Co-founder Jason Citron is stepping down, but will remain with the company as a member of the board of directors.
And so the hell-loop continues. Matrix seems like the closest successor, but having used it for awhile I would describe the experience as janky-but-workable. Signal’s good, but requires a phone number. I hear that Mumble’s good, but it’s overly focused on VoIP. Hopefully the alternatives polish themselves up before the enshittification gets too bad.
You can nowadays create a signal account without a phone number, you’ll get a user name instead
Oh? When did they change that?
So glad I never got into that thing.
Just doesn’t understand why so many people prefer Discord over forums. In terms of information preservation Discord sucks!
It’s even become mandatory by communities in some games, which is something I hate with passion. For instance, many MMORPG communities are on Discord these days (e.g. Guild Wars 2, more specifically the raiding scene).
So I subscribed to these communities and started using Discord. I still don’t get the appeal, it’s a cluttered mess all over the place and it doesn’t feel intuitive to use. Maybe I’m getting old…
I think the main thing is that it’s the lowest friction for just sending a message, making a “post” gives people pause, but sending a message people will do no problem, so small communities get more activity in Discord than anywhere else
Hey, listen I know it’s bad and all but discord makes it really easy to create your own channel, customize it however you want and organize study/gaming with friends.
Since it’s convenient and easy to setup and use, people use it for things they really shouldn’t.
To bring back forums we need another equally easy to setup and host forums system that modernizes the bbs.
That sucks
Gonna go ahead and show my ignorance here, but why is this such a bad thing?
Shareholders want quick profits & they don’t care if the service shuts down in 10 years, or becomes largely unusable in 3-5.
Cause things that make most money for shareholders make the worst experience for the end user.
Public companies have to account for the shareholdres’ expectation of, well, making money (and more money, and more money, and growing the numbers as much as possible). Shareholders have some degree influence on how the company works, depending on how many shares they own, e.g. they can vote for the CEO. This usually leads to the company to introducing more aggressive ways of making money off the users/customers, enshittification, etc., as it has to satisfy the shareholders and not so much the original customers.
Any good options recommended for self-hosting something similarly functional that doesn’t take too much effort to get up, audit, maintain? Discovery isn’t really important for me, so federated isn’t really necessary, but a cool extra. I’d love to host something or contribute to hosting for my gaming groups, my class or multiple classes at my school, or otherwise. Voice, chat, screen share, camera, would all be great if possible, but range of options would be good. I’m still using Mumble for gaming…
Haven’t tinkered much with Matrix nor do I know much about Revolt, but I’m curious before I look into it deeper if anyone in the community has experience hosting any communication platforms for small, invitational groups.
Nothing comes close to the feature set offered by Discord, Matrix’ bad priorities unfortunately made sure of this. There currently is a project to fix their shit even if it means to break some bad decisions, Tuwunel, however it’s neither ready nor is it clear where it will end up. The previous project it forked, Conduwuit, got bullied into giving up.
You’ll probably be best off with a classic 2-way approach for now. Stick with Mumble for Voice and get something nice for Chat and Organizing like Mattermost or Revolt (or even IRC if you’re a purist). With some luck Discord’s strong enshittification will give projects like Tuwunel the necessary push it needs to force Matrix to finally care for more than just the needs of governments and their perfectionism that gets them nowhere for years now. That or we’ll see some kind of soft-fork with even more bad blood.
This just sounds like FUD.
What should the Matrix developers have prioritized instead? Chat programs are complicated, especially when you’re making them distributed. You’re comparing an organization and a MSP with like $1M/yr revenue with a soon-to-IPO company with $600M/yr in revenue.
What feature is missing from Matrix that is preventing Discord users from joining?
[sarcasm] Who could have ever seen it coming? [/sarcasm]
Honestly, the writing was on the wall for a long time, it had no clear business model and was a mess. It was always going to go this way and I tried pointing out that it was a bad platform but nobody either cared or believed me. Whelp, looks like I was a Cassandra yet again.
Hope Open Source people can make something to fill the gap, there really is nothing else (yet). Matrix really doesn’t have the features and that which it does have is often bad UX and doesn’t work everywhere. Not seen anything else which will fill the gap and I’ve been looking but I guess nobody thought discord would go down, go this way, or just don’t really know how to make something that would fill the gap, or didn’t want to.
This whole “spend a ton of money to get your foothold, take over a market, then enshittify to bilk the users” shtik is getting very very old.
That’s tech companies for you.
Why else would they make all this for free?
That’s Jason Citron for you.
Lol IRC knockoff
I’ve got 2 gaming Discords I want to bridge with Matrix (and maybe Revolt too?) can you suggest an instance? one is for Deus Ex Randomizer, and the other is for The 7th Guest fan club
Note that when you join a Space, you are not automatically joining all the rooms inside it.
this is going to be a bit painful for people who are used to Discord
you can search public rooms but not public Spaces? how do you find Spaces? they should’ve copied the good parts about Discord lol (EDIT: I found the way to search public Spaces, I guess it can’t search across instances though which is a shame, it probably wouldn’t require much disk space to index the name and description of every Matrix Space)
I don’t even see rooms linking back to their Space?
tchncs.de has a lot of public spaces, I created my account using my Google but it just assumed my username :(
Three, before there was Discord there was TeamSpeak and they’re still fighting
Ventrilo would like a word as well
I can’t tell for sure, but it doesn’t look like Revolt has voice chat yet? Which was what attracted my friend group to Discord initially.
Yeah, sadly most open source alternatives to discord either cannot do voice/video chat or cannot do it as well or seamlessly as discord did, partially because federated voice/video chat is not really a solved issue and partially because of money. Though even most of the centralised ones don’t really have voice/video chat that works well except for a few like Signal because they have the resources.
Another problem is it’s based on p2p a lot of the time, whereas I think things like discord partially use their servers to facilitate it, I’ll check on this though.
Discord routes over their own servers and uses a private I3Dnet backbone to spread the signals across the world. The latter is one of the reasons why discord video is very good.
If discord did any p2p there would be stories all over of people getting ddos-ed after joining a voice call / screenshare.
In general, discords tech is pretty solid overall. The platform itself is just getting shittier.
Thanks for the info!
Yeah, sadly.
Matrix could’ve implemented it with classic TURNS for a while now so the feature at least is there for those needing it, but they dug their own hole instead and focused so hard on their idea of a protocol they created software that hardly can do anything, and what is should be able to do it does really badly. Also for some reasons it was more important to throw away he concepts of “Communities” and build… “Places”. Now Element is a convoluted mess that <Error Decrypting Second Part of this Message>
Yeah, the people behind it always seemed to be more interested in getting corporate funding and thus gave corporations more what they wanted/needed instead of typical users and mods. This is part of the reason why I’m no longer interested in matrix main and more hard forks of it.
Matrix uses TURN, and the Matrix protocol is not used for carrying voice/video.
Element is an independent client developed by Element, and not part of the Matrix protocol.
To my understanding they’re pushing those TURN connections through your home instance though? Wasn’t that the whole reason it takes so phenomenally long?
Otherwise implementing WebRCT with TURN would be rather easy, there are ready-to-use modules and frameworks to do so in basically any language. Whatever it is that’s wrong with the teams behind Matrix, it causes Matrix (especially when used with Element) to be just awful and buggy.
The legacy jitsi-based rtc used turn, and so does matrixrtc I believe. I haven’t tried it myself, though.
Jitsi
Jitsi doesn’t have e2ee except in a few situations and they don’t seem interested in bringing e2ee to all platforms, or they can’t. It also is somewhat buggy with disconnects etc. Also it’s meant for one off calls or meetings compared to discord, but yeah, it’s okay for some situations.
I’m not sure, either. I haven’t used it yet, though that might come sooner than later after this announcement.
Never heard of Revolt before, nice.
As a community I’d use Revolt if my game/mod/whatever is built upon extensive bot functionality, and Matrix if not.
Everyone loves Activision and what they’ve done for gaming. There no way this could go wrong.
Well it was nice for a while there.
No it wasn’t
deleted by creator
How the fuck are blizzard execs still getting fucking jobs?!?!! Jesus Christ people, could you find a worse person to run the company?
Because he “has experience managing a public company” and in his portfolio only focuses on cherry-picked KPIs and no mention of any negatives at all.
I hate that our society encourages failing up and instead of punishment because of poor management skills and decisions, they do mass layoffs and give themselves fat bonuses because of “cost savings”.
Frankly, if a company fails, they will ruin other companies; it’s never their fault because of “complicated reasons”.
Probably the point, honestly. If they lose money from it, at least they made it worse for the cattle who stuck with it!
Sounds like a good time to reinstall ventrilo
Mumble is where it’s at.
I just have to find a linux distro that likes my network device so I can install my local server, but I honestly never left Mumble, the sound quality is higher that Discord (imo)
Adding that to my list, I was looking at element (matrix), revolt and fosscord
I assume that one was a joke, Ventrilo looks very out of date
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventrilo
Revolt is nice though. Once they finish upgrading the app, it would be an easy switch
I didn’t know about Fosscord (now called Spacebar it seems), it looks cool https://github.com/spacebarchat
Spacebar is a free, opensource selfhostable discord-compatible chat, voice and video platform.
- Discord-compatible (Use all your custom clients/bots with minimal changes)
- Selfhostable (Server)
- Open Source (GitHub Organization)
- Configurable (Configure every aspect and limits to your needs)
- Decentralized (no abuse of power and doesn’t have a single point of failure)
- Extendable (secure and cross-platform plugin system)
- Themeable (cross-platform theme system with design editor)
- Secure (publicly audited and hosted FOSS software for transparent foundation in terms of security)
Ventrilo is what everyone used like 20 years ago it’s the OG of course it’s outdated
Spacebar looks to be exactly what I’ve been looking for! Unfortunately, according to their FAQ the voice and video features aren’t implemented yet but here’s hoping that someone comes on-board to help set it up 🤞definitely an easy decision for a self hosted Discord alternative if that comes to fruition!
Fosscord changed to “spacebar” a while back. If you want a more Discord-like experience, try the Cinny or Comet Matrix client. And on mobile the SchildiNext Chat client. Although I really can’t recommend Matrix as a replacement at all.
Do those have push to talk?
Uhhhh I’m not sure, I only use the text functions
I just want an experience my friends aren’t too stumped by. I’ll give them a look! Thank you!
Matrix authentication process is confusing and annoying. If your friends aren’t technical, they’re going to have a bad time.
Ye, it is. I liked it but I don’t think many will. A non-paranoid mode or service for matrix would be nice
“Get off vent, or I’ll have you bent.”
I wish those stupid videos weren’t the first thing my brain goes for when I see the word “Ventrilo.”
I immediately go to vent pranks from like 17 years ago where they recorded people’s voices in public chats, then played it back to them and cause some amazing confusion
‘found a ring in there last night…dropped your pants?’
4 STRENGTH 4 STAMINA LEATHER BELT! AAAH OOORHG!
MANY WHELPS! LEFT SIDE!
Moving towards becoming a shit company, you mean.
Better buy some stock. I kick myself for not buying Reddit stock before it went public
