Do you think that the fediverse has something to gain with the enshitfication of discord? Are there voice chat programs in the fediverse that can benefit from it?
Why not promote matrix as a substitute?
It’s unfortunately barely usable, the responsiveness and features of discord are unmatched, in my opinion
It is not perfect, but it has been usable for quite a while. It’s clocking already at tens of millions of active users per month, so it’s not like all these people are just suffering around and not chatting and talking with their groups.
Also, unlike Reddit, it does not need to have a strong migration from all the long tail of niche communities. There are bridges already, so even if just, e.g, 5% of the discord base moves to it, it will be already enough to jumpstart a significant shift.
I would love an alternative that works just as seemlessly yeah!
The strength of Discord is its numerous partnerships with YouTube, Twitch, Patreon etc, making it trivial to gather paying supporters around a streamer or a video creator, attributing roles and perks automatically. I manage the patron community of a Minecraft gamer on YouTube and automatically sync the access to a community Minecraft server for people with a certain pledge on third part platforms, this would never work in the open source world, unfortunately
Do you mean exclusive/tiered access to certain rooms only for subscribers?
If you are telling me that such a thing doesn’t exist for Matrix already, you just gave me a perfect thing to offer on communick
That’s very cool I’ll check it out :)
I don’t know about other platforms, but YouTube membership is totally implementable on any other platform.
The workflow anyone need to implement is the same flow Discord has implemented:
- Perform OAuth to get the user’s own channel using the
minefilter on channels.list end point. This way the service can know SomeOneWatching is owner of channel UC1234ABCD - Perform OAuth to get the host’s members on a fixed interval to get a list of all members, and match it against all known users’ channel IDs or target individual user like SomeOneWatching’s UC1234ABCD channel ID as part of
filterByMemberChannelIdon the same members.list end point. - Upgrade users’ groups on the service to reflect membership accordingly, no direct YouTube partnership required.
- Revisit the same flow in 2 regularly to downgrade when memberships are not renewed; beyond the pubsubhubbub which notifies subscription content updates (new uploads/deletions) on a subscribed channel, YouTube does not have a push notification for automatic updates. This is why there’s always a slight delay when membership status changes.
Source: I’ve worked in YouTube adjacent company using all of their public and several proprietary APIs for around 10 years now. I’m fairly familiar with their API offerings.
That’s good to know, i thought it was be some kind of exclusive deal between the two entities.
Of course, convincing people to get off Discord when almost everyone already have an account, a desktop app and a phone app ready to go sounds like a hurdle, but with time and enough enshittification™ anything is possible!
- Perform OAuth to get the user’s own channel using the
How do the bridges work? Do they need to be set up by the community, or do they just work?
They need to be setup by the homeserver, i.e by the admin of the “instance”.
Thanks 🙂
I wouldn’t say barely usable, but it does have a long way to go before it could be a replacement for discord, that’s true
No screen sharing or even video calls iirc. Soo many people use Discord to watch stuff with their friends or to play games with their friends. Matrix is more of a irc replacement imo it doesnt have any gaming focused features and the Forums on discord are nice too
Matrix video call support is still in beta IIRC? https://call.element.io/
Works with Jitsi just fine…
Good to know!
just came out of beta afaik
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Yeah, there are some glaring issues with account and content deletion. Lemmy too, for that matter. If I delete something, I don’t want it to be just slightly obscured and easily recovered, I want it to be erased, unseeable forever. But that aspect of privacy doesn’t count in the FOSS circle jerk hive mind. “Keeping illegal revenge porn online forever is worth it so long as they don’t tell advertisers what colour I like”.
Nothing you send out to the internet can be deleted.
Yes, never put anything online that you might ever want to remove.
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Welcome to the world wide web
I haven’t tried matrix yet. What’s a good instance I can create my community on and bridge with my discord? For gaming communities.
For Discord like communities, I’d also suggest using Element as the Matrix client. It’s pretty similar to Discord. Also, you’ll need support for “spaces”, which are like Discord servers. Rooms = channels
You can try out matrix.org and can always move it later
I guess, but I don’t really want to contribute to the centralization all on the biggest instance
IMHO, the best thing people can do to help mass migrations is to build out Lemmy’s moderation and administration tools as fast as possible.
They’re not great right now, and it’s really hard for Lemmy to keep up with the noise, spam, and trolls that come with a bigger community.
I fear it is like with WhatsApp : “But all my friends are on Discord so I have no choice!”.
right, I forgot about this factor
Social pressure is a real thing. I wonder just how many people in the US have iphones because of that dumb blue-green bubble stuff.
The reality is there isn’t an alternative that would be easy enough for non-tech people.
I am never getting my friends off of Discord because there is nothing else that is easy for them and has same features - texting, calling and desktop sharing with sound.
Revolt.chat is quite similar to discord and open source. They do run a centralized server to make it easy for everyone to get onboard, but it can be self hosted as well.
That being said, I still don’t use it because nobody else does, and that’s the problem with all chat and social media apps.
Matrix is easy unless you try to do something complicated with it.
Fr I finally started using it and it’s the simplest fuggin thing
Have you tried the Signal app? Has all that and works pretty well!
The recent headlines saying “discord will be showing ads” is just intentionally misleading. No one even bothered to read the articles. They just saw the headline that agreed “discord bad” and didn’t even question it.
Discord already has “ads” in different forms that are even more like ads than what those articles were talking about. They promote games and services as a “perk” for nitro. They also advertise all over for their paid stuff, like Nitro and profile decorations.
I opened Discord yesterday, seems like now they even have lootboxes, what the heck
I’m not sure if you’re doing a bit, but that was an April Fools’ joke.
You know what, they just seem so pushy lately about Nitro and stuff that I didn’t even get the joke
That’s fair, I also fell for it originally. It was a pretty convincing prank, I really should be more suspicious on April 1st.
Revolt is so promising, except it’s not federated. I tried spinning it up today and then realized it’s local only…
Which then even on their main page they have a pleading asking us to not host instances because the base will become fractured. Which, is solved by federation.
They have a page about federation, in which they explain why they haven’t implemented federation yet.
In short: privacy concerns (e.g. metadata leakage), lack of devs / manpower & resources, difficulty adapting Revolts protocol to a federated one.
I like the project. I think it would be the perfect place for Foss Projects and a good replacement for Discord, but it is in dire need of more contributors and ppl, who know how to properly integrate Federation. I’d love to see Revolt succeed.
Currently I am short on time, but I’d love to contribute to them in the future.
Reddit was an easy switch for me because there wasn’t a social cost to leaving. There’s no way the discord communities I’m part of are switching, way too much hassle.
I don’t use Discord much, but apparently it works a lot more like IRC (real time discussion) than like Lemmy/SubLinks/PieFed (asynchronous discussion) or Mbin (asynchronous disc + microblogging).
If that’s correct, perhaps it would be simply better to code a Fediverse alternative to Discord, and make sure that it’s well integrated with Lemmy.
How would a Discord-like application integrate with Lemmy? Are chat logs federated to posts in Lemmy? Do posts in Lemmy get federated to this other chat thing? Can you just sign into chat with your Lemmy username and that’s it? Is it just a chatroom that’s associated with a community?
I feel like people here are like “everything should be federated” but sometimes I don’t really follow the thought process. I get it with Lemmy and Mastodon, but maybe someone could explain what a Federated Discord looks like.
Someone smarter than me might have better ideas, but I picture a “Fediscord” (federated Discord) working this way:
- There are multiple “Fediscord” servers. Each has its own chatrooms and users.
- Users from one server are able to interact with chatrooms of other servers, as long as they federate.
Then, when federating with Lemmy instances:
- You can use an account from one of those services to interact with the other, no further registration needed.
- You can follow “Fediscord” chatrooms from Lemmy as if they were communities. For reference, we can already follow PeerTube channels this way. (I feel like allowing the opposite would be unwise, given that Discord tends to be fast-paced; not sure though.)
- You can quote Lemmy threads/comments to discuss them in Fediscord, as if you were quoting something from another server.
- Shared DM system.
I could see the login part being nice, but I still don’t really see the value in federating chat text. Honestly that would be a negative to me, I don’t really want my chat messages copied and federated out to other servers forever. Similarly, why would I want to view a chatroom through Lemmy? Why wouldn’t I just want to go to that community through it’s app or site or whatever?
It just feels a bit like blockchain all over again. Federation and activitypub are great tools for some purposes but people seem to want to use them for everything.
Discord isn’t just “chat text”, it’s also “real time discussion”. That’s why for example you see indie game devs often creating Discord channels, to contact their userbases.
In this sense, it partially overlaps with a forum+link aggregator like Lemmy, that allows deeper and asynchronous discussion. But they’re still distinct enough so both a hypothetical “Fediscord” and Lemmy would benefit from federation:
- If discussion in a “Fediscord” server is getting a bit too deep for the medium, you can redirect people to a Lemmy thread.
- Conversely, if people just want to chitchat, in Lemmy they’ll end creating noise. They can simply do it instead in a “Fediverse” server.
- A Lemmy mod team meeting in “Fediscord” to decide how they’re going to moderate their Lemmy comm.
Nota bene: privacy is a concern and federating all content would be certainly unwise. Even across “Fediscord” servers. But some content is sensible, as long as you have a clear division between “public” and “private” rooms.
Similarly, why would I want to view a chatroom through Lemmy? Why wouldn’t I just want to go to that community through it is app or site or whatever?
CBA (can’t be arsed) is one of the main features of the race that we belong to, humankind. If you’re interested on a single “Fediscord” chatroom but can’t be arsed with the rest, you could follow it through Lemmy instead - it’ll be less optimal (F5, F5 all the time to see if there are new messages), but still useful.
It just feels a bit like blockchain all over again. Federation and activitypub are great tools for some purposes but people seem to want to use them for everything.
I get that when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, but that isn’t my case here - I genuinely think that the “Fediverse forums” (Lemmy, Kbin/Mbin, and any potential newcomer) are in a central position within the Fediverse, and should capitalise on it by federating as much as reasonably possible with other Fediverse services.
This will be an unpopular opinion here, but Discord is worth paying for and I do. Obviously, everyone’s usage will differ, but I use it for video and voice chat for several hours a week and I can count on one hand the number of hours that have been disrupted by discord service outage. That kind of value is worth paying for imho.
I am pretty sure that you can get a dozen of commercial XMPP providers who will offer the same quality of service, but won’t cancel your account if you dare to use a “non-official” client
The problem with Discord is not that it’s paid, the problem that is closed and creates a walled garden.
But XMPP doesnt have any gaming focused features, no screensharing iirc, no group calls.
Xmpp is by design, an extensible protocol. There just doesn’t seem to be any motivation to develop for it.
I actually did subscribe for it initially when nitro first became available, but they made so many shitty decisions that they no longer deserved my money.
What decisions have impacted your ability to use the service? I’m not keen on all of the choices they’ve made, but they also don’t negatively impact the way that discord serves me.
There’s been a lot of little things over the years, adding clutter and moving buttons around for no apparent reason. The usability is still pretty good overall, I avoid the community side mostly anyway nowadays and just use it to speak with friends. Most notably recently with the mobile app change, god that thing is the perfect example of shitty UX, luckily the old APKs still work.
I’d love people to move on to a more privacy respecting option, but getting people to move is an almost impossible task and the options arent all that great at the moment.I didn’t mind the mobile UI update, it had some kinks at first that I mostly think have been worked out. So some of these kinds of things will just be difference of taste.
I don’t think having to swap sections on the app to use server and use messages will ever be a good change, the update added a lot of extra steps to find information. The original app worked like their desktop app, so it’s natural to use either, whereas now it’s completely different, crazy what was going through their heads with it (well money, trying to sell cosmetics).
But if you don’t mind it, that’s fair.
I support your position in principle, but canceled my own nitro when they did the android app redesign. It went from really snappy (respecting system animation scale settings) to completely ignoring them. It feels like molasses compared to every other phone app that operates at the system set 0.25 animation scale.
They also completely broke foldable support, and if your device changes aspect ratios inside a chat, you have to restart your client to get it to behave correctly again.
The enshittification is real and I am voting with my wallet.
Wow that has not been my experience thankfully, but I can definitely understand being upset by that, especially the fold stuff.
I advocate for voting with your wallet.
I don’t know where you’ve been, but Discord has been showing ads for a while now. If not for their own garbage they can barely deliver on, it’s in app sponsored merch and discounts. usually for video games and such
mostly matrix (mabye xmpp) will benefit
I still like guilded more then discord to start. So I wont have to move. But I wouldnt mind trying Matrix.
Bro guilded is moderated by roblox admins
well for feature set its better, and I have never seen any moderation from them at all. If you have more info let me know.
Discord isn’t really applicable to the fediverse but that doesn’t means that FOSS can’t benefit. Are there good alternatives.
I’m not convinced Lemmy-style Federation lends itself well to the Discord model.
Like, you could have individual servers running (or maybe a server that hosts many communities), and a client that connects to all your subscribed ones, but I don’t think there’s a lot of value in sharing that data out across many servers, or somehow mangling real-time voice into that model.
Same account different servers would mimic discord. So you have one app, but the communities or ‘discord server’ can be their own instance. If it’s mimicking discord it will keep all the message boards private to users like discord, but it could still benefit from Lemmy/Mastodon integration. Many communities have a discord and a sub Reddit having the same account on both may be valuable to some people.
I don’t know the state of voice and video calls in the fediverse, it seems to be the main benefit of discord. Otherwise discord is just a terrible closed version of forums/subreddit/communities.
Something something IRC
Audio?
