I’m personally crossing my fingers for Discord.
The day I don’t see “join our Discord” where I would earlier expect to find “visit our forums” will be a good day.
A bloated live chat monolith is not what I want to use to discuss game bugs or podcast episodes.
Agreed. Live chat has its place for certain things, but for other things a forum type interface is better suited.
Yeah, several groups of friends of mine are using Discord to chat and arrange roleplaying nights and such. I use those regularly. But I’ve got several “project” Discords that are forum replacements and I find I almost never go there. Certainly never when I don’t have some specific goal I’m trying to fulfill.
I don’t know when they introduced it, but at some point, in some servers, I noticed a new channel type: forum. The fact that this is a thing is the greatest proof that Discord is not the end all, be all solution to communication.
Nothing is, really. One thing I really enjoyed about the 00s web was its diversity, because different things had different places and different formats, and the ever-lasting stakeholder grasp wasn’t as successful at trying to put people in one place to show them ads and drive engagement to please the statistics gazers.
that’s my biggest pet peeve, too.
GloriousEggroll, the mastermind behind modified version of Valve’s Proton, posts his code on GitHub, and then links to his Discord as a place for reporting bugs.
I actually quit using his Linux distro in large part because the communications were so terrible with Discord being the only way he disseminates information (so so poorly).
There were issues and the necessary information couldn’t flow effectively in either direction.
Thats uhhh… interesting. Why…?
the only reason I can think of is “to spite me”.
Revolt seems to be to Discord what Lemmy/Kbin are to reddit, but I dont see most people bothering with it unless discord makes some reeaaallly huge mistakes to piss the community off.
People seem pretty annoyed at the changes to usernames, but probably not enough to leave Discord.
Tbh that whole change has been kinda blown out of proportion, it doesn’t really affect people in any meaningful way IMHO. Discord will have to do much worse to get people to actually stop using it, it is way too convenient as it is, unfortunately.
Hah, yeah I don’t see people going from “I gotta change my username” to “I gotta change my username and find all my communities in matrix etc.”
I see this as falling under painful but kinda necessary admin, which is nowhere near the level of friction required for a platform switch with massive disruption to communities.
That said, the barrier is lower for chat servers than it is for social media - history matters less in discord than it does for reddit, for example. If the server owners decide to migrate to another platform, they can probably convince people to migrate given a good enough reason and alternative. The people online at any given moment matter more than the last couple months of chat history.
Ab. So. Fucking. Lutely.
Completely agree! Especially if it some kind of product support. I hate having to scroll through thousands of chronically ordered chat messages to find the solution to the problem I’m having.
Discord HATER here. Im happy for gamers to have their stuff; makes sense in that context i guess. As im not a gamer it is not an appropriate tool for anything i want to do.
Discord is a likely contender, but I think it’s likely to be Instagram. It’s got a very dissatisfied userbase, and there’s already a few reasonably active pixelfed servers
Yeah I’m loving pixelfed way more than IG
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I just hope this is the start of an internet renaissance with less corporate control.
That’s certainly what it’s feeling like to me.
I remember when I was a kid and the Web 1.0 stuff was popular, things like IRC chat and forums were too intimidating/confusing for me to get into. My introduction to being an internet “citizen” was Web 2.0 and the MySpaces/Facebooks/Reddits of the world, where I had a UX approachable enough not to intimidate my teenage self.
The shift towards the Fediverse feels like a blend of many of the best aspects of Webs 1.0 and 2.0 – I have a UX that feels familiar, but one that comes with a bottom-up, decentralized grassroots feel that is reminiscent of the early internet.
I’m bullish for sure.
I always like to hear about when internet was at its early stages. I’m born in 2001 so never got the chance to live through that era, but to me it always feels so much better than what it is right now.
Hearing you say that we are experiencing a moment similar to those is making me so happy.
I was absolutely amazing!
complete wild west. only limit was your mind/imagination.at least it felt like that, when I was young ;-)
The other limit was the speed of your dial up modem.
People do remember it with rose colored glasses - there were fewer niche communities, fewer lgtbq+ communities, slower connections, 240p video at best (so much anime I somehow watched like that… Sorry anime), sexism and racism in a more general way vs now as like society and particularly techie culture at the time in general, not being able to use the internet when someone needed to use the phone, and so on - but while we gained a lot with time that we take for granted now, we did lose stuff, too.
I hope we can bring back something of the good that was lost, now and in the future, as well as find new good things.
At least, surely, there will always be cat pics.
yeah the corporate greed is at its peak lately…
It’ll be hard to get people to not only detach from something they’re accustomed to, but also then attach to something unfamiliar.
I tried and am trying again with Mastodon, but a lack of users I wish to follow, a more confusing premise at times, and just overall more enjoyment overall (if that) with twitter as a platform makes it a challenge.
Lemmy however has checked all the boxes. It literally feels exactly like Reddit, and honestly like a fresh start to avoid the various decisions both Reddit admins and the community itself made along the way. I’m hoping more for the latter experience than forming when diving into the fediverse, but my above statement is most likely applicable for a wide sample of people out there.
I’ve been having trouble getting going with Mastodon. But I’ve also had issues with Twitter as well. Lemmys been great so far.
I honestly don’t think the fediverse will become nearly as popular as many seem to.think. It’s still complicated to use/understand for many non-tech enthusiasts, and in the case of Reddit, while people are angry, I doubt most of their users are going anywhere any time soon. Some will leave, but it’s not going to be a small number.
We keep going on about how Reddit relies on it’s “creators”, without whom they’ll die. Frankly, a lot of the highest rated content is just repost of old videos or tiktok videos. A lot of that stuff isn’t original, and the deep conversations are, in my opinion, few and far between. Sure there are some communities whi h have this, but they’re not exactly over represented.
I don’t have statistics to back this up, but I’d be willing to bet an entire doughnut that most reddit users have never posted even a single comment. People with that level (dis)engagement aren’t the type to seek out alternatives. They just kind of drift away.
We may be few, but I’m proud to count myself among those who quit Reddit because of this. (Not that I wasn’t looking for a good reason for a long time).
As long as there’s enough of us to maintain a community here, then we’re golden 🙂. And I’m definitely under the impression that we’re getting there.
I hope so.
I honestly don’t think the fediverse will become nearly as popular as many seem to.think.
Probably not gonna get Twitter/Reddit-sized, no, as those platforms have userbases the size of a large country. It’s mostly a question of “can we attract enough users for the ecosystem to be workable” and I think the answer is “yes.” Hell, for me it already is.
It’s mostly a question of “can we attract enough users for the ecosystem to be workable” and I think the answer is “yes.” Hell, for me it already is.
And this I completely agree with.
Reddit started out with more tech-y users, then got more mainstream. Maybe the same can happen here.
Reddit blew up when it got decent mobile apps. If the fediverse (is that really what we’re calling it?) gets decent mobile app support that helps simplify the onboarding process and connection to communities there’s a much higher chance.
Yeah. A lot of (possibly most?) people don’t even own desktops or laptops anymore - they just use their phone and/or tablets.
I’m thinking Twitch. Discord, imo, is just starting down the bad path but it still does what it’s supposed to do very well. Twitch, however, wants to enforce rules on content creators that might lead to them leaving entirely.
I worry about Discord imploding because everything is behind the walled garden and difficult to extract unlike a forum board or playlist. The landgrab with account renames will be an interesting test for them.
Discord is doing a lot of stupid things lately i must say
God I hope so. Discord works fine as a voice chat and groupchat for games. But it’s insane to me that people use it as a replacement for message boards or websites and hosting files. It isnt indexed so you cant google it and a groupchat is a terrible format for this. Even as reddit dies you have some people acting like a glorified group chat is a good alternative. As an addition and supplement to a message board or website community sure this is how it’s always been even in the old days there were boards with an active IRC chat. As the replacement? Awful.
yeah i totally agree
Teamspeak has a pretty slick new version that looks very much like discord. Not fediverse but pretty easy to self-host.
Wow, I had no idea. Thanks for letting me know!
I tried to research more about it, but other than a few screenshots it’s very hard to find info on what’s actually new in.
Yes please Discord, it is so worrying how everyone has all their private messages and content in an unencrypted app owned by a corporation who gives 0 shit about privacy. They won’t even delete your messages if you delete your account/leave servers / get banned. In fact there is no way to delete all your messages
Feels like I’ve been stuck using it just by default, because everyone else I know is, and there’s nothing decent fitting that particular use case. Skype definitely wasn’t cutting it. I at least avoid communities that are trying and failing to be forum-like, and just keep it to ones with people I know, and my viewers. Still run a Teamspeak server for a select set of friends to do YT recordings on, as it predates Discord, and is generally more stable (avoiding voice dropouts).
YouTube. It will be a real loss because I doubt even Archiveteam could backup all the useful YT videos.
Well, I don’t think it will STB, but YouTube needs a FOSS equivalent that has the same capabilities sans ads. But, that’s $$$$ infrastructure so I don’t know if that will ever come.
BUT, I really hope that by the time Discord pisses off its users, that matrix or another federated equivalent will have figured out the UI/UX to capture a large chunk of those users. I used to live in IRC, but discord finally killed it. And I hate using proprietary software for so much chat.
I wish, but this one is particularly hard. Storing video takes a LOT more than hosting a text based service. There is peertube that you might want to check out though!
Oh I agree it’s hard. AV1 helps, but until we get even better compression codecs, it’s just not going to happen. Eventually, though, you’d think storage and bandwith costs will get down to such a level that we think of 1080p videos the same as text messages now.
For Discord we have Revolt (almost a 1:1 clone) and obviously Matrix and XMPP.
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That client looks really good! thanks for share i will give a try
I have never tried Cinny, time to give it a try
Nice, was just looking for something! Will have to try it out. Discord on Linux barely works. And when I stream gameplay to friends, sound doesn’t work out of the box, so I have to use pipewire to combine it with my mic’s stream.
Take a look, it even supports bots. And yes I know I use light mode.
It’s not quite clear to me how hosting works. If I want to set up whatever the analog to a “discord server” is for me and my friends, do I need to host it myself? Or can I join an existing instance and then create “servers” on there?
Or since it’s using matrix, do I join a matrix instance and this is just a front end for matrix that works like discord?misread your original post.I feel like the support page on their site is pretty sparse at the moment.
Revolt is it’s own thing, it’s not Matrix. You just create an account at https://app.revolt.chat and start using it, just like Discord. With Matrix you can do the same at app.element.io, you don’t need to host your own server, even though that is possible.
Ah ok thanks! I’ll try it out 👍
For chat servers in Revolt it’s literally the same as Discord, just click the add button
Revolt is really amazing, the only thing that it’s missing (for now) it’s E2EE, the team is working on implementing it as far as I know.
They’ve already made a few missteps that have driven some folks away, as well.Things like the NFT scare a while back, and the price jump on Nitro.
Discord tried doing NFTs?
They never actually got anywhere with it, but there was talk of involving them somehow.
How’s revolt?
It’s the closet thing there is to Discord while being open source. It’s not federated though and it still doesn’t support E2EE at the moment. If you want to give it a try, visit https://app.revolt.chat
Twitch tried to implode a few days ago. I’m hoping for YouTube, it’s too much of a monopoly.
As for YouTube, Odysee exists and has a mirroring for YouTube uploads for content creators, but it’s mainly just tech and crypto people at the moment - yes, there’s others, but most everyday people have never even heard of LBRY or Odysee.
I tried Odysee but it was overran with conservative etc. content of people who I feel safe to assume got banned off of YouTube.
What did Twitch do?
Charlie has a good summary: https://youtu.be/-5zGuFPxW88
They’ve since walked back a bit, but the writing is now on the wall.
They were trying to disallow third party ads for streamers https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65834521.amp
With people learning about Fediverse, I’m guessing Instagram. Why? Because IG has become overwhelmed with influencers and TikTok-like junk. The initial wave of people into Pixelfed will be techies that want a break from that scene. Their friends will hear about it. The friends that just want to have an IG-like experience to share their pictures with friends while avoiding all the rest of the noise will slowly transfer over. Once they hit the critical mass, the switch will happen. This will take at least another year or two.
Yeah public instagram is utter garbage. From photo quality to the current environment. Pixelfed is a really awesome federated alternative though I don’t really see how it could resist the same fate if it ever got as much mass.
I think there’s a missing link in your forecast: what will make people who are not techies, who currently use IG, stop using it, leaving behind their contacts at IG? They aren’t going to want to use two platforms, so it’ll have to be a clean break. I don’t think hearing about alternatives from techies is going to do it, IMO. It’s how a lot of people keep in contact.
Network effect is really sticky. Most of the users of the internet were once techie folk. Now it’s everyone.
I hear that YouTube and Twitch are in the process of enshittifying, so probably them. Would also like to see Discord get replaced by something like Matrix, but I think the UX isn’t ready for that yet. On the plus side, the Matrix protocol supports bridging to other chat platforms, so that’s cool.
A logical extension of your post really makes you think just how much of social media post-2007 was set up on fundamentally unsustainable business models. Engagement is not a good business model! Making investors pay for users was always a bad choice and sooner or later, investors were going to ask for their money back!
It will be interesting to see how social media changes post-2023. With Meta almost vestigial (except Instagram and marketplace), Twitter and Twitch absolutely clowning away their positions, what’s next? Jeff Bezos and/or Daddy Sundar reinvesting in social media?
I highly recommend watching Louis Rossmann’s video on Reddit - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqL-G3GFqRU&t=728s
I still like IRC and I’m surprised that it got almost completely murdered by Discord.
As OneRedFox says, it’s all about the UX. From the perspective of your average gamer, IRC has awful UX. I know that speedrunning, romhacking, and other gaming subcommunities have used / still use IRC, but they’re very much on the technical side of gamers. Discord is a lot friendlier to the average gamer (I know, I know, it’s Electron and proprietary and shit for reasons besides those two, but consider your average console CoD player here). I still like IRC, too, though I’d love to see it evolve a little more quickly. IRCv3 is nice but my goodness, how long have they been working on it?
