The “enshittification” continues
Matrix has always been a great alternative. Any service that is owned by a corporation will eventually be monetized. I never liked discord in the first place.
Matrix rules, but I can’t get my friends to leave Discord because that’s where all their friends are, they run servers, etc. it sucks.
Getting friends to leave facebook messenger for discord 8 years ago already, never underestimate how much the average person can ignore. For the time being I’m on discord, but if they start cracking down on small servers I’ll be spinning up alternatives overnight
My instance is discord bridged. When discord user wants to voice chat, I fire up discord just for that.
But my discord text chats and servers? All in matrix baby.
Makes it a lot easier to convice friends to swap, too. Especially when I show them that telegram and whatsapp can be bridged, too.
Everything one app.
I have that too, but you have to be admin to be able to do that, and I didn’t figure out how to connect the 1-1 chats in Matrix yet.
Once you have the bridge plugin set up, you need to talk to it in matrix to set up your stuff. Just open a chat with whatever your config says its username is. I set mine to be @discordbot
I have it set up with rooms where several people are in but have no idea how to set it up in 1-1 rooms.
Oh, you’re using it for just bridging group chats.
For one to one you need to link your matrix account to your discord account using the !login command. After this you can access everything that your discord account can access. Manually managing anything except for which servers you want bridged is completely unnecessary.
The trick is to not have friends sucka
Matrix won’t seem to let me on via my vpn so I can’t even download the client on my computer. Makes it hard to see what the fuss is about.
You’re comment makes no sense. Matrix is a federated chat protocol, and works kind of like lemmy. Matrix itself has more in common with ActivityPub, the protocol that the fediverse uses. What’s more comparable are the matrix clients.
There are many, many matrix clients to choose from, and even more instances, including the option to set up your own.
Idk what I did wrong both times I tried before, but sites would not load. Today, I got to the search for homeservers and was able to sign up.
Which client? There’s a lot more than Element, including clients like Nheko and Cinny.
I think it was element, but some more searching got me on a server. Now to find rooms I guess.
this feels like back in 2015 when I was trying to get all my friends to go from TeamSpeak to Discord because it had Text & Media Channels and you didn’t have to pay for the server
I’m loving Matrix.
I really need to get on Matrix, but I haven’t put the time to learn it.
The Element app for it works pretty well. There are some edges to smooth, but it functions.
And if Element isn’t to your tastes (like it wasn’t for me), there are other clients to choose from. I use Nheko on PC and FluffyChat on my phone.
Oh cool! Thanks for the heads up on FluffyChat!
Revolt.chat is far nicer than Matrix usability-wise
What’s to stop Revolt from becoming the next Discord?
Edit: I just logged into my account to see that Revolt had removed a “server” for breaking foreign (unjust) laws. That seems to go against everything the fediverse stands for.
How can revolt “remove” a server since you can connect to any custom hosted server? It’s like saying lemmy removed an instance.
And besides, I’m pretty sure that is something that federated instances will have to worry about too, you might not care about your local laws but the ISP or hosting provider of your server where possibly illegal data is, will care.
No it isn’t. The default is to be hosted on Revolt servers. I created a “server” and I didn’t set up any kind of server, so it’s not running on my server. I don’t really know all the technical details, I just signed in and saw a message that said the “server” was removed.
Ah I see, so kinda like having a community on kbin.social removed. I mean that makes sense then, the admin and owner of the server can decide if he doesn’t want something there, its his server (or in this case, revolts)
1.) because Revolt isn’t trying to do federation. It’s community driven open-source project not backed by a company.
2.) you can easily self-host a Revolt server. Then you can make your own rules.
Not everything has to be federated
…is Discord trying to do federation? I’m confused.
Someone is in charge of Revolt, doesn’t matter if it’s a company or someone else. Someone is in charge of the servers. What’s stopping them from ultimately selling the company? Reddit didn’t start out as a corporation. Nor did WhatsApp, but after creating a trusted userbase they were sold off to Facebook to be exploited for data.
IT people love to talk about how “easy” it is to create and run your own server, but this is simply not true and they just lack awareness.
If this is an isolated issue I don’t mind.
bad idea when revolt exists and is basically exactly the same software but open source and self hosted
Second this. Revolt looks exactly like Discord except it’s open source and privacy focused.
“Exclusive memes” this is hell.
That’s an exotic synonym for “dank.”
it’s the opposite of dank
rank
Stank memes?
Rank memes
Discord. God I hated how I was one of my friends that got everyone to switch, and now I’m the first one out. I don’t think they have added a feature that hasn’t been an annoyance for a while, and after a year of no mobile notifications working and their staff being incompetent (especially if you are a free user) I’m just over it.
Everyone worshipping it is kind of a turn off too. It’s a service y’all, I’ve had everything from AIM to Slack and I’m sure there will be a million others. Worshipping a corp is gross.
A question I was asked interviewing for my only marketing position: W"1hat’s a brand you admire?" I would have turned right the fuck around were I not supporting stepkids and looking at a 50% raise.
I don’t understand the ability to have an emotional connection to a corporation.
Omg I would have absolutely no script for that. They would get the blankest expression and something snarky like “it was impressive how Nestle was able to get market share on water and baby formula in the African market” but knowing my luck I’d probably get unironicly hired with that line when I was trying to be sarcastic. 😭
Learning the truth about Nestle made finding out about Santa seem tame.
“Chiquita Bananas’ ability to manipulate the government to further their own ends is admirable.”
I don’t understand the ability to have an emotional connection to a corporation.
I do, but the corporations I have a connection with are not the ones people think of usually, it’s the ones that are FOSS-first, or the ones that actually fight for what they believe. i.e. not 99.99% of corporations.
At least tell us what you made up lol
I looked at my clothes and said Eddie Bauer and then came up with a wildly embellished tale of how I grew up with their sleeping bags in my closet, and now they’re the only jacket I’ll buy because they make quality products. I don’t know … I did well enough through the blind rage to get the job.
Turned out my new boss’ background was in journalism, so what I thought was a liability was actually an asset. The job wasn’t terrible. I hated coming up with flowery descriptions of pedestrian English muffins and exhausted any and all citrus and citrus-adjacent puns known to man. And then we lost the contract less than a year later.
I found out about that the day I got back from hauling a truck from New Mexico to get my stuff out of storage.
I’ve set up matrix and element to replace discord. I even bridged discord so my users can even still talk to people they have on there.
But damn, does it feel good to self host shit again like in the days of TS3 and Mumble.
I honestly don’t mind this. This is really useful for small creators in not needing to do workarounds for Patreon or Patreon roles and this makes it easier by being baked into Discord itself. I get the worry of stuff being paywalled but since it is entirely set by the server owner/creator, it would be something to take up with them instead. The 10% cut is a bit rough but I know other platforms also take a cut, but I’m not too sure if 10% is high or low. That would be my own biggest concern since it only makes sense if it is comparable or lower than other platforms like Patreon.
This is essentially where I am with it. I get the outrage but for now I don’t have an issue. But likely as with many things lately, we should maybe pursue the federated option.
I created a Matrix account as Plan B now that the link is back in the sidebar. I was very active on Discord a few years back, but a week before joining Beehaw, I was ready to ditch it, since I can chat with my college roommate on Steam and I no longer DM with anyone else (also, all my servers from then are now dead).
I don’t think I’m the target audience for Discord, so other than a few longstanding UI gripes, I’m kinda content to let them do whatever. Monetization won’t hit me until you have to pay to be able to send text messages.
I use discord for 2 things, my personal group chat with friends that I manage, and keeping up with Mechanical Keyboard artisan shops and manufacturers. So I mean it wont be a huge leap for me to migrate to something better.
The 10% cut is a bit rough but I know other platforms also take a cut, but I’m not too sure if 10% is high or low.
I have a Patreon and their cut is about 3% there (at least for me, it varies depending on what services you use through Patreon). This is a very easy pass and the only people I see utilizing it are creators like Twitch streamers who already have a large Discord server/presence to build off of. It’s a bad deal though 10% is real rough imo.
I imagine 7% isn’t that much of a “loss” when compared to how much larger the market on discord is and how convenient it’s going to be for these users to start spending on MTX.
Agree to disagree then, every percentage counts and the effects of each of those percentages is exaggerated with each additional patron. 7% of one patron is negligible, 7% of three hundred patrons is huge.
Edit: oh and the discord market is a niche market, the average person does not have a Discord and many aren’t even familiar when it’s brought up. I had a much easier time getting people to sign up for a paid Patreon than I had getting them to sign up for a free Discord account back when I was putting in the effort to grow a following on these platforms. I think it’ll be good for people who are already building on that market but for every other creator it’s an easy pass.
But the goal isn’t to replace patreon with people that have to sign up for discord, it’s to reach people who are already on discord and aren’t funding the creator on patreon. Surely that’s a huge untapped market, discord must have millions of daily users by now. You’re not losing 7%, you are gaining 90% per each new customer obtained this way.
Sure, discord has millions of users but they’re of a particular demographic. One that requires moderation, is typically higher maintenance, and less likely to spend money (speaking from experience from a few years back). Discord demographics screw young and young audiences spend a whole lot less than other groups. Not saying that as a knock against them, it’s just the way of it.
But the potential to gain more is just that, potential. And comes with much more to manage. I don’t have to moderate my Patreon comments for example. I did have to actively keep out trolls and shitheads from my Discord server though. More power to any creator who wants to try and deal with that, but it’s an easy pass for me and most creators I personally know (which is primarily artists/musicians for context).
I see, thanks for explaining. I didn’t realize you need to actually have a server with a community to sell these things, I assumed it’s just a marketplace ran by discord staff. If it requires additional work on creator’s side then I can understand the drawbacks.
For sure, it’ll be interesting to see where it goes but I’ll be watching from a distance instead of trying it out myself because no thank you lol
Good. Discord is the cancer of the free searchable internet.
If you really need communication, use XMPP or Matrix.
And for everything else use stuff like forums and Lemmy and mastodon reddit Twitter whatever. But not closed walled gardens that are not searchable on the net. It’s astonishing that so many people gatekeep content behind this Discord crap.
It sucks that Discord is being used for a bunch of large communities that would be better served by a forum for future access, but for just groups of friends, it’s way easier to use than anything fediverse. And if I’m chatting with my friends, I don’t NEED my shitposting to be easily searchable on Google.
I’m not against using Matrix, but I could only get select people to join me. Discord is where all the more tech-illiterate gamers live and sometimes I wanna hang out with them too. It’s not the same as Lemmy, where I want to talk to complete strangers, so it doesn’t matter too much if more than half a community is lost by migrating from reddit to lemmy.
Yes, that’s my reason for still having it too. All my friends are on there. And getting them to change platform is almost as hard as getting a woman to like you.
Seriously. The worst is when developers distribute their software on Discord. WHY.
lol, that, or when they insist discord is the best place to store documentation…
yeah, I particularly hate when mods and romhacks require you to join a discord server to download them
Well that usage makes the most sense. Having links to copyright-gray content in a closed garden makes it much harder to take down.
Not all discussions should be public.
Why does everything need to be free searchable on the internet?
Call me crazy but I don’t want my group chats publicly available on the internet. Discord feels… private. I know they have access to all the data, but it’s not like a public website, forum, or even an open irc chatroom. It’s my walled garden to chat with friends, stream games, game chat, post dumb memes, etc.
That’s like saying signal is cancer to free and open internet. Or hell, email because it’s not indexed and searchable?
I don’t get the sentiment.
undefined> Why does everything need to be free searchable on the internet?
imagine everything is behind a gateway of account + phone number. you wouldn’t be here on Lemmy because you would’ve never heard about it and couldn’t search about it, or reddit etc.
It’s not hard to get your head around why searching the internet is the most important part to get things going. You wouldn’t get ANY information if you need to get your phone number out for every single site/forum/whatever.
And if you have no experience with Discord and how it evolved over the last years, I can’t help you. Discord already replaces many sites and forums, or give support via Discord only… now these things are no longer searchable because people somehow like to idle in Discord servers and search for things in there.
If you can’t see the issue with this, even right now already and especially in the future if it continous like that, then I can’t help you, sorry.
You cherry picked one line of my post and didn’t address the entire context or intent of it. Im not defending companies or businesses using discord as a drop in replacement for forums or support pages. Imo that’s a mis use of the tech.
I think that’s stupid.
But discord isn’t designed for that. It’s a chat app (voice and text). I don’t want my chats with friends publicly searchable on the internet. That’s dumb. Having my emails publically searchable on the internet is dumb too.
If a company started using Signal or Whatsapp for support, would you be clamoring for all signal and Whatsapp messages to be searchable on the internet?
That doesn’t make any sense. You seem more upset that companies are misusing Discord than mad at Discord.
people don’t just use discord for private communication, and that’s what should be searchable. also, you do realize that discord doesn’t feature any encryption and some people can read your “private” messages, right?
This is not good it’s been used for the vast majority.
Companies and big communities use it as a forum, sharing knowledge more or less important.
For example, i dabble in modding games, nowadays i need to join a game discord server and ask there hoping that someone is kind enough to repeat for the nth time something asked already, probably several time a week.
Most often than not, you don’t get an answer due to several factors, one of which is that if you ask when the people that can help are not online, nobody answer really.
On a forum you could have searched your question and find some answer anyway.
THAT is a very big problem. Knowledge is walled in and the search provided is the equivalent of digging in the sand with a spoon.
Are XMPP or Matrix really any more seachable? I’m all in on FOSS, clearly, but do they fix that complaint? I feel like the real solution is separating chat and longer term info, and putting the longer term info on a wiki or other public and indexable format.
Yeah, Cinny does look like Discord anyways but it’s lack of voice chat is a bummer
I really disliked my cinny experience, element was much superior
Totally, I too think that one should prefer Element for multiple reasons (feature richness, app availability, … I mean, the web widgets absolutely rule imo), after all, it’s UI is similar to Discord/Slack but it also feels somewhat different here and there. For the first 1-2 hours it can be a bit overwhelming for newbies. Cinny’s UI is much closer to Discord’s UI, and it seems fine for chatting as far as I have tried it.
the encryption broke first just for the desktop app, later also for web browser several times, people couldn’t see what I was writing to them, all while it worked in element. I was able to create nested rooms but nobody could see them for joining… the overall experience was painful and it probably coated me my one chance to convince people to get away from discord after their policy change to record audio from calls
Weird, when was that ? In onboarded 6 non-tech people recently on element and it went fine and easy.
Yes element works, I use it still. I had issues with cinny as a discord replacement. This was in the time from march-april.
Oh shoot nvm then. I only used it for like two weeks before I went back to Element because of it’s feature richness. And even during the time I used it I rarely chatted.
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Discord is a chat and the default setting of every server is that to see the content of it, you need to join the server.
It make sense for a chat.
However, companies and communities have largely misused discord and basically turned it in forums.
Lots and lots of knowledge is spread on these chats with no way of finding it unless you know which server to join and provided they do not shut down at some point.
On top of that, the discord search feature is barebone at best.
This is the problem with discord.
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What has discord to do with privacy? you really going the privacy route here while using Discord? Is this a troll or should I need to send you their privacy policy and tos? Nobody is talking about private chats you have with your buddies on Discord. Nodoby want to see this anyway. (expect Discord ofc) we are talking about PUBLIC discord servers with thousands of people in it, where content is posted that only is accesable via a gateway of making a discord account + phone number and is in no way searchable on the internet.
Now imagine, everything would be like that, you wouldn’t even be here arguing with me because you would’ve never known what Lemmy is or even reddit. Because nothing would be searchable on the internet.
Not sure what is so hard to grasp about that.
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use XMPP or Matrix.
XMPP is mostly dead these days. The protocol is very inefficient (it’s all XML) which isn’t ideal on mobile devices since it uses more bandwidth to transfer and more processing power to parse.
I work at a big tech company, and at work we use Mattermost hosted outside our data center for cases where our internal stuff doesn’t work. It seems fine and I think it’s open-source, but I don’t know a lot about it.
I’ve heard about Matrix but haven’t tried it yet! Is it good?
What about IRC?
This couldn’t be more wrong actually.
Xmpp is far from death. Just because many started to use matrix instead doesn’t mean it’s dead. Even though matrix is a Ressource and performance nightmare much more so than xmpp will ever be.
I’m an IT specialist and work in IT too. I also selfhosted a lot of stuff publicly.
XMPP is used by many companies like Facebook , Google, Nintendo, GitHub, zoom, WhatsApp, Apple etc.
Xmpp is a an official Standard.unlikr things like matrix.
And if you think that xmpp has battery issues.oeadays then that tells me you used any xmpp app like conversation/snikket etc. like many years ago.
My xmpp Apps use way less battery than any matrix app ever could.
XMPP is fast, reliable and just works. Matrix is a nightmare to selfhost, too.
IRC? Irc has no E2EE whatsoever. Therfore isn’t even comparable to xmpp with omemo or matrix.
XMPP is used by many companies like Facebook , Google, Nintendo, GitHub, zoom, WhatsApp, Apple etc.
Facebook doesn’t use XMPP; they use a custom protocol built on top of MQTT. WhatsApp was using a binary equivalent to XMPP (keeping the same stanzas but removing the XML), but I’m not sure if they still are. Do you have a source stating that the other companies use XMPP?
Xmpp is far from death. Just because many started to use matrix instead doesn’t mean it’s dead. Even though matrix is a Ressource and performance nightmare much more so than xmpp will ever be.
How is matrix a performance nightmare? been running a matrix server for years with almost no issues. I guess the only exception was the few times I ran out of hdd space, but that’s it.
Xmpp is a an official Standard.unlikr things like matrix.
What’s an official standard? Matrix is a protocol just like xmpp and the specs are public, just like with xmpp.
Matrix is a nightmare to selfhost, too.
It’s literally as easy as running a docker container and editing a yaml file, at least for synapse.
It is very well known that Synapse is a ressource hog. Heck, you can’t even enable presence because it would kill your server ressources. Why do you think almost all instances have it disabled? Cmpared to an XMPP server ressource usage, Snypase is a nightmare to host. I also hosted a public server for a long time.
XMPP standards: https://wikiless.ftw.lol/wiki/XMPP https://xmpp.org/extensions/ https://xmpp.org/about/technology-overview/
It’s literally as easy as running a docker container and editing a yaml file, at least for synapse.
just like xmmp is, difference is, matrix snypse uses like 20x the amount of ressources. Just try to host a public server for more than 100 people and you will know.
There is a reason why people make stuff like Conduit or the matrix team works on Dendrite as a new server.
Matrix is searchable through https://archive.matrix.org/
I’m going to take a rather controversial stance on this. I don’t see this as such a bad Thing
First of all, running a discord server, especially a large one is not easy and discord mods deserve to be paid for their time just as much as anyone else.
While I will say that I’m not a huge fan of discord’s new focus on massive servers, it’s clear that that’s what brings in the big dough for them.
If this helps discord keep the lights on, and keep small servers running that’s good for me as much as it is good for them.
Also, I’d much rather this than ads ngl
Oh God anything but ads
This is the classic tactic of make a product free and run it at a loss until you have full market share then you can extort users for whatever.
Or as Cory Doctorow calls it - “Enshittification”. They’re now in the second stage - open the gates for other companies to market to Discord users:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
I’m confused, this changes nothing for most users. All this does is allow creators that use Patreon tiers to grant certain roles in Discord to do this entirely through Discord. If you’re not in one of these servers, this probably won’t affect you.
Even if you are, it’s still barely a change
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No, it’s automated via Patreon as well.
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Yep, we’ve seen that before
So it’s just an expansion of what can be monetized within a server. I see nothing wrong with this. It even gives small indie devs like me a chance at a small revenue stream.
If you don’t like the things a specific server is doing, leave. It’s pretty simple.
I have no problem paying for a service or an app if it is good and fits my needs. It’s the microtrans and battle passes that people generally have issues with. Paying for every little thing like a meme.
You seem to be forgetting that it is the server owner who decides these things. If you’re on a server that is monetizing memes and you don’t like it, leave.
Monetizing memes was given as an example. A stupid example Yes but only an example.
I found the PC Gamer article a bit confusing so I read other articles and understood it better. I get it now. It’s not Discord setting these sub tiers etc. They are allowing more servers. Doesn’t sound so bad. I guess depending how much a person uses a server they are a member of, they can help support the server and receive premium benefits and Discord who gets a cut of the purchases. All optional. Not too bad as it is up to the individual servers.
Edit: this can be a good thing and help support discord financially. So far we are lucky discord has not sold to a tech corp or gone public.
The thing is, between stuff like this and nitro, discord can fund itself without ads. Something like this literally helps everyone involved. If you don’t want to donate to a server, then don’t. It’s literally that simple.
I get tired of people jumping on this bandwagon because it’s popular to hate on discord. The people that are hating on it generally are the ones who fundamentally do not understand what is going on. They read some ragebait article and instead of digging a little bit deeper in trying to understand they just take it at face value. It’s very irritating. The latest buzzword is “enshitification”, which, by itself is a good descriptor for some things but these people throw it around so liberally that it loses all significance. “Oh an app did something I don’t like and I’m not going to take the time to learn more about it <insert meme of hand smacking button labeled enshitification>”.
Think of it this way… Discord is doing a Patreon but for discord servers. This is cool. This is neat. It hurts exactly no one and helps potentially everyone. At the most it’s a net zero effect for most users.
It’s the beginning of the entire platform turning to shit. Because it’s never enough money. More ads, more tracking, more locked in features.
This is the cycle of monetization. It gives you a small revenue stream, but only until users get fed up and leave. Because it’s never enough money coming in. More more more.
Give Revolt a try if you want something that feels like Discord without all the bloat.
I misread this as “give Reddit a try” and thought you were insane.
Revolt seems pretty promising. Info is kinda scarce, are they a purely volunteer driven product?
Oh god, here you go the next “enshitification” victim… Matrix isn’t really that good of a replacement, I wonder what we will end up with.
Sure are a lot of tech companies seemingly speedrunning their self-destruction right now. Is there something in the water in the SF?
On a more serious note, Discord has always been mediocre. Makes me sad that the third-party client(!), Ripcord, is more or less abandonware. Being able to monitor just the specific channels you’re interested in is infinitely better than being forced to use servers wholesale given it’s near impossible to keep an eye on one at a time beyond notifications – which are clumsy at best. But for how useful that is, not having access to things like spoiler tags, most voip (and all video related) stuff really limits its practical use.
Oh well.
Makes me sad that the third-party client(!), Ripcord, is more or less abandonware
If this were free software, someone would probably have already picked it up and continued development of it.
You can select which channels you’re interested in in Discord now (though maybe it’s not enabled by default for all servers yet?). I want to be able to see all those channels in a single place instead of clicking between servers but 🤷
I want to be able to see all those channels in a single place instead of clicking between servers but 🤷
That’s precisely what Ripcord does so well! I can hardly fathom how decision-making works at Discord, given all the random bells and whistles they add, but not a core feature like this.
Usually I’d think this was just another case of developers not using their own product, but I mean … they hardly use slack, do they?
Since they introduced super reactions, which nobody needs, I’ve become a bit worried, because I live on discord.
I like Matrix, my friends and I had a lot of fun with Element. Didn’t stick because of course everyone else was still on Discord but Matrix works as well as… Well, Lemmy
Gonna leave this here for the inevitable dissenters: https://element.io/
Do they even have a consumer version? I’ve seen them linked before but their whole site looks like they only want Enterprise users. The lowest pricing plan is “Business - $5/month/user”. I’m not an organization and while that’s not extremely expensive as an individual, it adds up if I’m paying separately for everyone in my family to join. My “senior executive discussions” consist of polling the family about what we want for dinner next week and what other groceries we need, not how we can achieve nationwide scalability for our household.
If they have offerings for individuals outside of business, they really need to point people to it and have a better landing page for them.
Element is just a client that can connect to the Matrix which is federated and decentralized just like Lemmy. Element is heavily promoted because element is the most well-developed client out there (made by the same people behind the matrix so they get the new features first) but far from the only one.
Regular element is free on all operating systems including windows, linux, android, etc. And there’s even a web version.
And just like Lemmy you can register on any instance and communicate with any other (federated) instances. Matrix.org being the biggest one but there are countless and you can even self-host.
If you’d rather use another client you can use any of these listed here: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
To use Element on the web you just need to go to:
https://app.element.io/I typed a reply and it seems to have vanished, so my apologies if you end up getting two similar yet not identical replies to this.
Thanks for elaborating. I did end up trying out Fluffychat the last time I looked into Matrix. It looks like Element on the web isn’t available on mobile, so I might give it a try later on my computer or download their app.
I still think the Element site should do a better job of explaining it’s also available for personal users for free. I had to go 11 links into their footer to find that information, the pricing page has no mention of their personal offerings at all.
Yeah, if you just want to use it personally, you should click Sign In in the menu, then Open Element Web, which brings you to https://app.element.io/.
Alternately Get Started then Download the app.
Either gets you to a client where you can easily create a Matrix account (on matrix.org).
Absolutely. I use the free consumer-tier version every day. Just download the app, sign up for a Matrix account, and go.
As long as I can still use all the current free functionality then I don’t mind these things. It’s when these things become the only option ala Reddit killing 3rd party apps that it becomes a problem.
Yea, I don’t have a problem with a company, whose service I use, try to sell additional services or create a paid tier that basically pays for me to use it for free.
I like discord. The name change hubbub was…a nothing burger. If people want to pay for extra emojis or whatever for their server…cool? How does that impact me?
Discord has been making a lot of bad decisions lately but imo this isn’t one of them. It’s not like they’re forcing every server to setup paid channels.
Currently, many creators have Patreons setup and allow varying levels of access to their Discord servers based on Patreon tiers. Literally all this change does is give creators the option to do this entirely through Discord rather than using Patreon.
This is nothing new. Just a slightly different way to handle monetization.
Lol pay for exclusive memes, I’m out guys
I never understood why everyone moved to discord. Regardless of this, it actually just sucks and is hard to use. Discord really gives me hope that the fediverse will succeed, just because the UI sucks so fucking much.
What did people use before discord?
For voice, TeamSpeak
For text chat, IRC
For forums, phpBB or any other forum software
Discord replacing the third is the saddest. It completely isn’t fit for purpose. Part of the reason you can’t find anything on Google now is that forums died, and Discord is unsearchable.
Discord just switches it’s business model yearly to clone the one thing it hasn’t killed yet. Started out to kill TS and IRC, then went on to kill the forum, then it tried to kill Steam/GOG but failed, now it’s trying to kill Patreon.
Discord is pretty great for video/voice chat - the things it tries to do outside of that can be frustrating.
It’s miles ahead of having to use Ventrillo, Teamspeak, Skype like we had to in the past.
I never used Discord but used google hangouts before switching to Telegram and Matrix (the former for family and the latter for everything else).
Also, weirdly, a lot of people seem to use Discord for things used to be (and I would say should) be on a forum (or community, magazine, etc.)
Trying to follow the thread of a discussion about some obscure point you’re interested in is much easier when it’s in a thread, instead of an undifferentiated chat log with a bunch of unrelated cross-talk.
Does matrix have a voice/video functionality or is it strictly text chat?
It has video+audio calls but not push-to-talk and there are no “voice only”-rooms or whatever it is discord has
I plan to check out matrix since the /r/firefox group has been chatting through that.
Teamspeak, Skype. Funny enough up until redesigning a year to two years ago they advertised themselves as being the replacement to these.
because skype was worse
I mean I guess? Aside from the calling it’s fine imo. UI was also easier for me to use
wasn’t the calling the main thing Skype was used for tho?
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Eh, it’s the only voip number provider I’ve found that will sell me a number despite not being a business buying 1000 numbers and that isn’t Google
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Discord provides free hosting.
Everyone talking about alternatives like Revolt or Mumble does not realize how big of a deal that actually is.
Exactly, I can go to discord and create a new server with a few clicks. Even as a somewhat tech savvy person I am not that confident about setting up a server, securing it properly, making it scalable for large amount of users, handling data storage and backups and all that.
Versus Slack, it was an easier sign-up process for ad hoc communities. You could just have people sign up instead of going through an approval process. (Slack’s approval process could be automated with third-party tools, but it was a hack. Slack was meant to be a specific group of known people.)
I always thought Slack was just for businesses
It’s definitely marketed that way, but I’m on a few Slacks that are just small, private groups. It’s private by default while Discord is public by default.
