, but at the same time, if you are hosting a community it shouldn’t be on discord since you aren’t in control of it
Wish they gave as much of a shit about shutting down pedophilia and OnlyFans leak servers as they do licking Nintendo’s boots.
Discord is an inherently unsafe platform.
Pretty fucking authoritarian for a company that uses the OPA’s split circle as its logo
Wait. The OPA from expanse? There is some resemblance, but I’d say it more looks like a gamepad/emoji hybrid.
Good discord is trash.
I often revere the people who can do smart shit.
I really shouldn’t. Using discord is dumb. Using discord for a switch emulator, while Nintendos lawyers are waking around with their cocks out is stupid.
Is it wrong to seek for online friends in discord?
I think you just need to know what you are getting into.
It’s a private company, it’s closed to sourced, they capture and monetise your data.
For people who value transparency and privacy, there are better options. This emulator project, should have known better than to use is.
aaalll of that being said, it’s very popular and if you are not concerned by any of the points raised in this who threads, it’s a good place to meet people to chat about Warcraft or whatever your thing is.
Just be aware that any thing your write, effectively belongs to them forever.
Yeah, tbh I am only using it because lots of people do not want to get off discord.
I’ve said this recently, but intelligence is domain specific. People just being generally “smart” is not a thing people should really care about.
Yep, I’ve known specialists that are extremely good at their job but when you hear them talk about other stuff you sometimes wonder how they manage to tie their shoes in the morning.
It’s not a matter of intelligence, these people just have different priorities.
If their priority is to make a nintendo emulator, they have to think about keeping their lines of communication secure against corporate legal threats, because those lines of communication are basically what software development is.
Sure, but they also need to be on a platform that people actually use. I agree that there are lots of reasons against Discord, but my point is, they didn’t choose Discord because of a lack of intelligence.
Have you considered that the person you consider smart is focusing all their brain power on their projects and they don’t have time to set up and maintain a website? That’s what discord is for, an easy, quick and dirty community aggregate
Not for a minute, no.
and thats also the reason why this project is now gone…
also you are pretty much “paying” with all you information and since they started heavily monetizing Discord you will pay even more as they soon will start to sell you conveniences or essential features. Also Tencent you know, which is pretty much like Nestlé, so it should be avoided.
Creating a channel on freenode takes seconds
I will say this, if you are a Lemmy user, sure probably.
But I did a simple websearch for “how to set up a freenode server.” The very first 3 things I saw (what fits on the screen) were a page full of syntax, a 13 minute YouTube video, and a page where the first thing that’s written is literally “Internet Relay Chat is a difficult thing to get used to, especially for people who were born into this world of full graphical interfaces and messaging web apps that handle user interaction seamlessly.”
For the average user, creating a channel does not “take seconds” if you need proof, discord. Its popular because it is so easy to use and the numbers back that up
Uhm, freenode already exists, you don’t have to set up another server just to create a channel. There are clients that are embeddable into webpages as well, so joining an existing channel could be as simple as opening a page for a new user.
Otherwise it’s just install a client, select freenode and join the channel.
I challenge you to find a non tech savvy person who can do this In under 10 minutes.
Lemmy is absolutely an echo chamber of the tech minded, you have to remember most people wouldn’t be able to even get on this platform because that “little bit of effort” is way too much for them
Lol everybody did this in the '00s and '10s. It’s literally “copy this text in that field”.
Stop treating people like idiots.
While there’s truth in your words, there are alternatives that require little effort. Even a IRC channel would have been better.
Discord is not only a terrible bad application, it’s the equivalent of writing posts on medium. If and when they decide to gatekeep your content, there’s nothing you can do.
Always easy to say this in hindsight.
IRC is considered unsafe too to a certain degree with pirating folks.
Also let me emphasize this: for every discord server shut down like this, there are 100+ servers with almost the same purpose that still exist and will continue to for at least the next 3y.
If you are doing development as a hobby, you just don’t have the time to use a different system, get used to that system, and then critically convince everyone else to go there too. Just look at Lemmy, I want it to be great as well but we have to accept that a few tiny steps more in the day to say usability of a system can be the difference between Twitter and Mastodon. And before ppl are saying “well Twitter was there longer”, sure but that doesn’t mean we cannot see the trend for growth that does or doesn’t exist.
you completely missed the point here:
the issue that those aren’t around NOW, the issue is that they WILL inevitably disappear eventually and every shred of knowledge platformed there will be irretrievably lost to the void.
discord is a black hole for information:
it sucks information in and deletes it from existence.
that’s why it’s bad.
the time frame doesn’t really matter here.
That’s still not really the purpose of discord, and I think you have actually missed the point. It’s not an informational archive, it’s a tech support line, and oftentimes one which can be used to improve the FAQ and documentation, which is usually found on GitHub or independently hosted, and is usually light enough in weight that it can just be copy pasted anywhere or even included in software. For much of these kinds of software, creating an incredibly comprehensive and well-organized FAQ isn’t as large of an up-front priority as mashing bugs. Of that use case, what strikes you as better, the app that everyone already uses, or IRC?
Not easily searchable, only solves the problem of the user who is currently being interacted with, and on top of that a forum does everything you mentioned but better because it is indexed in the web, meaning the next person with that problem will probably find the forum post before they contact you. No one is taking these discord chats and updating FAQs with them, and if they were, they could save that time by just having a forum that is indexed by search engines. IRC isn’t the best option, but it limits corpo takedowns like this so at least what you have doesn’t randomly get nuked one day. Altogether, moving from forums to discord is a massive downgrade and much information will be lost in the Discord Exodus that will come with time as the company consumes its users for the shareholders.
Why do you think this is, though? This really hasn’t been my experience, people are usually pretty quick to add shit to the FAQ if it actually comes up ime.
You’re also relying a lot, ironically, on Google, when you advocate for using search engines as a repository for forums. Google is not that good anymore, and most forums don’t come up. For a niche software, do you think the specific forum for that software would actually come up 99% of the time, or would the results just be flooded by a bunch of youtube tutorials and posts to random subreddits and other forums about irrelevant shit that you weren’t looking for? If you were even lucky enough to get results in the first place, that is. Partially this is due to things moving to discord, but partially it’s due to Google having an effective monopoly on search engining.
If you’re just going to like, go to a forum and use the forum’s internal search. One, it probably sucks because they always have these stupid idiot rules like no common words and it has to be in a range of 4-40 characters and no symbols, shit like that, which sucks. But also, you can do the same thing with discord and just navigate to the web version and then just look up what you wanted to find on the chat logs and read an old conversation. They seem functionally pretty similar in that respect.
Moderating a forum to protect against random people spamming you with CSAM attacks is also more time-consuming for a small developer, and it’s also time consuming to redirect people to previous threads when they inevitably come in and post shit that’s already been asked about, which is also going to breed probably a more insular culture than discord, as impossible as that might seem. Again, you’re also waiting like 2 days for a response, and this is especially stupid when you’re dealing with a back and forth, because not everyone is going to put in the effort to present their problems as thoroughly as possible and present you with like an actual bug report or screenshots or anything. They might not even know what to search for or ask about, and then they’re completely fucked. It’s easier to manage discord because of it’s more active nature.
Basically, the problem is this: Forums put more responsibility and onus on the users to adequately present their problems in a more easily parsable format, and better search for solutions to their own problems. It’s not a mystery, then, why people might prefer to use discord, in my mind.
Or matrix which is far more modern and user friendly than IRC.
The lack of intelligence is thinking you can build a grey zone project in discord. It’s like saying you want to build a house but don’t want to pour a foundation. Like, good for you, focus on windows and paint, but you’re not gonna get anywhere.
Easy quick and dirty are not acceptable when you are trying to build emulation software based on the products of a very litigious international corporation
That’s not what discord is for if you are doing anything where a big corporation wants to muscle you around.
Huh, I thought it was just a chat room to get to know people.
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I know. It would be so fucking cool. Oh well.
What exactly are you referring to? Matrix?
There’s also IRC
How is IRC decentralized?
Because everyone can spin up their own irc server. It’s not federated though.
irc is booring and dated
(even though it’s much more robust than matrix and does not suffer from desyncs and stuff)
Not entirely true. IRC can have network splits (I believe they were referred to as netsplits if I remember correctly) where one network can drop out. You can notice this when you see like 50+ people leave a channel at the exact same time because the network they were on disconnected, it’s kind of interesting imo lol but also I’m a nerd so maybe that’s why I find it interesting.
it’s not as big of an issue as on matrix.
stuff can desync and the server has to decide which state is canonical, dropping out some messages
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What would it be called?
Email!
Datcord?
And we could call it… XMPP! Maybe that’s too nerdy… What about Jabber?
Just learned about Revolt.chat. It looks to have great potential. It’s basically a Discord clone.
Revolt is promising in that it’s trying to be a direct Discord clone, but it’s also being made by one person as a passion project, and it sounds like it’s their first time doing a project of this size. Last time I checked, encryption was not even implemented in it yet.
Matrix is distinctly different from Discord, but it’s certainly more mature and featurefull as well.
I just had a KDE/Gnome flashback from reading your comment.
Couldn’t agree more. Revolt is still in it’s infancy, but it has great potential.
Personally I don’t trust it. Don’t really have any reason not to but it just feels eh to me. Just use matrix
I guess if you like matrix thats cool, but I did just do a quick google and it looks like their clients and server backend are all open source (AGPL-3) and self-hostable so I wouldn’t say there’s much to distrust.
Matrix is great at what it does, but it’s not a replacement for Discord imho.
There is also Jami, if you want to just chat with friends
Until ten years ago we used TeamSpeak for voice chat, IRC and forum for text. You can host all of them yourself. Today we have the fediverse and matrix. The problem is that kids get caught by the likes of tiktok and discord (because they are easily accessible with no other requirements than a phone or pc) and they can’t get away from them.
I don’t want to get victim blamey, but…
They should just spin up their own Lemmy instance
Yeah, and a Matrix instance
They don’t really need a chat though, do they? For their purpose of user-interfacing development and tracking, a forum would be much more useful when coupled with a code hosting system, no?
Can do bug reporting/tracking and development through the latter, while the former allows discoverable FAQ, dev-to-user and user-to-user support. With chat, the last point is just about impossible plus it’s not discoverable.
I don’t know man, I’m not a doctor. They just had a Discord already so I assume they wanted one.
Discord is a shit, always was shit. Shitty platform, shitty (electron) apps.
Suyu is a troll project anyway so
Makes sense /s