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 kinda sad to see it enshittify, for gamers and for those who find it fits their actual collaboration use case, but I also really hate the number forum-format communities that Discord has displaced or prevented from coalescing. Discoverability on Discord is terrible, as is having help available long term, as well as older advice and other content that helps newbies get the culture of a community. Even where the functionality exists, the general “real time” transitory feel of it reduces the quality of content and encourages people to be dicks, since it will all scroll by or be forgotten (if streaming) in a few moments anyway.
Horses for courses, and my old-ass X-ennial self thinks Discord has been pressed into service on a lot of courses where it’s terrible.
At least it is not “Enshittification Continues: Lemmy to begin showing advertisements on it’s fediverse platform”
Discord is a sack of shit anyways…I don’t get the obsession?
After however many years I finally joined two discord instances for some niche topics where community was hard to find elsewhere.
I haven’t used IRC in a few years I admit, but I’m a few months in with discord, and so far it has never stopped feeling like IRC with a confusing interface, a gaudy new coat of paint, and emojis everywhere.
I have no idea why it’s seemingly the ONLY place anyone wants to create an interactive community anymore for so many things.
Because its zero-effort to make a functional forum (no hosting or backend to be set up) and you have almost full control over the space / it’s isolated from other communities (unlike reddit)
EDIT: I don’t like discord either, but I can see why content creators and the likes would prefer it to other forums
this thread is making me realize I’m clearly missing something. How do people actually use discord? Me and my friends basically use it as semi-permanent group chat. A few different topic areas, and no stupid android/ios compatibility issues. I’m also in two servers for some small clubs. Do people really use it the way they would lemmy/reddit?
A few open-source projects I follow use it as their main community tool and it sucks.
I don’t mind my friend groups using it because it’s just for ephemeral chats and gaming anyway, but I want to know why these other communities think it’s appropriate.
Every single entertainer (YouTuber, Twitch Streamer, etc.), community game server, some Open Source projects, Indie game developers and anyone who gets public support through Patreon uses Discord as the sole public hub. Colleges, Universities, Online courses also rely heavily on Discord. It’s a social network they can advertise, some servers are for subscribers only and is seen as a reward to get access to that. I’m part of a dozen or so servers for online things of interest to me, even though I hate the platform. It’s all silenced and without notifications, else I would go crazy, and I never chat with anyone there. But unfortunately there are several events, opportunities and activities that are exclusively communicated via the Discord server. It’s like cancer. Just like Instagram and WhatsApp, I have them not because I like it, but because if I remove them entirely or too aggressively it will take my social life with it.
This is basically how I use it as well. I am in a few game jam channels, but i only use them when the jams are running.
I like to watch twitch streams and play modded videogames (minecraft, lethal company, valheim). Every single twitch streamer has their own discord. Fine I guess, they want control over their space and it’s full of cat pics and tattoos anyway. But the mod makers do the same, patch notes on discord, feature discussion on discord, some even close their githubs and want bugs on discord. I don’t want to be part of your shitty community, I want to know which recolored slime is killing me through walls so I can disable it in the configs. And because the discord search is garbage, I still have to sift through racist memes and wildly outdated info to find what I need.
I didn’t think people use it like lemmy/Reddit. People use it like IRC. That’s the analogous tech. IRC is better in almost every way, but not in the most important ways: ease of use, and voice chat.
I know only a handful of people who could set up a server for IRC, but in discord, it’s a one-button process. Sure, you can use a public IRC server, but then your channels are harder to organize and you don’t have as much moderation control. I dn’t think
I would vastly prefer IRC, but even if it was easy to set up, I would still need something for voice chat, and, sure, there are plenty of voice chat tools, but not ones that integrate with text chat so well.
I think a lot of people like the API and the bots built from it, tho personally that’s not something I use much.
I’m in probably ~50 servers: groups of friends, video game guilds, tech chat (eg HTMX, Lit, Svelte), random interests (eg mechanical keyboards), and community servers for video games (eg a couple of LFG servers, a couple servers where I can ask questions to tryhards, streamers’ communities, etc).
I would vastly prefer to use something FOSS, but there just isn’t something that does it so well and so easily – and even then, I’d probably have to use discord for a bunch of these things.
Let’s say it’s like Slack + Zoom, but it ends up used for things that would have made way more sense as a Lemmy/Reddit/old school forum. You can’t find anything old without pausing the scroll, the interaction is piss poor because nothing is visibly sticky for more than a couple of hours even on a slow channel, and then because people (rightly) feel that it’s more like a chat, the feed fills up with low effort nonsense and dick-baggery.
In my company, Slack is useful because we’re all stuck in front of it for 8hours+ per day, we’re all incentivized to be on our best behavior, groups are mostly manageable in size, and to the extent there’s a social aspect, it is to replace “water cooler talk” which was always light and ephemeral anyway. It works… fine. I don’t love it, but it works fine. Zoom too.
Discord is also fine for what it is, but it’s terrible when it’s the only public facing option for sharing information and fielding questions about a project or topic.
For sure. Look, I hate Stack Overflow as much as the next guy but you gotta admit, for the big picture, long term, best practice for the future of software development, that’s the correct format: one question, focused discussion, end.
Discord’s failure to make its history available is really going to put a big hole in the middle of our cultural wisdom.
It’s decent for voice chat in games.
I’m not sure why it became the open source world’s documentation platform of choice.
deleted by creator
Great, now you just need somebody to rent a server for you.
That’s where Discord won, along with being able to run in a browser for those who didn’t want to fill their PC with crap comms software for one PUG run through Uldir.
there are web clients for mumble
deleted by creator
??? I hope you don’t actually think this
There’s no reason to require everyone on earth to prioritize a better computer interfacing environment over their free time.
My time is worth way more to me than video game voice chat – but it’s not either/or. Thanks to other developers, I can have both.
Well yes, but at the same time if you had to pay a few bucks a month for Lemmy or it only worked on a special app, would you be on it?
deleted by creator
OK. And how many other people would be here for you to talk to?
Discord nitro is a thing. They are bleeding money like mofos. There’s no more investor money, they are desperate for income.
sounds like it’s time to allow third-party clients distribute the server software, shut down free “servers” and offer paid hosting and support. that would cut costs a great deal.
Mumble does that one thing just fine, but it doesn’t do all the things discord does.
And it’s not just the fact that discord does all those things that’s made it so dominant; it’s the fact that it does all those things in one place.
Even just the core features of voice chat, text chat, and the ability to set up a new server where you have extensive moderation control in one click – it’s what people wanted.
They don’t need a handful of different programs to glue together a shittier experience, they need a FOSS discord/slack.
What do the Lemmings recommend as a replacement for discord?
I’m happy to revert back to teamspeak if need be, I heard it’s app recently got an overhaul (or at the very least a facelift).
I’m disgusted (though not shocked, I fucking called it years ago), that discord would go down this rabbit hole being that their main demographic is gamers. The stats are in, gamers (among every other living being) hates ads.
In fact, I pay for YT music because I think it’s good value, but ive never once had YT premium, and I haven’t seen an ad on their site for close to a decade now. (Still no pihole, that’s likely next).
To circle back, if possible Lemmings, I would like to find a discord replacement that my folks would be willing to install/try out. I’ve got a couple people who have said “hey man, find a better spot and we’ll tag along”, however I have yet to find a suitable replacement on my own time.
Makes me miss Xfire. Feature-rich, customizeable, great quality, overlay feature that didn’t suck, no bullshit. It was orders of magnitude better than Discord ever was.
…but not popular outside of gaming; and ofc the other big tech companies litigated the fuck out of it, so it never really took off and now it’s gone. Boooooooo
we were happy and we didn’t know it
Neo, Matrix is calling
These are all near unusable and against ToS
Same as it ever was.
Please yes, pump it full of ads, discord can’t die fast enougb, reddit and youtube too.
Discord has a really good reputation and the users are invested, it will take a long time to die even with enshitification. Remember that most people are used to ads and won’t care as long as it starts with videogame ads.
Yeah take a look at something like Twitch and how many ads they shove down your throat. Yet 100,000’s of people keep coming back again and again.
Anyone tried revolt.chat?
Investors, who made Discord possible, want to earn money. It’s totally understandable.
Well I guess its done its job for the US Government. Funding has obviously stopped.
Well, that’s what you get for letting a private company replace and open protocol with a proprietary solution because it’s easier to use and has some cute emojis.
Feels good to never have used it lol
Matrix works pretty good.
