Please, pretty please, be the spark that will stop OSS projects from hosting their “support forums” on Discord.
I wish it was only limited to support forums. I’ve even seen a Linux kernel driver where the Issues sections was closed and you should go to Discord instead. No thanks.
It’s horrible. We already had that stuff figured out. Wiki pages and forums to make information accessible even after 20 minutes have passed. Fuck that development and everyone that was/is pushing for that.
🤮
Who are the morons that keep making these decisions?
Several open source developers in this case
It’s people that don’t want to have to maintain things, which I understand. It’s trivial these days to host a forum with a cloud provider, or have a github, but Discord is one click. It’s not the ideal tool, but one click, no payment, and you have a place everyone can talk to each other.
This is my biggest pet peeve of OSS projects. Someone writes some code and that is where it ends for them. The rest of the infrastructure is so free and so easy that there is no need for dedication to the project.
I guess, but even without talking about forums, even a subreddit would at least be publicly accessible and searchable. Using discord is effortless but antagonistic, at least a subresdit would be both effortless and in the service of the public.
Sure, I’d prefer an open source self hosted platform, but I’m hard pressed to find anything worse than discord
Sure, except that Discord was accessible when these were set up. There is nothing stopping Reddit from doing the exact same thing next year.
Discord is just as inaccessible from the open internet as it’s always been, if not arguably worse so, although you’re right in giving Reddit no further credit in that department.
It’s too bad the open source community couldn’t find some programmers to help them make an alternative.
As long as the alternative is not another chat app that is not indexable by search engines. Forums fill the role pretty well, I don’t understand why devs would use Discord in the first place.
Hear hear!
Matrix is an ok alternative to Discord for what Discord does.
Support forums are not an appropriate use of Discord, or of Matrix. Discourse is pretty great open source forum software. NodeBB forums even added ActivityPub support! I never particularly like when companies use Reddit as a primary communication method, and for the same reason I’d rather they didn’t use Lemmy or Piefed, but all of these are vastly better options than Discord, Matrix, or other un-indexable private chats.
Fluxer apparently has that on their roadmap. https://blog.fluxer.app/roadmap-2026/
As part of #3, I’d also like to add the ability to publish forums to the open web. That way, people can discover, archive, and access discussions without logging in.
As someone who has spent the last 2+ years testing revolt/stoat, matrix with element, and teamspeak, desperately searching for any viable discord alternative, I’m very interested in this. Where did you come across it? I tried to create an account but stuck pulsing on a loading screen.
One of my friends’ husbands brought it up, so good old word of mouth.
I did notice I wasn’t able to get logged in last night, though the night before I was able to make an account without issue. I wonder if they got a hug of death like Stoat did.
Haha I opened a github issue on that and the main Dev confirmed they were getting the HoD.
@craigers @other_cat can I ask what was the issue with using matrix as a discord replacement? I would like to propose it to some friends, so it would be good to know if there are some fatal flaws
My issues with matrix were mostly around the voice services.
@craigers oh ok! So far everything seemed to work fine with them. I hope they’ll keep being stable in my experience. Thanks for sharing!
Sounds great. I hope it has video chat and screenshare or will implement it soon.
They do have those things from what I can tell.
I saw earlier that Zulip already has that option, but I still would much prefer a regular old forum.
As long as the alternative is not another chat app that is not indexable by search engines. F
For me this is the biggest probem about Discord and Discord alternatives why not just use Lemmy what’s the problem with Lemmy?
Also not very searchable on engines, especially due to fediverse server name differences, you can’t !lemmy because many of the communities don’t have Lemmy in their domain or titles or however that works. At least I have only gotten Lemmy results for like 25% of my searches.
But you don’t need Google to search lemmy,. lemmy’s internal search is very good and you got whole index (even without an account)
Discord took the place of IRC. Chatlogs for IRC were rarely indexed by most channel admins until after about 2010 when projects like freenode hosted all the open source projects for the whole web.
It was purchased by some right wing billionaire and now it is no longer.
But in a success story for open source software, the entire community migrated from freenode to libera.chat in like 2 days.
The way to defeat enshittification is by disallowing lock-in.
Gen Z will not comply with this. They’d rather lick boots and get bullied by chuds. They treat social media networks like kids in the 80s treated 7-11. And they will not leave.
There is stoat.chat (formerly Revolt). But you wont find much help on Lemmy or Mastodon. A lot of people on the fediverse have an aversion to Discord because when they try it, they have difficulty with it like a senior citizen with a smartphone. Even though Matrix and Discord arent similar, people on the fediverse will still try to recommend you Matrix, because they think Discord is just another messenger and not like having a forum, teamspeak, jitsi and other stuff in one program. And even if you explain it like that, they will be like “but then you can just use a forum, matrix, jitsi and a screenshare program separately” or something like that.
Lol. I can vouch for this.
Hell my friends are still Stans for IRC and will literally argue it has everything you need.
Open source community always loses to capitalists, because people won’t do the work unless there’s money involved. Otherwise there would be open source alternatives that are better and more popular. What incentive do smart programmers have to help the open source community when they’re better off earning 180k+ per year programming for the financial sector? Especially in this ever increasingly oppressive economy. I’m sorry but unless leftists are donating billions to the open source community, it’s idealistic at best to depend on them.
Nonsense. Open source built the web. Open source isn’t some new anti fascist trend… What are you smoking?
Open source built the web
Yeah and how’s that working out, in the context of the subject of this thread. I don’t see any open-source communities competing with Google or Microsoft or Palantir.
Open source didn’t crumble under the weight of inevitability. It fell apart because corporate interests profiting off of it decided it was more profitable to create cultures antithetical to the guardrails that open source presents to exploitation and co-option.
A las, capitalism wins again. I don’t like it, but it’s a fact.
It was pruned. It will grow back. It’s growing back now. There will be an Internet post American dominance and it will use open source.
I deployed several docker containers using an image from this one guy. Later when I needed help with an image I realized the support is provided exclusively through a Discord server. To nobody’s surprise the guy is an asshole who shouldn’t interact with users.
Yes, thank you.
IRC still supports most of the FOSS core.
More modern alternatives include Jitsi, Matrix and Simplex. Mumble also works well for voice.
Every time I see Simplex it reminds me of a virus.
Hear me out. Maybe, if you are a parent, its your duty to keep an eye on your child, and exert some control over the spaces and people they interact with?
Americans- If you’re thinking “this isn’t so bad” please consider that all it takes is a teeny tiny, insignificant api added to the back end with absolutely no notice to users and suddenly the DHS has a database of dissenters, with cross-referenced IDs, photos of faces, chat history, link share history, raw uploaded photos, and approximate locations.
Say no to this. If you need a temporary alternative that’s quick to get going, create a signal group chat with your friends.
Good.
Discord is overused for help forums and wikis, which makes them extremely difficult to search and dependent upon third party software to be maintained. I hope this will force people away from that behaviour and back to good old fashioned messageboards that have been working just fine since at least the 80s
“I categorically cannot trust tech companies with that kind of personal data,” wrote one frustrated user, with many hoping they might be able to convince Discord to do a U-turn with enough public pressure. Others went further. “What a great way to kill your community,” added another longtime user, while some predicted “that’s game over for Discord” and remarked ruefully that “privacy on the internet is truly dead”.
LOL. Just like Netflix price increases, or reddit third party apps thing, the protest will barely register in usage metrics and discord will carry on.
These companies have effectively infinite resources with which to test changes with user reference groups, model potential outcomes, and mitigate risks. It’s pure hubris to suggest that you have a better understanding of Discord’s user base than they do.
The vaaast majority of users will just do the video age test and never think about it again.
Man 100%. Every now and then you hear that Facebook is “hemorrhaging users” or “it’s all over” but most normal people just don’t give a fuck and use it because they’re already there and their friends are too. This’ll be no different.
I’ve been off Facebook for at least 15 years. I’ve been trying to move people away from it for so long, or at least getting people to stop sharing shit about their kids, but a lot of people use it as their primary means of communication, news, photo sharing, etc. I just don’t get it. I do think most people I know just have ghost accounts now, though. But for some, Facebook is their internet. When they send me Facebook links, I just don’t interact with it at all. I don’t know what they sent me because I refuse to click the link, and even if I did, Facebook is blocked by my firewall and DNS so I won’t even be able to see it without getting around my own network. I just don’t even respond.
hmm idk, i only know like 2 people in my life that still use Facebook heavily. i know it’s different in India though.
Facebook has seen stagnation or user drops in most mature markets, it’s still growing in growing markets. India especially represents like half of all Facebook now.
no idea where you might be from, but this is not a globally universal issue. this will likely play out differently in different markets.
That’s a real good point. Here in the UK I’m the only one out of my friends group who doesn’t use it. Here’s me also jumping to conclusions that it’s the same everywhere !
In India, it’s pretty much the old generation and elders who use it due to old habit I think. Most kids nowadays use instagram.
I dunno about netflix, but at least the reddit debacle diverted a lot of users to the fediverse.
If we get a similar exodus from discord to matrix, that would work wonders for spreading the fediverse to others. Most of them still haven’t even heard of it.
A blip of users
I mean, do you want more people on the fediverse or not?
Thats not my point though.
At the time reddit closed their API to third parties loads of idiots were saying it was the end of reddit.
In reality reddit just sanitised their user base.
In reality, reddit gave a userbase to a platform that previously had none.
… and yet, that’s not what im talking about.
If you call that sanitised…
Well they got rid of the users they didn’t want so from their perspective, yeah.
They lowered the lowest common denominator by driving away the users that wouldn’t tolerate their BS.
Idk, they lose users from stuff like this. For every one real user they lose, they are picking up several fake ones, the mechanized troll divisions, loitering chatbots with air support and artillery cover from amplifier accounts, influence agents, and political support to back them up.
The internet is dead, and those metrics are not the real metrics, the traffic from fake users, inauthentic users, is now greater than real people using the internet it’s been reported.
So your metrics might even go up in user numbers/volume. It doesn’t mean real people didn’t leave, and while your value might not decrease having fake users and bots fill the void, the real value of that website decreases, and that real value will show through eventually.
LOL. Keep telling yourself that mate.
This is just supposition. They have the hard data.
Figures don’t lie, but liars do figure.
It’s not at all false that the true value in something lies in the true value, and that our clown economy that prizes confidence men and confidence games that value Tesla at a trillion dollars are unsustainable, and will in time come back to intrinsic values.
Having fake users may keep the company looking just as good, but it lessens the value. Interactions with bots doesn’t satisfy most people, and will lessen the value to them, and they will use the site less. Moreover any advartising on the platform will see less payout because more of the accounts being served the ads are fake accounts operating under false pretense.
Just like reddit, they more than make up for users that left with new fake accounts, and they are already overrun with them, but when people are stuck interacting with those fake accounts they will generally use it less, because they aren’t witty, they aren’t insightful, they are spitting out learned answers that only sheep would enjoy fraternizing with. The fake accounts shout down real users, drown out real discussion anyplace that that discussion threatens the entrenched interests that employ those mechanized trolls, not just governments but corpoorations, all of them basically, they have trade groups that farm out contracts, often to AI, Actually Indians, to run the influence operations with the help of regular ai and computer programs because they are low cost and speak english well enough.
While the ivy league hacks running our businesses and government don’t care if they have fake users that run off real users that makes their site less valuable intrinsically, because for now it doesn’t affect their profitability, and they are unable to look beyond their next set of financial statements, it will catch up to them.
They will use their corrupt influence and anti competitive tactics to try and crush any upstarts that are nearing critical mass, so they don’t think they have to cater to the user base at all, that we have no options, no alternatives. Let’s make them wrong about that. Because following their lead is the end of the world.
This is exactly what I’m talking about.
After the reddit “collapse” of 2024 their market cap was > $6b following their IPO in November 2024. Right now it’s $28b.
Yes, reddit is a cesspool and the UX has dropped off a cliff.
I’m sure /u/spez is tarrified that some dweeb on lemmy decided “it’s going to catch up with them”.
They’re right. Have you used reddit before and after that? Many decent users just disappeared, at all, and the new users replacing them are not nearly as decent. So in terms of usability and utilitly the website died. It is like titktok. No less no more, but with text posts.
This might shock you but they don’t care about your experience. Everyone made loads of money.
Not only that, verification is not mandatory. So, unless you frequent some questionable 2 furry goatse 1 cup channels, there is literally nothing to worry about. The rest will gladly verify their age and jerk off to their favorite AI generated porn.
They’ve stated elsewhere that even though they’re deploying “age inference” (whatever that is), verification is mandatory if you don’t want your account to be restricted to PG-13, basically.
Stop a calling this “age.verification” and start calling it what it is, “identity harvesting”.
Many of the communities I am in are pissed and these aren’t even tech people, this is even worse than what reddit did.The thing that most people online hate is age verification, who thought this was a good idea, reminds me of when Tumblr decided to ban porn same level of stupidity.
It’s all about abuse.
Companies get too big for their britches and are accustomed to doing whatever they want with their sheep just going along.
I’m sure they’re very surprised to see any kind of significant backlash.
They, like some political parties across the west, are arrogant in thinking people have no other choice. They’ve consolidated it all down into a few options, buying out their rivals, or crushing them legally, and or using anti competitive behavior to hurt them, that’s against the law but not enforced because plutocracy, and think we have no other options, the other option is worse, so they can continually get worse and not lose market share, because what are you going to do?
You can start your own websites, they will use the law and courts to try and crush them. They will lean on isp’s to strangle the traffic, get hosting sites to refuse to host them, they will lean on credit card processors to not process transactions for them. Maybe manufacture a terrorist connection to justify personally going after anyone involved in the website or it’s operation.
There is no limit to the caprice of these entrenched interests where we are headed, with an openly corrupt government; openly sold out courts with contempt for the constitution and ancient rights of English Common Law countries, open contempt for their citizen charges seeking redress from powerful interests abusing them; an executive branch that is all but openly harvesting protection money, payoffs, and bidding off regulatory actions, bidding off laws and executive orders and justice department investigations, and setting the federal government up like a political machine from a century prior, where everybody pays and the boss gets a cut of everything. Like boss tweed or something, I don’t know what we’d expect with a mobbed up blackmailing and blackmailed real estate baron from New York City that’s been involved in over 10k court cases and never once paid any real price for cheating everyone he’s done business with that couldn’t hurt him and slandered them to justify it.
We could go on with the corruption bit, but point being, any new sites that start to get critical mass need to be set up in a way that they can’t strangle traffic off on them, and that they cannot take down the whole unit for allegations of criminality in any part of it. Easy enough for them to set up a fake terror account, wire money from here to terror there, and then take the entire thing down. To sanction everyone involved. The federation bit could help limit the liability and prevent a lot of that maybe. But we need our own infrastructures. We need our own internets. We should be setting up community cooperative internets everywhere. There is no reason we should pay two companies trillions of dollars to provide internet poorly and spy on us in the process, when hundreds of billions could provide ourselves internet at cost under a less intrusive nature.
They for sure made the calculation, how many leave maybe 10-20% if we are lucky. How many stay and give them the right to sell their most sensitive data. How much money do they make with the data? Its more than they lose for sure.
What did reddit do? I heard about for in the Uk and aussielands, because they are leading the way in subjugating the internet to ai, to id every account and associate it with id and likeness and every word, every page view, to run ai threat detection, and create secret social scores, to then without attribution filter down to banks and search engines and isp’s, to digital price tags on cctv facial recognition systems, to law enforcement information networks, the courts, etc., to decide your treatment. If you get the loan, pass the background check, get the job, what search results your internet shows you, what prices you are offered for individualized ai pricing. How much police scrutiny you get, your treatment in court. Your treatement in the business community.
This is surrendering their citizens to big tech, for a cut of the information and control of the all encompassing social scores. There will be ways for the authorities to slip bad scores on individual people, and groups, they don’t like as there always are. How else are they going to stamp out anit salmonism or whatever? Or the criticism to their corrupt rule down the road.
Age controls, and chatcontrol, are trojan horses, redesigned as trojan sheep, to bring big tech and ai behind the walls of liberal democracy. It’s a betrayal of your citizens to the most powerful people in the world, the peter thiels, with the most malign worldview and plans imaginable being put in charge of ranking citizens from winners to losers.
So reddit just did the age checks for the aussies and uk peoples so far right? They didn’t do anything to mine in that regard, their moderation is dishonest site wide, violating people for false pretenses, for other reasons, so you can’t actually challenge or even be sure what you are being violated for, whether it’s Israel, or triggering some group of snowflakes like conservatives. But I was able to create new accounts without any such scrutiny just an email that returns a message to activate the account, as of half a year ago anyway.
I think the biggest exodus from reddit happened when they limited their API so all 3rd party apps died at the same time
But reddit had a lot of blunders so this is just my guess
I heard about for in the Uk and aussielands, because they are leading the way in subjugating the internet to ai, to id every account
Fwiw Australia’s law quite specifically says they can’t require ID for age verification, requires that if the user does choose to use ID it cannot be used for any other purposes.
Aside from ID, they’re allowed a variety of options for age detection. Most of them seem to have gone with a short of sentiment analysis type technique. They work out you’re over 16 based on the fact that your account is 10+ years old (and not many <6 year olds have accounts) or you’re talking about politics more than Bluey. That’s not collecting any data they didn’t already have.
they don’t arrest child traffickers and rapists.
No no, it’s the child at fault for being at risk around them.
The real problem is, that the majority of users won’t change, and it’s the users that make Discord. There could be a much better alternative but if users are too lazy to change, it is worth nothing.
This is the case with Facebook messenger too. There are great alternatives, but it’s messenger that has the userbase
And compounding the issue is that there isn’t a better alternative to discord in terms of feature set and accessibility. Matrix is the closest, but its just… not there yet. There’s no option for people who care about privacy that isn’t a steep downgrade, and that just sucks.
The reality is that there never will be, because the feature set offered by Discord is functionally impossible to provide to the public without charging a subscription fee most users would be unwilling to pay. It’s a doomed business model, where enshittification and being acquired is inevitable.
As someone who barely used discord, what are these other features, is it not just a regular chat app?
Not OP, but I’ll answer from my own perspective. Note that Discord terminology can be a bit weird, since a server is just a unique shared group space, but hopefully makes sense.
So you can:
- Have private chats with one or multiple individuals.
- Start audio or video calls through those chats, and screen share/stream in them.
- I’ll also mention the ability to send not just text, but images, videos, embedded GIFs, files, so on.
- in servers you get the same thing, broken into text and voice channels (the latter allowing the full range of audio, video, and screen share).
- in servers each user can be given roles to determine which channels they can see and use, or edit, among various other permissions.
- Pinned messages, @ mentions for roles.
- Though I don’t use it much anymore, the option to effectively subscribe to a channel on another server to have messages from there propagate over (e.g.: a uni club server announces an event and you see it on another server in an events channel)
- also servers don’t have any upper limits on members, at least not one I’ve ever seen hit
- Bot integration via API.
- oh, also it all works on desktop or mobile (because it’s mostly just a web app, but still)
And key thing is: all very easy to get started with, whether you’re just wanting to join a server, or start an entire community.
Big deal for my uses currently is voice chat and screen share in one place, while still being able to organise stuff into separate channels, pin messages in them, etc.
I think right now if I had to replace it, assuming I could get the people I interact with off (which is either 20 or 1500 people, depending on how much I’d want to carry with me), it’d have to be a mix of Matrix/Stoat and probably Steam’s built-in features. Maybe a classic forum. That is, if I wanted to have all the features I use. I could do with less, but it’s frustrating.
I think the alternatives will get there eventually, self-hosted even, but self-hosting also has a hardware cost.
That said, I really don’t know why software stuff was ever moved on discord. My uses are gaming and university community-related.
For people that don’t like Discord, this change does probably nothing. I only start it when I need it. I do basic communication,I don’t buy anything and I don’t follow 18+ content.
For all purposes this change just decreases the likelihood of accidentally seeing pr0n.
It’s a sliding slope though. The initial reasoning is fair. But it will eventually spread to other features like (potentially) creating and owning servers or holding administrative and moderation roles
It’s the same with the chat control currently looking over EU. Nobody can say that they are against efforts to stop CSAM. The issue is that the efforts don’t limit themselves to fighting that. Likewise the age verification on Discord does not seem to be targeted or limited to certain content. They are leaving the door open to use it any way they want
hunting for alternatives
I’ve heard people mention Matrix, but I’ve not tried it yet.
It’s definitely nowhere near as polished as Discord, but it does a good enough job for my small gaming group to have moved over.
The equivalent of a Discord server is a Space, which is made up of Rooms (channels). Unfortunately Rooms are displayed in order of recent activity; admins can’t define a set order to group things by function.
The two weirdest things: there are no audio calls, you have to do a video call and turn off the webcam. And the process of logging in on your phone requires scanning a QR code from your desktop (a technically-minded person will understand this is necessary for E2EE, but to an average user it’s just strange).
And the process of logging in on your phone requires scanning a QR code from your desktop (a technically-minded person will understand this is necessary for E2EE, but to an average user it’s just strange).
Pretty sure discord has the same.
Discord has E2EE?
QR based sign in
It’s optional; you can also just use your standard username and password.
Well yes, but it has it as an option.
I don’t think the QR code has anything to do with encryption, though. They’re just trying to make it convenient to sign in.
Meanwhile, Matrix has a lot of extra stuff going on behind the scenes.
Oh, it does? I’ve always logged in with username and password.
Yeah, but you can also sign in by scanning a QR code with a logged in device.
Though technically it’s then other way around, you sign in to your desktop by scanning the QR code in the login window with your logged in phone.
It has QR based sign in. Shit, Steam has QR based sign in so it shouldn’t be weird for people at this point.
So do “Smart TV” apps. Or messenger like Signal. That is really a common thing nowadays.
I’ve seen QR-based login before as an option. (Heck, I was an early adopter of SQRL…or tried to be. Sadly that protocol never went anywhere.) But it’s not typically mandatory, and I don’t think most casual users (the kinds of people who just reuse the same password everywhere rather than using a password manager) aren’t likely to be especially comfortable with it.
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No audio calls
They added that recently (element-call audio only i mean) its the phone icon at the top
I think the video call rooms (always open channels) remember your preference but im not sure rn
They added that recently (element-call audio only i mean) its the phone icon at the top
I don’t see that. Video, Threads, Room Info, People is all I have at the top of my rooms.
Thats weird?
What version of element-desktop are you on? If its element-web it could be that your server is running a outdated version.Its only available in DMs not groupchats. It was added back in december https://github.com/element-hq/element-desktop/releases/tag/v1.12.5
Its only available in DMs not groupchats
Oh right, nice catch. Yeah I only use it as a Discord alternative, so no audio calls for me yet.
Anyway, audio calls in that way aren’t quite what I’m after anyway. They’ll work. They’ll do the job. Just like the existing video calls with webcams turned off do the job. But the Discord style chat room with an assumption of audio only on voice detection, with robust screensharing (including PC audio!) capabilities in an otherwise audio-only call is what I’m really after.
Yeah the video rooms feature is most of that but not quite. The “call” always stays open so you can join and wait until others join without disrupting them. It has good screensharing but no option to share your output audio. You have to turn off the webcam before joining. The voice detection thing would be cool as an optional thing because it can also cause problems. I just use a filter plugin for that on my computer.
Yeah the last thing you didn’t bring up was screen share. I’ve found Element’s screen sharing to be rather lacklustre. It’s share whole screen only, rather than having application or game-specific sharing (and Discord’s gamer-specific feature of detecting you’re in a game and immediately surfacing the option to share that is excellent here). And when I’ve used it, I’ve found audio from the game doesn’t make it through, and I’m not sure if it’s possible (I’ve never really tried looking through all the deep options) to send game audio while also having your mic, without using third-party software to mix the two together into one stream—which would necessarily break your choice detection filter.
I tried starting an audio call (had a telephone icon) yesterday but it turned on my webcam without prompting. Didn’t see a setting for it not to do that, and that’s a wild default.
I never really thought if matrix as a discord alternative.
They’re both messaging apps but directed at different markets / uses.
I would have said Matrix is a kind of hybrid. Obviously Matrix has 1 on 1 chats and individual IRC-like rooms, which are not at all like Discord.
But the addition of Spaces is very much positioning itself as an open Discord alternative.
Yeah, I have no idea why the matrix developers decided to have stuff called “spaces and rooms” instead of servers and channels.
Coming from IRC it always baffled me why people on Discord would talk about servers and channels too. Especially servers. It still irks me when someone says “Join my Discord server”.
Calling them servers in discord always annoyed me. Spaces and rooms isn’t much better. Room is fine, but space is incredibly nondescript.
Like the other replies you’ve gotten, I never really liked “server”. It implies something very different from what it is.
Rooms is pretty obvious and straightforward, I think. And to be honest I rather like Spaces too. It’s a lot less immediately clear, but there’s something ineffable about it that just feels right to me. I’m just glad to see the old Communities feature (which was their now-deprecated first attempt at a Discord-like functionality) is hard to even find out about now. When I first joined I was confused about the difference between Communities and Spaces and had to search to figure out which to use, but when checking now to remember what the old one was called, I found it hard to even find the name of it.
I run a Matrix server and it’s deffo YMMV based on the server admin and how good they are at maintaining things.
Getting the federation to work can also be a chore and a half. Otherwise it works super well. The clients often implement features on top of the protocol (looking at Element and their weird jitsi integration for instance).
I and my group are all just on matrix.org. We didn’t want the risk of dealing with potentially less reliable servers or federation.
We also use Element desktop and Element X for Android. I think I read that the old Element might have supported audio calls? But these days, it’s video only, with the very weird UX of having two different options for video calls (one being, as you say, Jitsi). I assume there’s a historical reason for that, but it doesn’t make much sense as a design today, to me.
Having Discord-style audio rooms built around the idea that people are not broadcasting all the time (as opposed to the more chat-like design of today) would be one of the most impactful comparatively low effort (considering they already have video calls working) things they could do, IMO.
I and my group are all just on matrix.org. We didn’t want the risk of dealing with potentially less reliable servers or federation.
Absolutely a strong way to go.
Yea, there are some historical reasons for the integrations, but they could do a better job evolving the UI to match the current state of things for sure.
I’ve been forwarded this pretty neat summary of the current alternatives (Mastodon thread) :
It’s terrible. They’ve had years and years to get their shit together and they still can’t. It’s just horrendously bad.
I use it all the time. There are many mature clients, and matrix is a protocol, so I don’t know what you mean. Since the sliding sync implementations, I have found it really nice to use.
Don’t know what to tell you. I’m literally unable to read messages sent to me, they all show up as “unable to decrypt”. If I can’t even use the damn protocol then how many clients it has doesn’t matter.
And I have tried different clients.
And as far as I’ve read, this “unable to decrypt” affects a lot of users.
What server are you using and with which client most recently? It sounds like your device is unverified so untrusted or the key isn’t present.
To expand, “unable to decrypt” would affect a lot of users. That’s a good thing and exactly what you want it to do when not correctly trusted.
I’m using the default matrix server and I’ve tried with Element and FluffyChat. I’ve never used a different device to access Matrix. It has always been Firefox through Element, and then when that stopped working I switched to try to use FluffyChat which also did not work.
To expand, “unable to decrypt” would affect a lot of users. That’s a good thing and exactly what you want it to do when not correctly trusted.
No, you do not want this affecting every user who has done nothing to change their environment. The device is still trusted, else I wouldn’t be able to sign in and get new messages at all. Here’s a massive list detailing many of the ways this can happen and note that this goes back to 2022. So for 4 years now they’ve had numerous issues with thousands of users being able to decrypt messages sent on the only device they’ve ever used and it still isn’t fixed.
Maybe I came off as dismissive or just stupid, but I really did mean to be helpful. Of course you don’t want users experience bad interactions. I meant if those interactions were for an actual intended reason. So yeah, never mind.
Bummer you’ve had a hard time. I think they and the free software community are trying to put together a good solution.
Sorry, clearly I responded too harshly. Honestly I’m just tired of the suggestions to use Matrix, when myself (and several other people I know personally) have constant issues with it. I’ve tried to use Matrix for over 3 years now and I am required to use it sometimes, but every time I’m incredibly frustrated.
I think they and the free software community are trying to put together a good solution.
I agree, and I do think we need that, but sometimes the focus should be on usability before security. I know how much that sucks, but if you look at Lemmy you see the same thing. The focus was on usability first. Security came later, because (honestly) security is kinda pointless when every user can set up their own instance and intercept any posts they want. We’ll get there eventually with security, but if people aren’t using your platform then security is pointless.
they
Your server, not mine, homie. Shop around for a better admin who actually knows how to install the thing.
So the Matrix developers/creators don’t know how to actually install the thing then? lol not a good response homie.
The overloaded, overbloated main instance?
No, they don’t. It either shouldn’t exist or should be broken up.
So the devs who created it can’t run an instance and it doesn’t scale properly. Yeah, I’m just gonna go out on a real short limb here and say that maybe the problem isn’t the instance.
Matrix is terrible any way you slice it.
Agreed, Matrix works fine as a toy, but it breaks down after a year or two with even a moderate amount of chat.
For me it broke down the second I started using it. I literally am unable to see chats on the only device I’ve ever used to access matrix, they’re all “can’t be decrypted”.
Slightly related. Does anyone know of any decent Matrix clients (apps) on Android and/or Linux? Because, and I don’t mean to be rude when I say this but…Element is very, very bad.
Im using SchildiChat on Android
I like Cinny
Stoat.chat seems to be a more likely alternative. I love matrix, but I don’t think it can replace Discord. Not yet.
This seems to be like Bluesky vs. Mastodon.
I see a lot of morons shilling one over the other, so I expect it to be the stupid-platform.
For me it’s as long as it’s not Discord.
As a generational discord hater, this pleases me.
The absolute shitload majority of users will not care about this enough to stop using the product
I found this little substack article that lists out alternatives. The timing is is great & I hope it helps people out.
After what happened in Nepal last year, this 100% tracks with the dystopian narrative we are currently living. The powers that be saw a small country use it as a tool to affect change. To me, and tell me if I lm jumping to conclusions here, its obvious as to why this policy change is happening at all, to prevent the site from being used in that manner again.
Note, this is happening for the same reason Reddit started enshittifying much harder all of a sudden. Discord wants to do an IPO and so they’re going to suddenly start squeezing their users to make the numbers look good just in time for that IPO. Their bet is that they have enough momentum that enough people will stick with them long enough for the IPO to succeed, and after that happens, it’s someone else’s problem.
