cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/17617609
They supposedly can be disabled in settings- but we all know that won’t last. They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode and it’s only a matter of time.
I’m so tired man. I just want it to stop. It feels like everything nice is slowly being squeezed in all aspects of life.
Anything that capitalism touches or influences has begun to choke us out. It just seems to continue and doesn’t seem to ease up or improve. Maybe I’m just noticing it more, but the past 4 years felt like things accelerated quickly
This is the definition of late-stage capitalism. Capitalism starts out by finding useful things that improve lives for at least some people (potentially by ruining it for others). For instance, it invents assembly lines to make manufactured goods cheaper but in so doing makes the worker’s job dull, repetitive, stressful, and robs him of his agency. This is early stage capitalism. Things are getting worse for some people but broadly better for many.
But then later on capitalism runs out of things to improve. You can only invent the assembly line once. You only get that boost when you implement it. So you have to come up with something else. Maybe you computerize things. But eventually you can’t wring any more profits out of production and profits must go up, so you have to take them out of the customers. You roll up all the competing firms into a monopoly and then start jacking up the price, slashing the quality, etc. This is late-stage. It becomes more and more parasitic and the snake eats its own tail.
I like how you highlighted the main problem.
this will always happen unless we move to FOSS
It’s often not the cost of the software, but the hosting costs, especially on a growing platform.
platforms can be peer to peer too, with maybe a cheaper to host tracker. i think its viable for a chat app, like matrix, for example.
overall yes though, i wonder when lemmy is gonna start having these issues, its still mostly run by unpaid volunteers…
I think it’s why many decentralised platforms don’t want very big instances, and prefer them to split off into smaller federated sites.
Hope we get some comparable options yet, I only know of matrix and that one allegedly has tons of security and performance issues.
Can you list some security/performance/feature comparison between matrix and discord? I don’t have the need for these class of product, but I am trying to get the hype behind discord.
I don’t know about discord issues, the hype behind is it mostly that it’s free, very convenient, feature rich and can easily integrate bots. Its the go-to place to build communities nowadays.
Matrix issues that I read about can be seen here https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07 . I haven’t done my own research tho so I don’t know if all of this is (still) true
Almost all of those issues are due to federation. Lemmy shares most of them. Considering that we’re on Lemmy, I’d say it’s mostly a non-issue for us. Maybe use something else for encryption-required communications, but other than that it sounds fine to me.
Lemmy is a public forum, discord servers are usually for invite-only, more closed-off communities, and we’re not talking about a lemmy replacement but rather how this is inadequate as a discord replacement.
That’s true, but the vast majority of the issues aren’t related to that. The majority of the issues in the article (if you read them you’d know) are about replication. They’re about whether the timing of posts, deletions, bans, and things like that possibly not being replicated perfectly across all instances. Lemmy has the same issues, but I haven’t noticed them causing problems yet. They would be even less of a problem in a private discord-like environment.
Mattermost does most of the required discord features. (Pun intended)
Is open source and is selfhost-able. I think there are some SaaS hosters if you need them too.
Yeah, some of us tried to get our work to that but higher ups went with rocket chat.
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Most of these platforms make no money but have taken huge amounts of VC funding which they have burned through. For the VCs to unload it and cash out they need to show the product can be monetised and them try and shift it before the users leave the platform. Idiot users want all the features of a product developed by lots of talented full time paid staff but don’t want to pay for it themselves so they leap from startup to startup then complain when the inevitable happens while dismissing open source alternatives as inadequate for their needs. Why should we care? I don’t.
While I don’t disagree with the sentiment, the Discord Nitro subscription has been around for a long while. From what I’ve seen using the platform it seems relatively popular. I’d guess adding ads to the free tier is as much about enticing people onto the subscription (which presumably won’t have ads).
Ubtil they go to the Netflix model where users can experience both a subscription and ads at the same time.
I doubt it. Video ads are worth a lot more. Unless they ad them to live streams Twitch style.
That would be absolutely terrible
And Nitro isn’t exactly inexpensive either, or wasn’t last time I used Discord.
I’ve been using Discord almost since launch, and in that time, not a single feature did I find as an important addition to the program. It is now much more bloated with unnecessary stuff, stuff for which they paid those talented devs you mention.
I would have been perfectly content with a one-time payment to use it and it would have worked perfectly well for them with that model if they didn’t get greedy and want to stuff it with random junk to justify a subscription.
I don’t mind paying as long as it’s not a subscription scam for no reason at all.
Good. I hope people will move away from it soon. I hate Discord for banning third-party clients and datamining my system for installed apps. So I’ve never really used it.
It does mean I’m excluded from some FOSS projects’ support like Home Assistant but to hell with that :P
Good. I hope people will move away from it soon.
You mean like they moved away from Reddit when they killed 3rd party clients and openly began selling user data to data brokers?
Or how they left Twitter when it was bought by an egomaniac who killed 3rd party clients, fired the entirety of the moderation staff, then required users to log in to view posts?
Or maybe how they left Facebook after any of the many times they’ve been caught collecting user data against their will, promoted genocide, never allowed 3rd party apps, and willingly manipulated elections?
Nevermind the fact that those platforms have had ads for decades.
Yeah sorry, ain’t gonna happen.
Hey I am here
never allowed 3rd party apps
Facebook used to allow third party apps (e.g. Snaptu started as a third-party app before the acquisition) and exposed most of the functionality via their API, but it’s not really a thing any more after Cambridge Analytica - the API was locked down significantly. You can’t really have it both ways… Allowing third-party apps also allows those apps to scrape and store user info, which is what Cambridge Analytica did.
You can’t really have it both ways…
I don’t want it both ways.
Allowing third-party apps also allows those apps to scrape and store user info, which is what Cambridge Analytica did.
Accessing an API is not scraping. Scraping is still possible without an API. All CA did was access public information. The problem in that case is not access to public information, it is intentional paid disinformation.
Accessing an API is not scraping.
I probably used the wrong words… What I meant is that given API access, a malicious third-party can gather a large amount of data and store it in a way that goes against the service’s terms of service, without the proper privacy guarantees (e.g. user data being deleted if they delete their account). Obviously that’s a problem for a social network where people can post a lot of friends-only posts.
ideally such changes to advertising and the ToS arbitration clause removing consumer rights will help give a lot of the open-source communities a gentle push to get off of discord. It’s become far too central to too many communities and is impossible to search for knowledge.
Hopefully those FOSS projects will gain some sense as discord becomes more shit and will leave. One can hope.
I never understood how a chatroom took off as a tool to document stuff. Who seriously thinks this is a good idea? 😵
If a project only has Discord for support (no docs, no bug tracker), I’m not using it. Don’t want to deal with trying to find anything in Discord.
Most projects still haven’t left GitHub…
Don’t forget that it saves even your deleted DMs for as long as you have an account!
People will move away, sure, but to another proprietary service that’ll do the same thing in a year or two.
I’ve only ever used it in browser to limit what it can see on my machine. I was told by one of my coding professors that one of the signs of a virus is if it monitors what apps you’re running, I’ve been cautious ever since of anything that does that (obviously it isn’t the only sign and isn’t instant virus bin, like I have an app that monitors GPU usage and throttles apps to keep from cooking my machine)
xkcd 743 moment
Did you memorize that number? 😮
IRC still rules. No ads in my irssi.
Does IRC do voice nowadays? I think that is the main reason people use Discord
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You mean does the 80s-based protocol that doesn’t even support encryption support voice?
It doesn’t support having messages received while you were offline
IRC supports one and one thing only: N-wise chats to connected clients. That and delusional nerds who like to think they’re better than everyone else. Huge support for that too.
People who actually have sane standards for their instant messaging use the Matrix decentralized chat protocol when they need non-proprietary coms, or revolt
I find there is no shortage of delusional nerds who like to think they’re better than everyone else. Even here on Lemmy.
Mumble exists
If you mean that in some channels only some people can actually “talk”, I think it depends on the configuration of the channel, but it’s a possibility.
I thought people used Discord because you could have video / audio chats (not sure about this, I’ve used it very sparsely.)
And then there are Open Source projects that use Discord as the documentation repository. Hell is a place on the Internet, apparently.
Discord became popular because it’s a more convenient integration of audio chat for gaming, with text chat: no need to set up a server (like TeamSpeak or Mumble).
People using Discord for official documentation, or bug reporting, are in a circle of hell just slightly below the ones doing the same on Reddit. Community support… they may get a pass.
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slowly moving myself to https://revolt.chat/.
Its sad since I’ve been with discord since almost '15.
so this Revolt project is open source, which is nice, but still seems to rely on centralized servers. Does it use P2P for voice+video+fileshare so that the original devs aren’t on the hook for insane bandwidth requirements? I can’t see anything about their networking systems in the FAQ or info pages.
I may consider getting my friends to switch sooner or later if it’s more P2P based. But I don’t really want something that runs ALL traffic through central servers, because the bandwidth costs will inevitably just lead to the same situation that Discord is now in.
It’s self-hostable, and they seem to be switching to webrtc-rs, not sure whether with P2P or not:
https://trello.com/c/Ay6KdiOV/1-voice-overhaul-and-video-calling
In 2022, they claimed it was using minimal resources on the server:
https://developers.revolt.chat/faq/monetisation
They also don’t seem to consider federation as a priority, but then again neither does Discord.
Compared to Matrix, or any E2EE chat, this doesn’t sound good:
we take your privacy very seriously. And with end-to-end encryption coming to DMs and group chats soon
Compared to Discord, or other established voice chat systems like Mumble, this doesn’t sound great either:
We are currently rebuilding the client and the voice server from scratch. The old voice should work in most cases, but it may inexplicably not connect in some scenarios and / or exhibit weird behaviour.
The “app” on Android seems to be just the webapp running in a standalone window.
I’ll concede them the OpenSource and self-hosted factors, and it does look like Discord, but it doesn’t seem like a suitable replacement for average users… yet. Then again, the ads might push them over.
Guess it’s worth to keep an eye on it.
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“Discord said users will be able to turn off the ads in their settings.”
usually at first you can do such, and later on, when a ceo wants more money, you then can buy that together with the new “pro” features actually nobody needs nor wants.
maybe better look for more stable solutions before they start acting like a broadcom ;-)
For now. I’m quite sure that option will disappear at some point in the not too distant future.
Sure, but you really expect that option to stay available for very long after 90% of users turn it off and ruin it’s profitability?
We need a Federated FOSS Discord alternative built to work with the activity pub protocol. I’m currently setting up an XMPP server, but I hope something like XMPP but works with activitypub gets made some day.
why activity pub? I don’t think it is designed to do group chats.
It’s not designed for real-time communication at all. ActivityPub is fine for things where it takes a little bit of time to sync everything, but a chat that worked that way would feel very slow. XMPP is a better fit.
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TeamSpeak has always been better tbh. For actual gaming voice chat discord actually sucks, it’s low bitrate and very high latency. It’s benefit was just easy coordination in larger servers without the need to constantly self-host and self-manage your own server like TS.
If only it had screen sharing
I believe teamspeak 4 is more similar to discord than ts3. No idea if it supports screen sharing though
Discord always had Discord ads. Thought I’d get rid of them by paying, because I genuinely like the product.
Nope, ads kept coming. That’s when I left Discord.
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Sure does, and I hate it. If they add more ads, I’m going to cancel nitro and move elsewhere.
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If you don’t already, consider using an ad-blocking DNS server. That blocks ad domains systemwide, not just in your web browser. Mullvad, Adguard, and some others have public DNS servers with adblocking. You can use them on both iOS and Android.
What’s a DNS server?
A DNS server is what converts a domain name, like google.com, into a numeric IP address, which is required for Internet traffic. Think of it like the mail room in an office building. They get mail for Bob in accounting, but the mail only has the name and the building’s address. The mail room staff (DNS) knows what floor and desk Bob sits at.
Since many ads are hosted on their own domains, like doubleclick.net, you can block them at the DNS level so your device never actually connects to the ad server.
By default you’re probably using your ISP’s DNS server, but you can customize it.
