I’m personally crossing my fingers for Discord.
The day I don’t see “join our Discord” where I would earlier expect to find “visit our forums” will be a good day.
A bloated live chat monolith is not what I want to use to discuss game bugs or podcast episodes.
Agreed. Live chat has its place for certain things, but for other things a forum type interface is better suited.
that’s my biggest pet peeve, too.
GloriousEggroll, the mastermind behind modified version of Valve’s Proton, posts his code on GitHub, and then links to his Discord as a place for reporting bugs.
I actually quit using his Linux distro in large part because the communications were so terrible with Discord being the only way he disseminates information (so so poorly).
There were issues and the necessary information couldn’t flow effectively in either direction.
Thats uhhh… interesting. Why…?
the only reason I can think of is “to spite me”.
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Revolt seems to be to Discord what Lemmy/Kbin are to reddit, but I dont see most people bothering with it unless discord makes some reeaaallly huge mistakes to piss the community off.
People seem pretty annoyed at the changes to usernames, but probably not enough to leave Discord.
Hah, yeah I don’t see people going from “I gotta change my username” to “I gotta change my username and find all my communities in matrix etc.”
I see this as falling under painful but kinda necessary admin, which is nowhere near the level of friction required for a platform switch with massive disruption to communities.
That said, the barrier is lower for chat servers than it is for social media - history matters less in discord than it does for reddit, for example. If the server owners decide to migrate to another platform, they can probably convince people to migrate given a good enough reason and alternative. The people online at any given moment matter more than the last couple months of chat history.
Tbh that whole change has been kinda blown out of proportion, it doesn’t really affect people in any meaningful way IMHO. Discord will have to do much worse to get people to actually stop using it, it is way too convenient as it is, unfortunately.
So much!
It’s just hard to really focus on the content. Short term chatting? Ok! Longterm discussion? BAD!
Discord is a replacement for Skype and IRC. People use it as a substitute for all that plus forums and sometimes an entire website and it’s exhausting.
Completely agree! Especially if it some kind of product support. I hate having to scroll through thousands of chronically ordered chat messages to find the solution to the problem I’m having.
I honestly don’t think the fediverse will become nearly as popular as many seem to.think. It’s still complicated to use/understand for many non-tech enthusiasts, and in the case of Reddit, while people are angry, I doubt most of their users are going anywhere any time soon. Some will leave, but it’s not going to be a small number.
We keep going on about how Reddit relies on it’s “creators”, without whom they’ll die. Frankly, a lot of the highest rated content is just repost of old videos or tiktok videos. A lot of that stuff isn’t original, and the deep conversations are, in my opinion, few and far between. Sure there are some communities whi h have this, but they’re not exactly over represented.
I don’t have statistics to back this up, but I’d be willing to bet an entire doughnut that most reddit users have never posted even a single comment. People with that level (dis)engagement aren’t the type to seek out alternatives. They just kind of drift away.
I honestly don’t think the fediverse will become nearly as popular as many seem to.think.
Probably not gonna get Twitter/Reddit-sized, no, as those platforms have userbases the size of a large country. It’s mostly a question of “can we attract enough users for the ecosystem to be workable” and I think the answer is “yes.” Hell, for me it already is.
It’s mostly a question of “can we attract enough users for the ecosystem to be workable” and I think the answer is “yes.” Hell, for me it already is.
And this I completely agree with.
We may be few, but I’m proud to count myself among those who quit Reddit because of this. (Not that I wasn’t looking for a good reason for a long time).
As long as there’s enough of us to maintain a community here, then we’re golden 🙂. And I’m definitely under the impression that we’re getting there.
I hope so.
Imo Reddit is dying, and while I’m sure some people will get confused by the way it works at first, i think people will stick around
Reddit started out with more tech-y users, then got more mainstream. Maybe the same can happen here.
Reddit blew up when it got decent mobile apps. If the fediverse (is that really what we’re calling it?) gets decent mobile app support that helps simplify the onboarding process and connection to communities there’s a much higher chance.
I knew about Lemmy, Mastadon, and PeerTube before this this latest mess with Reddit, but this finally gave me the push to come over as I’m sure it will for many.
@alehel @noodlejetski I’ll add that when Twitter first hit the fan there was a large influx of Mastodon users, but it quickly fell off. Perhaps there are more tech-savvy Reddit users who will dive into the Fediverse than did with Twitter/Mastodon, but for your average user we’re not approachable enough yet to overcome the inertia of familiarity.
Even if it quickly fell off, I think approximately 70-80% of current Mastodon users came from Twitter, and a big reason for people leaving (after poor onboarding experience) was the small size of the Fediverse. There just weren’t enough people in the Fediverse for the network effect to take hold. With each influx of users I expect to see a slightly higher proportion to stay, although I don’t see this influx (from Reddit) as being particularly large in the first place.
A lot of that stuff isn’t original, and the deep conversations are, in my opinion, few and far between. Sure there are some communities whi h have this, but they’re not exactly over represented.
If you get the deep conversations and the conversationalists the fluff will follow.
I just hope this is the start of an internet renaissance with less corporate control.
That’s certainly what it’s feeling like to me.
I remember when I was a kid and the Web 1.0 stuff was popular, things like IRC chat and forums were too intimidating/confusing for me to get into. My introduction to being an internet “citizen” was Web 2.0 and the MySpaces/Facebooks/Reddits of the world, where I had a UX approachable enough not to intimidate my teenage self.
The shift towards the Fediverse feels like a blend of many of the best aspects of Webs 1.0 and 2.0 – I have a UX that feels familiar, but one that comes with a bottom-up, decentralized grassroots feel that is reminiscent of the early internet.
I’m bullish for sure.
I always like to hear about when internet was at its early stages. I’m born in 2001 so never got the chance to live through that era, but to me it always feels so much better than what it is right now.
Hearing you say that we are experiencing a moment similar to those is making me so happy.
I was absolutely amazing!
complete wild west. only limit was your mind/imagination.at least it felt like that, when I was young ;-)
The other limit was the speed of your dial up modem.
People do remember it with rose colored glasses - there were fewer niche communities, fewer lgtbq+ communities, slower connections, 240p video at best (so much anime I somehow watched like that… Sorry anime), sexism and racism in a more general way vs now as like society and particularly techie culture at the time in general, not being able to use the internet when someone needed to use the phone, and so on - but while we gained a lot with time that we take for granted now, we did lose stuff, too.
I hope we can bring back something of the good that was lost, now and in the future, as well as find new good things.
At least, surely, there will always be cat pics.
It’ll be hard to get people to not only detach from something they’re accustomed to, but also then attach to something unfamiliar.
I tried and am trying again with Mastodon, but a lack of users I wish to follow, a more confusing premise at times, and just overall more enjoyment overall (if that) with twitter as a platform makes it a challenge.
Lemmy however has checked all the boxes. It literally feels exactly like Reddit, and honestly like a fresh start to avoid the various decisions both Reddit admins and the community itself made along the way. I’m hoping more for the latter experience than forming when diving into the fediverse, but my above statement is most likely applicable for a wide sample of people out there.
I’ve been having trouble getting going with Mastodon. But I’ve also had issues with Twitter as well. Lemmys been great so far.
I had the same issue with Mastodon when I tried to get into that, although perhaps worse because I was never into twitter either (thank goodness, honestly).
Lemmy though feels like old reddit from before the Digg exodus, if anything, or like other old forums that reddit drove either out of business or at least out of sight. It feels familiar and nostalgic and fresh at the same time, and there’s an element of hope to it to because it’s not just another corporate monster.
yeah the corporate greed is at its peak lately…
I doubt it, things cost money, that’s how we got in the corporate trap originally. If you invest a ton of time and money into something sooner or later you need to get something back.
I’m not convinced you need corporate money though. I think grants/user contributions (add the awards concept like Reddit has?) can get you pretty far a la Wikipedia.
You are right, it could work but it is in no way certain.
Discord is a likely contender, but I think it’s likely to be Instagram. It’s got a very dissatisfied userbase, and there’s already a few reasonably active pixelfed servers
Why is (part of) their userbase dissatisfied? I know almost nothing of instagram.
Ads upon ads upon ads. And then for some it is just that it is owned by Facebook.
I’m not very familiar with Instagram either, but it’s infamously bad for its users’ mental health, it’s recommendatiom algorithm is unreliable, and it collects a lot of data. Honestly it’s possible that a lot of its regular users do like it and that I just don’t tend to hear from them
As others have said, ads. The app is also overrun with spambots posting links to scams to buy followers or ForEx or whatever they’re selling. The algorithm is really, really bad, at least if you’re an artist of any kind. IG was one of the first apps to attempt to steal TikTok’s short-form video format, which means it’s hard to get your content out there if you’re just posting images. And there are a LOT of content reposters.
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Yeah I’m loving pixelfed way more than IG
Discord:
They started the software as a light weight voip solution for gamers. And imo they kinda lost focus a long time ago. It is now a sluggish, bloated, messy piece of electron software that has privacy issues and runs very poorly. They keep adding new features that are all paywalled and the pricing is just unreasonable. I’m not against paying for a service at all especially if it is free of ads but i feel like 10$ a month is just way too much for a chat app.
Discord still runs way better than Slack though.
well…idk. I didn’t use slack in years but it’s not really a good point for discord.
It’s like advertising Chlamydia with the slogan "It’s not nearly as bad as Sysphilis! Give it a try!
What does that make Teams? 😛
It’s a microsoft product. So it’s definitely the worst kind of infection
And unlike Chlamydia I’m not having nearly as much fun getting it.
Github, but Gitea’s not yet federated, though they’re working on it.
Gitlab’s a great alternative too, it’s definitely more resource intensive than Gitea but their community edition is packed with features. A federated Git platform sounds intriguing…
I have been on/off gitlab for a few years but they do sometimes weird things that drive me nuts. For example last time i check you cant search a repo issues without logging in.
One of main things i use repo sites for is to troubleshoot and searching issues is a great way. Why put a barrier to that? I cant imagine it is a big server load. Just dickish.
You can search issues without being logged in, but that setting has to be enabled in a repo or group’s permissions (Settings > General > Visibility, project features, permissions). Project visibility has to be Public, and issues should be set to Everyone with Access. I think tissues are defaulted to private or internal by default.
That’s big, I’m stoked for that if it happens.
I still like IRC and I’m surprised that it got almost completely murdered by Discord.
Matrix may be helping to dwindle IRC as well.
One can only hope so. I hope matrix gets a solid push when the chat gatekeepers have to open up because of EU regulation. If they can get invovled in the planned standards an implement them fast enough into matrix that might be a gamechanger.
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There isn’t much left.
First Facebook with their whole meta thing, then Imgur deleting all NSFW content and images uploaded by non-registered members, afterwards Twitter and now Reddit.
Twitch made a big mistake with their new sponsoring rules, but seems like they are reverting / changing it again due to bad community feedback.
Discord had a few changes the community didn’t like, but nothing ground breaking yet. But they get more and more greedy and their platform is filled with scams, hackers, bots and sadly many bad people like child predators and content which Discord support does nothing against. They seem not to care.
YouTube, well, I think they might be next actually. More and longer unskipable ads, restricting or demonetizing many videos, bad communication with their creators and less rewards for smaller creators. In addition, they might put high quality resolutions behind their already existing expensive subscription paywall. There isn’t any competition which is urgently needed.
UPDATE: Bad news about YouTube continues. Just now, YouTube Ordered ‘Invidious’ Privacy Software to Shut Down in 7 Days.
Which other big social media platforms are left?
I don’t really see YouTube failing anytime soon. They have such a massive userbase, it’s hard to imagine any other platform taking over anytime soon, regardless of shitty UX decisions. Creating a successful video platform like they have is an enormous challenge, the only reason they succeeded is because they were early.
@hampter @noodlejetski @Nankeru *cough* TikTok *cough*
In all seriousness, Google does not know what to do with YT. It is very hard to monetize. They tried to do whole TV thing, which fell flat on it’s face. it keeps being huge money sink, and moderation is nightmare and algorithms seems to fucking up constantly.
They can’t get rid of it, because it is huge, but it is not fire sure profit.I don’t know about YouTube not being profitable, but even if they aren’t, you’d be hard pressed to find a company better equipped to handle a money sink that Google. In 2022, they had a gross profit of 156 billion… I don’t think they are panicking, scrambling to monetize YT at Alphabet HQ.
The problem with anything video is still that it costs way too much to host, unless you’re a giant who already has their own data centers and massive data pipes. You can’t just throw it on a cheap VPS like text-based services
Are you thinking of it as a centralized replacement to YouTube? If you’re centralized, yeah, you probably need a data centre the size of Malta. There are decentralized alternatives (like PeerTube) where the cost is also distributed. If you’re using PeerTube, you literally can “just throw it on a cheap VPS”, and lots of people do, with no problems.
I think the real reason decentralized video isn’t going to catch on is because video (and YouTube in particular) has not been a community thing for many years now. There are very few YouTubers who make videos to build a community or connect to a community. YouTubers are on there for money, and there’s really no alternative that can both host the videos and pay out big cheques to content creators.
@duncesplayed @kalleboo tbh most of YTs I know either run sponsor ads, or have Patreon/paid for community. It is already slowly moving away from ads system in YT, which simply does not work.
That is a good point actually! That means they would have the freedom to move over to a new platform.
@duncesplayed imho making PeerTube or other Fediverse video service very good at UX and easy to use will allow these communities migrate when they feel like it.
I think biggest issue might be running video service like this and having running costs for video storage, etc. As always, communities might be willing to factor those costs in their pledges.
I think PeerTube needs easy to use setup / reliable network of hosters, and good UX to manage community, live streams, chats, etc.I think it needs to be made very, very easy (for people who understand Zero about the tech behind it) to set up and host their own peertube “channel” off their home computer. It needs to be just as easy and straightforward as setting up a youtube channel.
Anything that requires people to understand even a bare minimum of tech jargon, or even that exposes them to too much such jargon too quickly, will be too much of a barrier to entry for most people, vs youtube or similar corporate platforms.
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Tiktok, Snapchat, OnlyFans
Signal would actually be a decent Snapchat replacement since it can do both disappearing messages and stories. now if only they’d finally release usernames and phone number privacy.
Tiktok is Chinese military funded. It’s not going away.
Even though Tiktok isn’t a one-to-one equivalent of youtube, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a closer youtube equivalent come out of China, Russia, or even North Korea (the people are poor mainly because the country puts all its wealth in the military, and it already has extensive foreign espionage and media manipulation arms - if it wanted to, it could pour a lot into controlling a major video platform to get ahold off all that data).
In a more hopeful world, maybe a different small country might invest in it on a governmental level, similarly.
Saudi Arabia is already heavily investing in the gaming industry, in an attempt to diversify their economic reliance away from just their oil.
Qatar already has a lot invested in, and profit from, aljazeera (state-owned news) poking at all its neighbors’ human rights abuses, too.
Saudi Arabia - or another, unexpected country - could absolutely do the same with English-language social media, especially given the current lack of competition for youtube. Government funding could scale that barrier and snag a source of income and an espionage advantage for the host country.
Especially since Saudi Arabia, though rife with human rights abuses, is allied with the U.S. and thus less likely to become the target of a “ban tiktok specifically” push.
(sidenote: the “ban tiktok” bills would ban a lot more than tiktok, including VPNs - that subject’s a whole can of worms too).
Edit: especially now they’ve seen Tiktok as a template for this.
YouTube has been enshittified long ago, especially after the Adpoclaypse
What about YouTube?
I looked online and there seems to be PeerTube at least.
I would love for something to replace YouTube, especially something in the Fediverse, but video unfortunately has much higher storage and bandwidth requirements, so it’s hard to imagine that not being totally cost prohibitive at high levels of traffic, even if it’s split across so many different servers. I’d love to be wrong on that, though.
The other problem with YouTube/twitch alts as opposed to reddit/twitter is that a lot of the creators people like the most actually rely on those platforms to serve ads in order to make a living. That content can’t exist on FOSS systems unless they somehow manage to attract advertisers, which seems next to impossible
I feel like the trend is going towards serving ads in stream anyways, the twitch ad/ad blocking war is/(was?) ongoing last I checked.
I don’t see why that would be impossible in a federated setting.
While some streamers could get direct sponsors, that option is really only available to a select few of the most popular ones, and would still deprive them of the extra income they currently get from ads served by the platform. You’d have to convince advertisers to trust that each instance is going to serve their ads fairly and not additionally host content they don’t like. A system to distribute ads between instances would be complicated enough as it is; these sites have a lot of QoL updates to push before they even think about doing something like that.
Yeah, that’s definitely a good point. Even the creators that do get sponsorships also get money from the ads.
Yeah, thats why strata like peertube reducing costs with p2p sharing helps, or lbry (rip, I think) attempt to put in donations and tipping directly in was key for those to gain any traction.
Going further in cost reduction is what I am hopeful for. Better AV1 support and IPFS support are two develops I am following. A more radical approach may be using latent space generation from AI models like stable diffusion to generate frames locally instead of storing and transmitting perfect copies.
Yeah, video is just that much more expensive to store. I am sure a lot of current Lemmy instances are still lighter that some “cat meowing for 3 hours” video. And let’s not talk about all of those channels that upload dozens of gigabytes of data on a daily basis. I fear we may never have a suitable replacement to YouTube (that it’s not just another asshole mega corporation).
Fair point. I hadn’t thought much about the bandwidth and storage stuff. Reddit and co. are comparitively cheaper.
YouTube has been upsetting its users for over a decade now and also needs to make more money. The only thing stopping it from being overtaken is the sheer amount of infrastructure required to host videos on that scale.
There’s also ‘Indivious’, which they’ve been trying to sue (it’s just a FOSS alternative, not federated)
Discord is doing a lot of stupid things lately i must say
God I hope so. Discord works fine as a voice chat and groupchat for games. But it’s insane to me that people use it as a replacement for message boards or websites and hosting files. It isnt indexed so you cant google it and a groupchat is a terrible format for this. Even as reddit dies you have some people acting like a glorified group chat is a good alternative. As an addition and supplement to a message board or website community sure this is how it’s always been even in the old days there were boards with an active IRC chat. As the replacement? Awful.
It is a terrible format but it has the extreme advantage of being free.
yeah i totally agree
Teamspeak has a pretty slick new version that looks very much like discord. Not fediverse but pretty easy to self-host.
Wow, I had no idea. Thanks for letting me know!
I tried to research more about it, but other than a few screenshots it’s very hard to find info on what’s actually new in.
YouTube. It will be a real loss because I doubt even Archiveteam could backup all the useful YT videos.
They’re the safest. It has the highest cost to run of any other site pretty much. The amount of data uploaded is staggering.
They may deserve to be replaced, but a competitor has the highest hurdles to overcome. You pretty much need to be another tech giant or the public needs to have a new perspective on how to pay for content rather than ads.
I don’t think we’ll see a Lemmy etc of YouTube unless a lot of people are cool with sharing their bandwidth for little benefit.
Yeah only way I see it working is if it’s more of a peer to peer / torrenting concept. As in while you use it, you are “seeding” other videos / content as well.
PeerTube is exactly this, it’s federated and uses WebTorrent. https://joinpeertube.org/
Well that’s cool as hell - thanks for the info.
This reads like an AI generated conversation trying to sell PeerTube.
How couldn’t you guys know about PeerTube?? 😅
I recently stumbled over Odysee and am not exactly sure where to put them category wise. they are a federated service as well, aren’t they?
No, Odysee/LBRY operates on blockchain/crypto. It aims to be decentralised, and in that sense it’s bit like federation, but it’s completely different.
Does the seeding work in a personally easily controllable way, e.g. you only see the videos you watch and allow it to seed? I’m not super familiar with torrenting beyond the very basics, let alone however this might differ.
I’m thinking here mainly of making sure people aren’t just generally seeding everything in a way that would potentially make people unknowingly/unintentionally seed / party to any distribution of child abuse materials, snuff, revenge porn, or so on.
As far as I know, you seed videos you watch.
And then you run into the challenge of moderation.
If it’s possible to be handed random videos to seed that you’ve never watched, criminals would take advantage of that to upload illicit content that no one wants hosted…
It may only work to seed videos that you’ve explicitly whitelisted. Ex. Maybe “liking” the video also automatically volunteers some of your bandwidth to seed it. But then you will still open yourself up to legal disputes from copyright trolls. Just like YT, they would still be able to go around spamming C&Ds at everyone, and who is going to have time or money to fight it? Most would just take the video down immediately.
And that’s all assuming that exposing your IP directly to the public doesn’t leave you vulnerable.
On top of all of that, one of YT’s biggest values is that you can view most content in a browser while not logged in. Which I’m guessing is where a huge number of views come from. The core users would just be footing the bill for a bunch of freeloaders. But assuming everything else is solved, maybe it’s worth the tradeoff…?
I think it might still just have to allow advertizing. Maybe not individually targeted advertizing, but like a general banner ad in a sidebar for the server host’s benefit, or a video creator’s midroll sponsor ad. Or a a small server subscription fee for reasonably large servers, like apps do.
Even if the hosts make some money off it and it’s not entirely free and ad free for all instances, it could still be better than one single, centralized corporation that’s in control of everything and can monetize however it wants without consequence.
But regardless, the issue with potentially unintentionally seeding child abuse materials, revenge porn, and so on is my main concern. I personally won’t touch the platform until and unless I’m sure I will have control over what I do or don’t seed and that I will never end up unknowingly doing this just by using the service.
ISPs would need to give americans upload speed worth a damn first.
I internetted in a time where sharing an audio file was a real undertaking, maybe with better infrastructure the size of video won’t be a problem.
Maybe it’s me being short-sighted but I don’t see video going far beyond 8k for almost all applications.
All social media should be publicly owned, democratically run, and publicly funded.
For Discord we have Revolt (almost a 1:1 clone) and obviously Matrix and XMPP.
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That client looks really good! thanks for share i will give a try
I think Discord is still too new and still in the phase where they’re baiting users on their platform with superious UX and “verything is easy”. They haven’t yet started shitting on their users. But who knows ^^
They are already shitting on their users, recently they disabled permanent invite links for non-comminuty servers, if you want to get permanent invite links, you need to make your server a community, which I think it will make it public (not sure). In the other hand, Discord is still a giant cesspool of malware.
Also just the blatant push for introducing more and more nitro-only feature bloat into the average users UI. I haven’t ever seen the gift button being used, but it’s still right there on the text bar, where it serves no purpose.
I think I’ve only seen it used to give a suprise cheap gift in an active chat to send people crazy
that actually sounds a little fun. I’ll admit that I’ve mostly used discord for the smaller communities
Revolt is not and will never be federated.
I know, you can still self host it tho, don’t know how good is that option.
As far as I’m aware, their official app will not let you point to a server, it’s hard coded to the main server. If they ever fix that it might be worth someone running a community server.
Yup, that’s a problem
Nice, was just looking for something! Will have to try it out. Discord on Linux barely works. And when I stream gameplay to friends, sound doesn’t work out of the box, so I have to use pipewire to combine it with my mic’s stream.
Take a look, it even supports bots. And yes I know I use light mode.
It’s not quite clear to me how hosting works. If I want to set up whatever the analog to a “discord server” is for me and my friends, do I need to host it myself? Or can I join an existing instance and then create “servers” on there? Or since it’s using matrix, do I join a matrix instance and this is just a front end for matrix that works like discord?
I feel like the support page on their site is pretty sparse at the moment.
Revolt is it’s own thing, it’s not Matrix. You just create an account at https://app.revolt.chat and start using it, just like Discord. With Matrix you can do the same at app.element.io, you don’t need to host your own server, even though that is possible.
Ah ok thanks! I’ll try it out 👍
For chat servers in Revolt it’s literally the same as Discord, just click the add button
Revolt is really amazing, the only thing that it’s missing (for now) it’s E2EE, the team is working on implementing it as far as I know.
They’ve already made a few missteps that have driven some folks away, as well.Things like the NFT scare a while back, and the price jump on Nitro.
Discord tried doing NFTs?
They never actually got anywhere with it, but there was talk of involving them somehow.
How’s revolt?
It’s the closet thing there is to Discord while being open source. It’s not federated though and it still doesn’t support E2EE at the moment. If you wanttko give it a try, visit https://app.revolt.chat
I hear that YouTube and Twitch are in the process of enshittifying, so probably them. Would also like to see Discord get replaced by something like Matrix, but I think the UX isn’t ready for that yet. On the plus side, the Matrix protocol supports bridging to other chat platforms, so that’s cool.
Matrix’s client UX is improving a lot, there is the Cinny client that mirrors Discord’s layout perfectly. The issue with Matrix is its protocol, which faces scaling issues because each instance joining the network is supposed to replicate the entire Matrix network, which will make it difficult for small hobbyists to add instances without crumbling under the load when the network gets too big. There is another Discord-like alternative, Revolt which is self-hostable and uses its own protocol but doesn’t have federation yet.
This is not true. Data will only be sent to your homeserver if a user on your homeserver joins a room on another server. And only the data for that room is sent, not the whole network. The room data only contains all state changes, and a small amount of recent messages. The amount of state changes is the biggest problem.
Matrix protocol does have a giant problem regarding spam joins though, which make a complete instance basically unusable. Last time I talked with people related to the protocol they didn’t want to or know how to fix it, because the need to verify all room state changes.
Thanks for the information. I set up a Matrix instance with a friend before and noticed it had significantly more resource usage than expected of a little chat client, then someone else explained that Matrix was trying to discover all of the other nodes on the network so I assumed it was true. What causes so many state changes to be generated?
There’s a page explaining it in more detail, but basically, all servers need to verify the complete chain of state events in order to trust data and messages about the room. This is because otherwise malicious servers could make bogus state events and messages that are not valid, like scam messages and unauthorized room setting changes.
In matrix, when you create a new room, or edit room settings, a state event is made. The same is true for changes in user permissions like who is admin, and for settings related to who can join the room.
The last one is key, because this means that in order for servers to trust other servers’ messages, they need to verify if the user that sent the message joined the room in a legit way.
In order to do this, when a user joins a room it must cause a state event. However, this makes it easy for people to abuse, by joining a room with a ton of accounts, it spams state events to all connected servers, which bogs them all down because they are required to process all state events in order for chain of trust to function.
Even for rooms with non-malicious usage, servers can still be bogged down if the room is very big, which might be what happened with you or your friend joining a big public room.
Basically, in my opinion, Matrix cannot be used with public rooms as it stands today.
That sounds a lot like how blockchains work, do you know whether it is the same principle with hashing a state and then simply chaining them?
I don’t really understand what actually takes up bandwidth. Is it the multiple clients querying the matrix server, about previous states, at once?
If you don’t mind me asking
which faces scaling issues because each instance joining the network is supposed to replicate the entire Matrix network
Makes sense, after all matrix multiplication is O(n2).
I tried Cinny recently, but unfortunately it was a buggy mess that kept crashing and I couldn’t even login to my account. I ended up going with Nheko.
What do you mean replicate the entire network, does it include all messages on all instances?
So it would be like Lemmy if everyone was subscribed to everything on all instances?
Nah it only replicates joined rooms-
Discord already kinda sucks, I find the app not nearly as smooth as before, and it tries so hard to choke nitro into you, it also has so many bloaty extra features.
Maybe it’s just the use I try to get from it. Discord has evolved more towards community channels, and for that (at least the bit I tried to use them) it seems fairly decent. Most of the time I just wanna use it to play with 2 or 3 friends, I could definitely use a minimalistic app that does just that.
Wait a little until https://github.com/vector-im/element-call / https://call.element.io/ is done. It’s not polished yet so I can’t really recommend it but once it is properly intergrated in Matrix this will be my go-to solution.
If you really only want group calls for a handful of people I can only recommend Signal for that. Just create a group chat in there. You can start a call and select it to not ring on the other peoples end and then you can just hop in and out just like a discord vc. It has a desktop app for Mac/Linux/Windows too so you could use it while gaming too. The app is not pretty but it’s minimalistic and it works. Everything is end to end enrypted even the calls and video calls.
You could even screenshare with it but i never tested how well that works. It’s free and open source. It is not federated however. But still the most easy to use and best secure and private messenger out there.
Mumble used to be great for that back in the day. It is FOSS.
I want lightweight-as-possible app that just does voice chat for games AND facecam chat for games, now that so many people have those. With little overlay boxes for your friends, similar to what streamers do. Partly because this would also enable deaf people to play with sign language chat.
Just go back to IRC if you hate it that much.
Isn’t that sort of like saying “go back to Digg if you hate Reddit so much”?
Twitch tried to implode a few days ago. I’m hoping for YouTube, it’s too much of a monopoly.
What did Twitch do?
They were trying to disallow third party ads for streamers https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65834521.amp
Charlie has a good summary: https://youtu.be/-5zGuFPxW88
They’ve since walked back a bit, but the writing is now on the wall.
As for YouTube, Odysee exists and has a mirroring for YouTube uploads for content creators, but it’s mainly just tech and crypto people at the moment - yes, there’s others, but most everyday people have never even heard of LBRY or Odysee.
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As annoying as this is, I think we need to all accept that this is the reality with all alternative platforms. It’s up to us to outnumber these people.
