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.”
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.
The bridge concept made me really excited! I can keep up with the few friends I have who enviably stay on discord long past when it looks like the Vegas Strip. 😂
“Exclusive memes” this is hell.
That’s an exotic synonym for “dank.”
it’s the opposite of dank
rank
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Absolutely. I use the free consumer-tier version every day. Just download the app, sign up for a Matrix account, and go.
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).
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?
Have you tried it? Are the voice/video calls robust enough to host say… 5-8 people for weekly events?
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?
Now that I’ve started playing around with my own lemmy instance I guess it’s fitting for possibly my last beehaw post to reflect my first.
I see discord’s business model is still burning cash trying to be the next
slack steam zoom redditpatreonI 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.
Discord voice quality is significantly worse than TS3, and it has way less features actually related to voice chatting.
As for Vent and especially Skype, it’s an improvement.
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.
I plan to check out matrix since the /r/firefox group has been chatting through that.
Does matrix have a voice/video functionality or is it strictly text chat?
Teamspeak, Skype. Funny enough up until redesigning a year to two years ago they advertised themselves as being the replacement to these.
Yeah I’ve always hated the idea of using Discord as a forum space. The only thing it’s been useful to me for has been playing video games with friends and coordinating shit as a group. I’ve tried joining some of the channels related to my hobbies and it’s just a massive pain in the ass to use in that capacity.
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.
because skype was worse
Was it though?
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
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?
No. Messaging was just as popular if not more so back when Skype was at its peak.
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.
Seriously. The worst is when developers distribute their software on Discord. WHY.
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.
yeah, I particularly hate when mods and romhacks require you to join a discord server to download them
Yeah, Cinny does look like Discord anyways but it’s lack of voice chat is a bummer
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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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As long as daily usage is not affected, I don’t think this should be a problem.
Maybe this could be used as a way to pay mods/admins for their work as well.
I’m still using discord for basic party chat functions for my small group of friends. As long as that continues to work, I don’t care at all about paid memes.
I generally hate that I have to go into other servers because indie games confuse a discord as being a replacement for forums and a wiki
For real. Crowdsec, a crowd sourced blocklist / basic IPS system doesnt really have a living forum. You ask question through unindexable discord threads… so often times I cant just google an issue i am having with the app. I have to open up my damn Discord account while at work to get answers.
Its awful.
Those flashy animated reactions are just incredibly annoying. Wish I could disable them, but of course Discord would never allow you to turn off the monetization.
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.
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
