- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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We need to bring back the forum platforms. That is how communities looked and it was great
Discord became big because of the seamless audio / video / screen sharing. Forums are not even in the same stratosphere.
i know, but for casual conversations and banter and a place where to store some knowledge about some topics forums were awesome.
Forums work for knowledge storage, but for casual banter real time conversations trump everything
Yea… Forums were (are) great for something that Discord isn’t great at…
The old bulletins of the pre2000s. ASCII art every where.
It was so great, people ditched it immediately the second any alternative arrived.
They slowly ditched better services for convenience. The account/login struggle is the barrier to entry that myspace/facebook/discord “solved”. A unique login for each forum, a different set of rules between each, some auto-deletion of supposedly inactive accounts, no photo hosting capability until death bed, yet another set of credentials for the latest photo host, and so on. Nothing was immediate because it took time to build the replacement communities and libraries. The problem is, it took years to realize how inaccessible the information became.
Discord is just objectively terrible for knowledge. It’s not search indexable or archivable. It’s more or less a memory hole.
Discord is a communications platform with tacked on features that resemble forums mostly as a means of organization. It’s not a KB or repository under any circumstances outside of misuse, so why would it have to be good at being searched/indexed?
I hope you’re not implying an old forum search was any good
Back when Google was a decent search engine you could just search “something site:someforum.com” since the built in search was so ass
Something Reddit has in common with old forums
Google didn’t remove site:something from their search functionality. Yet.
Most decent forums were publicly readable online and thus got indexed by actually decent search engines unlike discord. Hence “search indexable”
I’m not sure why people think that discord search is some kind of gotcha. Its shit.
Not denying that it’s shit, I don’t know anyone who’s actually happy with it. But old forums also weren’t built nicely.
You say search indexable as if it’s a panacea, but you find whatever you want to find with your search engine, click the link, and it is:- moved somewhere
- renamed, so now the link is dead
- was actually a part of badly implemented endless scroll so it now points to nothing
- was edited to remove crucial information
- was put in private and now you need to have 25 karma across three boards to open it
- someone got butthurt so it’s now defaced
- all of the above and more.
So you know that the info was there at some point, but you can’t access it.
The whole of IT is different levels of shit all the time
That’s why I also mentioned archivable. Public forums can be archived. If I hit one of those issues I look for archived pages. Deleted discord comments are just silently gone and deleted servers are lost forever
At some point, when you’re combing through archives looking for the exact version of a closed forum post that contains exact info you have, you understand that this system also sucks.
I mean the masses are pretty fucking stupid and I don’t think following them is a good strategy for life.
Also, reddit was and somehow still is pretty popular and stack exchange is being killed by AI not discord, so that’s not really accurate anyways.
Switching to a self-hosted good old Teamspeak 6. Their screen sharing is very good, and audio quality is far above Discord. Overall it’s still need some polish but is okay.
Teamspeak sounds familiar, I think I had issues with them once before. Is it the one bundled with that OverWolf malware?
TeamSpeak is basically what Discord replaced in many gaming communities/servers/groups. Before discord, most gaming groups would have a TeamSpeak, Ventrillo or Mumble server. These were self hosted (or hosted in a VPS) and generally worked better than Skype. TeamSpeak was the most polished, Ventrillo was kinda dated looking but worked well and Mumble was the free software that was getting started and is now pretty good
Isn’t that closed source tho?
Maybe, but let’s deal with one crisis at a time
But isn’t that the wrong approach?
If you want to choose something better, shouldn’t be ‘enshittificationability’ be the main point you want to address? That is the reason discord is doing most of the bad stuff. Proprietary software is about enshittification.
No.
The main point that needs to be addressed is the requirement to upload your face or government ID. This exodus has nothing to do with Discord not being Open Source.
If you’d rather stay on Discord and give them your face while you await the “perfect” solution to materialize you are free to do so. But I think everyone else just needs something purpose ready that doesn’t ask for their face. Then when a fully functional, self hosted, open source solution appears they can reasses.
I mean, mumble has gotten super good at audio, but I don’t know about other features
Matrix is probably the most well funded and supported open source platform that might be able to compete with Discord but even then it’s not a fair fight.
Sadly most people won’t leave discord. People will forget about this next week.
They didn’t even untangle the web of half-finished and abandoned XMPP clients
I’m glad nobody is mentioning WhatsApp as an alternative. They released usernames a few months ago, all messages are end-to-end encrypted, will add voice and video calls to WhatsApp Web, many people and companies have an account there already… It would be an easy migration, but awful for privacy. Thankfully, the most similar suggestions I found were Telegram and Signal.
What’s app claims E2EE but it’s not really they store everything on their servers that any one of their staff can access at any point
Your cloud backups are not encrypted either, and you have to explicitly opt out of cloud backups. That means any chats or group chats that involve someone who hasn’t opted out are sitting unencrypted on Meta servers, even if you personally have opted out. Even if everyone has opted out and assume it’s encrypted, they still know who you’re talking to, when you talk to them, how frequently, etc.
WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal aren’t Discord alternatives though? There’s no ability to have multi text and persistent voice channels in groups. WhatsApp doesn’t even support screensharing.
I’ve said this a lot in different places and the Lemmy community is so small folks might even recognize me repeating myself, but I’ll say it again here. The problem with recommending a good Discord alternative is that Discord is different things for different people. For some it’s streaming. For some it’s video calls. For some it’s voice calls. For some it’s DMs. For some it’s group servers. For some the image and video sharing is an important aspect. It’s hard to recommend a good alternative because you’ll always inevitably run into the problem of someone saying “but it doesn’t do the thing I use it for.” The reality is that folks might need to use multiple apps to meet their needs if they migrate.
If you’d skimmed the article you would’ve seen they they suggested Discourse which the author openly admits is a forum, not a chat app. But hey, that’s what some folks use Discord as.
Maybe we can use this as an opportunity to use different tools for different purposes. Text chat is the easy part, evidently. The issues seem to be around voice/video/group chat on one side, and forums/wikis on the other.
What we need to recognize for one thing is how Discord makes it easy to host info repositories, but sucks at making that stuff accessible. We need a decentralized platform that makes it easy for someone to sign up and create their own forums and wikis in a user-friendly point and click manner that Discord does, but makes those same hubs optionally public and viewable for users without having to join anything.
Then for more live-oriented stuff, Matrix is already the most mature, established, closest thing to Discord we have. We just need it to be better at voice, video, screen-sharing, etc. If I understand correctly, that’s already being worked on.
Hell, maybe the former could very well be implemented on top of Matrix itself even.
The enshitification of the internet as a whole killed so many forums. I used to scour forums (and still regularly visit old forums) for info, but now it’s on discord or some bs facebook group. I miss old school forums and wikis and I fail to understand why everybody got away from them :c how on earth is an endless scroll of a FB page remotely conductive to finding information vs searching for the right thread on a forum?! I have no experience using discord so can’t speak for them but seeing all these articles makes me think I never will either.
Trying to find relevant information that’s supposed to be in a Discord server is one of the most hair-pulling aggravating experiences I’ve ever had on a computer. I mean seriously, any aspiring software developer of any kind should outright feel ashamed if they are relying on Discord for anything related to their project. Code repository sites are free, made for that purpose, and already offer everything necessary for collaboration. If communications are necessary, that’s what email is for - everyone has it already.
And yeah I also hate the over-dependence on Facebook. If a companies “site” is their fb page, they don’t get my business.
These things are successful not because they’re good. It’s because they’re easy and convenient. That’s the biggest thing we need to keep in mind when it comes to alternatives.
I read the article, it’s a good article but it also shows how we don’t really have any options that would match the discord’s functionality and ease of use. Which is very sad.
Made by the same team that did s3nd.pics (the imgur alternative. Under heavy Dev at the moment but has promise.
what are the best alternatives for non-tech folks to join and use?.. because that’s who I am going to have to convince
Spacebar.chat is a really easy one to join that I found. And it’s really a straight clone of Discord but without all the crap. It’s decentralized so you can self host or join and instance and start your own “server” on there.
You don’t have to understand any of that to use. It just works and looks like Discord.
Tangential but figure eyes are probably on here:
Any good guides or discussions for setting up and running Matrix in a VPS? Been thinking on and off I should do that for a few months now (and lack of account migration means I either start with my own domain or forever use a generic).
Matrix ansible deployment script
Not reviewed in this eval:
- DeltaChat (though would likely score similar to Signal with more points for decentralization)
- IRC
- XMPP
- Lemmy/PieFed/Nodebb (if he’s going to include Discourse…)
Why is SimpleX not mentioned anywhere in the article or the comments here? I thought it is similar to Discord. Am I wrong?
Looking at its Wikipedia entry, it looks like a reasonable alternative, I hadn’t looked into it before.
Have you had the chance to try it out?
Not a single reference to Zulip either (edit: I meant in the comments on this thread)
Personally, I really want Matrix to succed though, hope this discord diaspora (?) gives them enough push to smooth their problems.Zulip is literally the 5th thing in the article.
yeah my bad, I meant here in the comments, I was thinking of the thread more than the article itself
Either they edited it to add Zulip or you missed it.
shit I meant in the thread, I get my comment was confusing
Yeah, it was immediately clear based on the scoring that he was super biased toward Discourse. It’s not a Discord alternative, and had no place in that list at all.
I mean, it certainly is an alternative to all three morons using discord as some sort of forum for an app or similar. The same way discord is the worst for easily searchable info like a forum is basically the converse for discourse. And exactly the opposite for real time chat obviously.
He at least mentions outright it’s a forum tool. The real problem is having to include it because people misuse discord.
Kind of like anyone using SharePoint for anything. It’s not meant for it.
Some other alternatives not reviewed:
- Spacebar
- TeamSpeak
- Root
Spacebar sounded really promising when I checked them out years ago.
The big Discord.com features currently left unimplemented or with partial implementations are: Voice/Video support (WebRTC protocol support implemented, but lacking UDP protocol implementation)
Unfortunately, seems like it’s still not at a point where it could cover basic Discord functionality.
Edit: I should be clear, I’m not trying to discourage it. I really hope it succeeds to the goal of parity with Discord! Love to hear from someone who has used it a bit.
If Stoat (formerly Revolt) can integrate screen sharing capabilities soon enough, they will be the closest, user-friendly experience to Discord. Even the UI is familiar, if you come from Discord.
I‘m surprised Stoat is gaining so much traction here. It‘s no open source and will likely go down the same path as Discord if given the chance.
Top three are:
- Discourse
- Rocket.chat
- Matrix
I don’t really see how someone can position Discourse as the number one Discord alternative. Surely most people looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing… Or am I just in the minority here?
For the record, I think Discourse looks awesome and even thinking about how I might use it for a project, but I do not see it as a Discord alternative.
looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing… Or am I just in the minority here?
I’ll keep you company in the minority, since that’s what I want too
I would bet on the screen sharing not being that big of a requirement for most people. Voice and text chats though? Yeah, that’s the minimum.
A lot of people I know regularly use screen sharing through discord or opentalk. Both for work/productivity and while gaming (watching each other, helping, sharing what people are up to etc).
To get people to switch it sadly should support all features: text, voice, video and sending files/images/gifs/videos.
It’s tough.
A lot of people don’t seem to realize that Discord has a variety of features, and each feature can be more or less useful for different types of communities. There’s almost no platform that has all of them so you have to zoom out and look at more of the general purpose. The Discord “servers” I’ve used NEVER used anything but text chat.
I understand that but even the text chat is a different experience than what Discourse offers. Even people who only used Discord for text chat and want a replacement for that would be better on IRC.
Lots of communities use discord as a replacement for a forum despite it not being fit for it at all
Sure, but that’s not an argument for replacing Discord with forums. The two serve entirely different use cases, and should be treated like two entirely separate products.
I am getting flashbacks of the mid-2000’s IM landscape. Soon we’ll be using 10 services bundled into some hackjob app that doesn’t support all of the features but keeps the chats in one place.
Hey… Trillian was awesome.
Lmao that is the exact program that came to mind.
Dont do pidgin too dirty…
Pidgin was good; it did what needed to be done and wasn’t that bad at it.
The last service I was using it for was a self-hosted XMPP server for a small group of friends that were all refugees of other defunct services. We ended up finally moving to Slack or Discord (the group bifurcated along game-playing lines).
Now I’ve got to find something new yet again!
I’m running with signal for just plain ol bsing. And then maybe steam just for voice chat gaming. Discords been dumped its actually been a refreshing week of something different.
I tried pidgin and it didn’t land with me. I always went back to Trillian.
No, he hasn’t been running a discord server. It’s a channel. Discord is running the servers.
The older terminology, which is still used in the API, was a lot better.
It was Guild. It was a Discord Guild. Probably because Stanislav was working on it after he abandoned Guildwork.
Users (and I think Discord too) call the communities servers, and channels are the individual topics/threads in a community. It might not make sense from a hosting perspective but people do call it that
