They supposedly can be disabled in settings- but we all know that won’t last. They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode and it’s only a matter of time.
I get so tired of this “servers are expensive” cycle. Anyone know of a good P2P alternative? No servers, no ads, no subscriptions.
Skype was P2P for voice, video and files- only text chat and user discovery had any major server usage so users could receive chats while offline. Microsoft still sought to centralize & monetize it, they actively removed a lot of the P2P networking to “improve user experience”. Any service owned by any profit seeking corporation will have the same end result regardless of the underlying tech; their excuses will just change forms.
Yes, and that will always be the case. But I feel like P2P software tends to get shittier slower. There are probably some open-source solutions out there right now, waiting to be adopted.
I thought P2P still requires a server (STUN, TURN)?
Briar, Jami, SimpleX and Tox are all semi similar to what you might be looking for.
Thank you!
Quick search turned this up, but I’m on mobile, so not in a great place to dig into how viable it is. A Reddit post indicated it’s in some sort of alpha/beta stage, but I think it is something you can use today
Edit: Forgot the link like a fool https://positive-intentions.com/
Thanks! Worth a look!
They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode
And I thought Discord was initially launched to destroy Skype.
It was only ever launched to take over their position, not destroy their program design. Greed eventually consumes all.
Has Discord ever been remotely profitable though? I can’t imagine enough people put money into it that they haven’t just been bleeding cash for 10 years. It’s hard for me to exactly call it greed if they’re just trying to get back to even. I could imagine it being completely enshittified in the name of profit in the future though.
We have no clue if they’re profitable since they’re private… but given they’ve laid off quite a few employees and are now scrabbling for pennies through these ads, we can only assume they’ve been, at best, net zero, and likely running a deficit ever since their inception. And interest rates have turned off the VC faucets.
Exactly. Everyone wants an ad-free platform that’s free to use. Either you pay for the product or you are the product.
I don’t think paying will stop enshitification.
Line.
Go.
Up.
It’s not a publicly traded company smh
They’re probably trying to IPO like Reddit.
Maybe they are, but they fought off a Microsoft buyout only a few years ago, seems if they wanted to sell out, they would have done it then. Meanwhile, we don’t have financial figures (since it is a private company) but reportedly they are profitable Regardless, it’s just speculation and the “line must go up” meme generally refers to increasing share price to enrich investors and c suite, which… Doesn’t make as much sense for a private company who’s shares do not trade on an exchange.
bro, they employ literally like 200 people, most of those aren’t devs, based on the sheer amount of people that pay for nitro there is zero way discord isn’t profitable.
I mean they’re almost certainly VC funded, the entire strategy is grow big, fast, burn a lot of money doing so, but establish such an aggressive market spot that you can 10x the profit and nobody moves anywhere. You’re telling me we aren’t in the latter part of that scale?
They would probably be fairing better in terms of profitability if they didn’t have to host every instance themselves, but apparently that’s too difficult to conjure up. Or if they implemented actual features, but whatever.
Discord is a sack of shit anyways…I don’t get the obsession?
After however many years I finally joined two discord instances for some niche topics where community was hard to find elsewhere.
I haven’t used IRC in a few years I admit, but I’m a few months in with discord, and so far it has never stopped feeling like IRC with a confusing interface, a gaudy new coat of paint, and emojis everywhere.
I have no idea why it’s seemingly the ONLY place anyone wants to create an interactive community anymore for so many things.
Because its zero-effort to make a functional forum (no hosting or backend to be set up) and you have almost full control over the space / it’s isolated from other communities (unlike reddit)
EDIT: I don’t like discord either, but I can see why content creators and the likes would prefer it to other forums
It’s decent for voice chat in games.
I’m not sure why it became the open source world’s documentation platform of choice.
Yeah, but so is mumble.
Great, now you just need somebody to rent a server for you.
That’s where Discord won, along with being able to run in a browser for those who didn’t want to fill their PC with crap comms software for one PUG run through Uldir.
there are web clients for mumble
Does it also do temporary passes so you don’t have to give full access to people who only want to play alongside you once?
One issue I had with the Discord web client was the lack of push to talk. Anyone who raided with a Darth Vader will relate. I presume Mumble would be similar. You don’t really want to give a browser full key logging access. Useful for listening in though.
So, the answer is as usual laziness and minimum effort for anything. We really all deserve what we are experiencing.
Well yes, but at the same time if you had to pay a few bucks a month for Lemmy or it only worked on a special app, would you be on it?
Yes. In fact, I’m sponsoring the project and I am currently using a special app.
OK. And how many other people would be here for you to talk to?
Discord nitro is a thing. They are bleeding money like mofos. There’s no more investor money, they are desperate for income.
sounds like it’s time to allow third-party clients distribute the server software, shut down free “servers” and offer paid hosting and support. that would cut costs a great deal.
??? I hope you don’t actually think this
There’s no reason to require everyone on earth to prioritize a better computer interfacing environment over their free time.
My time is worth way more to me than video game voice chat – but it’s not either/or. Thanks to other developers, I can have both.
Mumble does that one thing just fine, but it doesn’t do all the things discord does.
And it’s not just the fact that discord does all those things that’s made it so dominant; it’s the fact that it does all those things in one place.
Even just the core features of voice chat, text chat, and the ability to set up a new server where you have extensive moderation control in one click – it’s what people wanted.
They don’t need a handful of different programs to glue together a shittier experience, they need a FOSS discord/slack.
this thread is making me realize I’m clearly missing something. How do people actually use discord? Me and my friends basically use it as semi-permanent group chat. A few different topic areas, and no stupid android/ios compatibility issues. I’m also in two servers for some small clubs. Do people really use it the way they would lemmy/reddit?
Every single entertainer (YouTuber, Twitch Streamer, etc.), community game server, some Open Source projects, Indie game developers and anyone who gets public support through Patreon uses Discord as the sole public hub. Colleges, Universities, Online courses also rely heavily on Discord. It’s a social network they can advertise, some servers are for subscribers only and is seen as a reward to get access to that. I’m part of a dozen or so servers for online things of interest to me, even though I hate the platform. It’s all silenced and without notifications, else I would go crazy, and I never chat with anyone there. But unfortunately there are several events, opportunities and activities that are exclusively communicated via the Discord server. It’s like cancer. Just like Instagram and WhatsApp, I have them not because I like it, but because if I remove them entirely or too aggressively it will take my social life with it.
Edit: tldr: I think I probably could’ve saved myself a lot of time by just saying that discord is like slack but for friends/fun.
I didn’t think people use it like lemmy/Reddit. People use it like IRC. That’s the analogous tech. IRC is better in almost every way, but not in the most important ways: ease of use, and voice chat.
I know only a handful of people who could set up a server for IRC, but in discord, it’s a one-button process. Sure, you can use a public IRC server, but then your channels are harder to organize and you don’t have as much moderation control. I dn’t think
I would vastly prefer IRC, but even if it was easy to set up, I would still need something for voice chat, and, sure, there are plenty of voice chat tools, but not ones that integrate with text chat so well.
I think a lot of people like the API and the bots built from it, tho personally that’s not something I use much.
I’m in probably ~50 servers: groups of friends, video game guilds, tech chat (eg HTMX, Lit, Svelte), random interests (eg mechanical keyboards), and community servers for video games (eg a couple of LFG servers, a couple servers where I can ask questions to tryhards, streamers’ communities, etc).
I would vastly prefer to use something FOSS, but there just isn’t something that does it so well and so easily – and even then, I’d probably have to use discord for a bunch of these things.
Let’s say it’s like Slack + Zoom, but it ends up used for things that would have made way more sense as a Lemmy/Reddit/old school forum. You can’t find anything old without pausing the scroll, the interaction is piss poor because nothing is visibly sticky for more than a couple of hours even on a slow channel, and then because people (rightly) feel that it’s more like a chat, the feed fills up with low effort nonsense and dick-baggery.
In my company, Slack is useful because we’re all stuck in front of it for 8hours+ per day, we’re all incentivized to be on our best behavior, groups are mostly manageable in size, and to the extent there’s a social aspect, it is to replace “water cooler talk” which was always light and ephemeral anyway. It works… fine. I don’t love it, but it works fine. Zoom too.
Discord is also fine for what it is, but it’s terrible when it’s the only public facing option for sharing information and fielding questions about a project or topic.
For sure. Look, I hate Stack Overflow as much as the next guy but you gotta admit, for the big picture, long term, best practice for the future of software development, that’s the correct format: one question, focused discussion, end.
Discord’s failure to make its history available is really going to put a big hole in the middle of our cultural wisdom.
A few open-source projects I follow use it as their main community tool and it sucks.
I don’t mind my friend groups using it because it’s just for ephemeral chats and gaming anyway, but I want to know why these other communities think it’s appropriate.
I like to watch twitch streams and play modded videogames (minecraft, lethal company, valheim). Every single twitch streamer has their own discord. Fine I guess, they want control over their space and it’s full of cat pics and tattoos anyway. But the mod makers do the same, patch notes on discord, feature discussion on discord, some even close their githubs and want bugs on discord. I don’t want to be part of your shitty community, I want to know which recolored slime is killing me through walls so I can disable it in the configs. And because the discord search is garbage, I still have to sift through racist memes and wildly outdated info to find what I need.
This is basically how I use it as well. I am in a few game jam channels, but i only use them when the jams are running.
I’ve been keeping an eye on Matrix if discord keeps getting worse. It is awful trying to look up guides or important info in discord’s format.
At least it is not “Enshittification Continues: Lemmy to begin showing advertisements on it’s fediverse platform”
I’ve grown with ICQ, MSN Messenger, TeamSpeak, Skype, several local chat apps, then people obsessed with Facebook Messenger, then Snapchat… I just know any particular chatting app is a temporary fad that will eventually end, it’s just their cycle. Don’t get attached to them.
I miss MSN Messenger… it was part of my childhood.
Same here. I’m just surprised at how well Signal is holding up.
Unfortunately it’s difficult to get people to switch to it
If only they had functional data backup and export on non-Android platforms…
And they didn’t make it any easier by removing SMS support from the mobile app.
It was pretty easy to get a couple of my friends to switch by saying it’s just another SMS client that also supports highly encrypted messaging with other people that use Signal. Now that it’s standalone, nobody will even fucking touch it.
Yeah I got rid of Signal when they got rid of SMS because literally nobody I’ve ever met uses it and they’re not gonna switch.
It’s unfortunate, I had just gotten a few people to take it up… but that progress is lost. People prefer convenience over all else and having to use 2 different primary message apps sucks.
which is weird, I don’t know any other country that still uses SMS other than the usa, for chatting.
it’s for 2FA from banks (which are now switching to authenticator apps) and bulk scams mostly that I can see.
I think it’s because texting became essentially free in North America long before it did in Europe. That, combined with the fact that it came preinstalled on EVERY phone (Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Palm, you name it), gave it enough inertia to stay dominant decades later.
“preinstalled”. lol.
Yeah, I know it’s probably not the right word for this context, but downloading an app and creating an account is factually a huge barrier for entry, because people are lazy.
I use sms quite a lot when network conditions are bad… with poor service (rural areas) or heavy congestion (sport events) SMS messages piggybacking on voice channels often stand a better chance of getting through than anything that requires an Internet data connection on 4G. That said I do have unusual use cases, the other 99% of the time normal messaging apps work fine.
Canada. Now you know two! Granted, we are basically the 51st state at this point…
America’s hat/touk!
Oh yeah, I’ve been through the same. Discord was nice while it lasted.
TS and Matrix will hopefully be the replacements I use if I can get people to switch. A lot of discord communities are heavily entrenched though, which I’m sure they’re banking on to maintain momentum as the service quality continues to degrade.
As a casual user I find the entrenched communities more of a bug than a feature. Reminds me of reddit cliques. But, I do get your point, and I agree that the inertia will be a challenge when it comes to getting groups to migrate.
A lot of discord communities are heavily entrenched though,
Entrenchment enables Enshittification, unfortunately.
In Matrix we trust
Sir IRC is still going strong!
The difference is you’re not relying on one corp with IRC.
One will stick once it’s sensible
Hello twin!
door opening sound knock knock
I can still sometimes “hear” ICQ, and that’s going on almost 30 years ago now?
I can still recite my ICQ number off the top of my head
Ha, same. Best thing I can do for my social security number is “That looks about right”.
63094052 add me A/S/L?
And then you wonder WTF you want my age, sex, and location.
I remember mine, and my childhood best friend’s Prodigy account IDs.
Okay, now you guys are making me miss CompuServe.
Big spenders here, NetZero crowd checking in.
Always kept the Netzero around, but the best were the fly-by-nights who were sure they could run a successful business without Juno or Netzero’s investment or technical debt by just asking you to pretty-please use their site as your home page.
Well, “best” for as long as they lasted.
Mine is 6 digits long and I remember it too. The whiteboard function was particularly fun.
39148895 add me plz
Uh oh!
I still have the “uh oh” sound - use it on my phone for notifications.
Same, however, I keep my phone on vibrate so I never actually hear it.
I hear you! 🤣
I so want a smart “watch” just for subtle notifications, with vibration patterns that can be configured.
I’d even pay for an Apple device, if it could be made to work well.
Oh, and it needs a battery that can last 3 days at least, preferably a week.
This may actually push users into thinking about modding discord, or even better, switching to matrix
Good move discord, I like it
I never stopped using irc (I know I’m old). There is matrix to irc connectors that are awesome. One of the benefits of open source is a lot of the protocols work well together.
Can you recommend any IRC channels for techies please? I like infosec, Linux, and Mac topics but I can’t find any communities that aren’t turbo-clicky or dead. Most channels I’ve found are like ham radio: a bunch of old grumpy people ragchewing. I’d like an actual conversation I can contribute to.
Not Rizon - Linux. I asked them a noob question and they banned me. Kind of irked me because I was just asking for help or opinion. I don’t even remember what I asked.
ah, that vintage linux community experience.
“RTFM” but the manual has been out of date for years? Hell yeah keep it old school.
I’d like to know as well. I’d love to join a good community or older techies.
Discord runs just fine in Firefox with uBO.
The way they sound like they’re implementing ads, it’s not going to be a simple banner or anything but rather a part of the UI that promotes some kind of streaming challenge. It’s not likely to be blockable if they make the ads a base part of the container.
Will filtering elements not work?
If it’s downloaded onto your machine, it can be blocked. It’s impossible to prevent a dedicated enough community from blocking ads. YouTube hasn’t even been able to keep users from doing it; they’ve had to resort to changing their platform (Chrome) to make it harder, but that just means people have to use other platforms.
It’s your machine, and you have admin rights on it. That means you control the data and display of that machine; ad block blocking is Quixotic at best, and neurotic at worst. Which YouTube has discovered.
Wait, there are mods for discord?
Yeah, check out Vesktop/Vencord. The plugins are great.
I use webcord, hopefully they’ll integrate an adblocker
Matrix works pretty good.
skype > discord
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Neo, Matrix is calling
Well I guess its done its job for the US Government. Funding has obviously stopped.
Investors, who made Discord possible, want to earn money. It’s totally understandable.
The paid promotions are from videogame makers and will offer users gifts for completing in-game tasks while their friends watch on Discord.
So they’re still showing ads to paying users. This shit should be illegal.
So they’re still showing ads to paying users. This shit should be illegal.
You could simply not use the service instead.
It’s not as simple as that, which is why e. g. laws to control monopolies exist. Just look at the recent changes in rulings regarding essential services, right to repair etc.
This is really an outdated, “the market will regulate itself” perspective that has been shown time and again to not work - people just get fucked by corporations.
What a dense comment.
Why should that be illegal?? It’s definitely disgusting, but if the paid customers don’t want to see ads (they don’t), then they will leave. I don’t see how or why to make it illegal to show ads to paid users.
edit: I didn’t really say that right, I just think that this is a complex problem, and saying “oh just make it illegal” is not a realistic solution. Some antitrust regulation is good for innovation, some more might be worse for innovation, and we need to be realistic about that, and not just act like we can regulate it all and then there will be 5 competing discords or whatever.
You probably still think prices are determined by supply and demand.
No they won’t. The whole point of a platform like Discord is to bind its users to it. At first because the platform itself offers good value, and second because of network effects. Once you’re good and hogtied the bullshit barrage begins.
It’s the default enshittification playbook.
Enshittification isn’t illegal though. And making it illegal sounds pretty draconian and anti liberal to me.
I, for one, will never pay for discord, and if the communities I do use it for decide to move elsewhere, I’ll happily move over.
Yeah that’s true, and I agree trying to regulate enshittification out of existence will probably have some heavy handed implications. However I do think it’s worth rethinking how network effects as extreme as Discord implements them relate to monopoly.
It’s definitely not “draconian” to make enshittification illegal. But you don’t regulate the turning-to-shit part. You regulate the part where they offer a service for free or too cheap so that they kill the competition. This is called anti-competitive and we supposedly address it already. You also regulate what an EULA can enforce and the ability of companies to change the EULA after a user has agreed to it. Again, these concepts already exist in law.
We’ve essentially already identified these problems and we have decided that we need to address them, but we been ineffective in doing so for various reasons.
But you don’t regulate the turning-to-shit part.
Yups, that’s what I was getting at. There can be very good reasons to do things that are impopular with end users.
At the same time, without reddit turning to shit, Lemmy wouldn’t have thrived the way it is now. Change is part of life, as is platforms turning to shit. You move over and learn to deal with it. You might be able to nudge it in the right direction, but in the end, corporations gonna corporate.
because at a certain critical threshold, which I think discord has reached, expecting users to simply stop using a platform when it is the only platform remaining for such tasks is shortsighted and ignores the true monopoly that’s been created.
See: Facebook and it’s complete consumption of most social media, VR headsets, and for-sale pages largely replacing Craigslist. If I want to buy or sell cars it’s basically impossible to do without Facebook Marketplace. I hate giving data to them.
You want the government to regulate discord? That’s a new one. Hadn’t heard that position before.
Ideally, it wouldn’t be regulating Discord specifically. It would be regulating the business practices and advertising methods. If Discord is affected, then it sucks for them. But it wouldn’t be something specific to Discord. It would simply regulate how companies are able to go about including ads on their programs, especially when it comes to interactive ads and player rewards.
Wow you’re serious.
So create a law to prevent something that charges money from showing ads? It would have to be pretty targeted because that’s how the rest of media works. Magazines, newspapers, cable television…. It’s an age old model you’d be fighting.
No, it’s not about whether or not it’s a paid service. It’s about the fact that the ads are interactive, require users to complete in-game “challenges” for rewards, require users to go live and stream their game, etc…
I’ve got some news for you about Magazines, newspapers, and cable television in the past couple of decades…
They’re made obsolete by internet devices which also have advertising?
I’m not tracking with the logic here. A ban on advertising? I’m an app dev. I’m not allowed to put an ad in an app? What about paid placement, is that ok?
Wanting a nanny state to punish software devs for putting ads in applications is a fine way to not have software devs in your country.
I didn’t say it should be banned, but I think this is not a very good defense for just about anything:
It would have to be pretty targeted because that’s how the rest of media works. Magazines, newspapers, cable television…. It’s an age old model you’d be fighting.
You cited three age-old institutions that had their legacy business models destroyed the very moment consumers could escape them.
I already barely use discord (after all these years I have only joined two servers, and both make my eyes bleed every time I look at them) - and I can get along just fine without those communities if they make it the tiniest bit less pleasant for me as a consumer.
The only reason I use it at all is for a small number of niche communities that aren’t very active elsewhere. My life would be nearly exactly the same as it is today if I never visited those communities again.
Not in a million years will I pay for discord, and if their ads can’t be blocked, they better be damn near invisible or I’m out. Considering I’ve never heard one person say how much they enjoy using Discord, I feel confident there are a great many others in the same boat.
this is not a very good defense for just about anything
It’s also how the internet works. I left it off because it was the subject of the comment. People didn’t flee those because of the advertising. People left because the internet is undeniably better by being larger, more convenient, timely, and is a 2-way comms channel. Advertising still drives everything there.
I use discord as my primary work app. If they add ads, I’ll likely move to something else also. And that’s the point. Platforms should be free to do whatever they want and consumers are free to react.
You don’t? In civilized countries, companies don’t just get to do whatever they want.
I thought Discord was USA-based.
Right, which is why they mentioned civilized countries in comparison. Over here in the US, yes, companies get to do whatever they want.
You need to get out more.
Why is that
