Discord should be avoided as a communications platform. I don't see a single point that makes me want to use it.
It has no customization or designing flexibility, you are forced to stick to one design unless you pay for a stupeid & an expensive subscription. Otherwise you need to use potentially unsafe third party tools for it and even those go against Discord's ToS.
It is a non-private, non-secure and overtly commercialized product that should be put in the bin. But thanks to the virtual monopoly in creating a social platform (also thanks to the tech-illiterate influencers for promoting it) for more than just "Chatting for gamers", as it was originally intended for. Discord in its current state is nothing more than just a commercial market where you are the commodity. Its not a social platform.
I don't want to give out my data and message history for some company to sell to be able to discuss about your project on GitHub, or even be able to communicate with you.
The client is garbage as well unless you own a super expensive rig.
I abandoned Discord completely more than half an year ago with the vow of never registering again. I completely shifted my comms to Matrix & Signal. I have not been more at peace since.
If you manage a public project you wish for people to interact with. I request you to at least keep a mirror/bridge on XMPP, Matrix or even Revolt. Please choose something open source, private and secure for the sake of other people.
According to data dating June de 2022. Matrix had at least 64 Millon users.
That is not a small number. So yeah, people do use it. While it is significantly low compared to Discord. Keep in mind that Discord has had much more advertisement done for it than Matrix did.
Matrix allows bridging chats so you can set up a bot in your / your friends server(s) and it'll forward their messages to Matrix and yours back to Discord. As for DMs you need to set up channels for that afaik (Future me: It seems that some bots support it). The big drawback is that you need to disable Matrix' E2E-Encryption in the rooms you want to bridge your chats to.
Here's a link to the Discord bridge if you are interested. It's not that hard to set up imo.
As for voice chat, you can use Jitsi (works like zoom but without the need of an account) as long as your friends aren't too lazy to open a link in their browser to chat with you.
As for Matrix clients there's Element, FluffyChat, Cinny & others. Element & Cinny are closer to Discord's UI whilst FluffyChat feels more like WhatsApp Web or Telegram Web. Element has cool features like web widgets you can pin to rooms whilst Cinny & FluffyChat are simple (and have MUCH better custom emoji / sticker management)
That's great but this does not account for the dynamics of a Discord server.
Let's say 8 people are hanging out in Discord, playing games or whatever. Should I then message all 8 of them a link to join a separate voice chat? The response would be "no, just join Discord of you want to talk". That also requires me to know who are in the call (therefore already using Discord anyways), since if I just message one or two of them I would be splitting the party, which they won't do.
The whole "hanging out in Discord and whoever wants to join just joins" dynamic is difficult to replace with a zoom-type voice chat that requires you to initiate a call with a link.
I have already tried switching people to signal from Facebook messenger. Didn't work. All it takes is one person to not want to switch and the whole group will end up going back. And that's just a messaging service. Discord is way more complicated to switch from since it is more of an all-in-one thing.
Matrix Clients like Element, Schildichat & Fluffychat have Jitsi integrated into them for Room VOIP so making a separate account for a Jitsi instance is not necessary.
it's just a circlejerk of gamers pointing to each other to justify why they won't take the miniscule effort of switching platforms
I've gone through this shit back in the days of MSN Messenger, ICQ, and AIM. I didn't exactly switch then, either. Instead I went with Trillian and later Pigin to just use all of them at the same time under one account. Same thing is happening now with everyone I know on different apps. Except there isn't anything like Trillian or Pigin for any of 'em.
Effort is not really a part of the equation for a lot of people. Usually it's just "I don't want to switch".
The client is garbage as well unless you own a super expensive rig.
What are you on about with this? Discord has its criticisms but this is stretching it.
This is not at all stretching it. Discord's client is very poorly optimized and bloated and it is known since a long time. I could never run it on my hardware with a comfortable experience. Even some of my friends would ask me to look for and provide them older versions of the app because each update would make it laggier for them to use. I don't live in a First or Second world country with a good paying job. Most electronics are imported here and cost a lot.
Ever look at it's resource usage? It's so bloated and resource heavy for nothing more than a chat client.
I don't deny discord comes with bloat. But the idea that discord needs a "super expensive rig" seems a bit hyperbolic. If you can browse this site, your hardware can probably deal with discord.
I can understand that «super expensive» will have a different meaning for different regions but for me it is the case.
I am using the Thunder Client on Android with some optimizations. But its resource usage is not comparable to Discord at all.
Regardless, Libre platforms like Lemmy and Matrix allow me to use different clients if one is too heavy for me. This is not the case with Discord.
I have a 12 year old CPU and I can flawlessly stream video while I play games to my chat group. Discord is doing petty good.
Well, I have 9 years old laptop and when I play something demanding like Valheim, or Risk of Rain 2 with my friends, I have to run Discord on my phone because otherwise I get either performance lags, or network lags, or both. May also be an issue with a shitty network bandwidth, but the phone and laptop are both connected to the same network.
I used to run a potato 5 years past its warranty and even that had no problem with Discord. Maybe that has changed?
Dude discord and whatever game I'm playing crashes at least twice a day. No crash without discord. It's just trash
I yet have to find another platform that implements screen sharing with sound in group chats as good as discord does
I mean discord's screensharing is good for windows users imo. Has good enough quality, sound and while the linux client is terrible there are unofficial clients that reintroduce the sound sharing, which is what I am using.
I am not sure what you are referring to here.
I was talking about Element, a client for Matrix (i.e. app through which you can communicate on Matrix.) It has Jitsi integrated into it for group calls and you can easily screen share through it.
The one and only reason I use discord is because it's pretty ubiquitous in the tech industry, and I'm a union organizer at a tech company.
Then do better. If you're a Union organiser, you should know to push the better options rather than kneel to the "WELL MOST PEOPLE DO X" BS.
This is a very juvenile response. If you're trying to organize people, it's hard enough to get them to do one specific action, you don't add in a bunch of other steps that don't directly contribute to the goal. You want to remove every barrier.
For example, if you want people to sign a petition and you're going door to door, you bring a clipboard with the paper, pens, and supporting literature. You don't tell them to go to a website, or print out a document themselves. You definitely don't demand they move to a new neighborhood where the doors are closer together and all at street level.
Discord is bullshit, and I'd love to see everyone move away from it. But you've got to keep things in perspective and think about what your primary goals are.
Took the words right out of my mouth. We tried to migrate to signal, it was an abject failure.
It's more important to reach people, don't you think?
Although I agree a bridge would be the nice thing to do
Reach then educate then. Don't settle, literally why Lemmy/Pub exists. I feel @Rockslayer isn't a union organiser. Or if they are, they're a very poor one with that attitude/mindset.
I feel @Rockslayer isn’t a union organiser. Or if they are, they’re a very poor one with that attitude/mindset.
Or maybe they know how to pick their battles? Yeah Discord isn't ideal, but is it really so bad that it's worth the significant effort it would take to try and get people to switch, compared to all the other things they could be spending their effort on?
That's a decision only they can make for themselves. And your condescending attitude does nothing but reflect poorly on you.
Tell me, how do you simultaneously organize people and convince them to use foss? I'm genuinely asking, because we tried to migrate to an open platform and it didn't work at all. We need to be where the people are so we can organize and form our union, not the other way around. The alternative to being where the people are is standing unmovingly on my principles and failing to successfully organize. Don't point fingers if you've never tried it.
I wish it was more simple.
The official matrix.org server is completely stripped down and removes a lot of features, and Element as a client is nowhere near as good as anything else.
Element X (with the sliding sync support) does fix the massive issue of absolutely horrifically slow syncing.
None of Matrix comes anywhere near the levels of usability Discord has and nor does Element, Discord's server-chat model is unbeatable in this aspect.
as much as i agree,
Plenty of people still on IRC. Often through (matrix) bridges, but the terminal clients are still actively developed.
I use discord because my two friends use it when we talk every once in a while and its the tool they know and are comfortable with. They don't live at their computers and do not bother. I don't use it other than that.
I'm gonna look into matrix though. If no one adopts an alternative, it will never be standard. And matrix is a cool name.
same here with the friends situation i also do design commissions and I'm in a few small niche hobby servers. I do have Revolt just in case...
I can send messages, images, files, links, it supports youtube miniplayer for links, and I can start audio calls all in a singular app, and I can control which members of a channel see those messages or access that call very simply with roles. They also store that message history for years and years, idk what the limit is for channels but for DMs I can scroll back at least 5 years no problem. This works both on Desktop and Smartphones. I don't know of any other programs or apps that do all of that, please correct me if I'm wrong.
Well, it's the standard now. I don't like it either because of their gratuitous data storage, but what other choice do I have? All my friends and communities use it.
I don't use it much, but as far as I can tell, it's IRC with a bunch of features that would have significantly improved IRC.
I’m gonna preface this with I haven’t used discord in a year or so.
It’s kinda fun watching a new generation go through their first redesign outrage.
Youtube should still have the description over there👉. Putting it down there 👇 will always suck
I use theatre mode so I don't care about that, but I remember back when you could customize YT Channel background art and set colors and transparency values, cool times.
Use the Improve Youtube extension. I looked it up when I wanted to see something at the end of a video which was obscured by the suggestion boxes, found out it can remove all kinds of bullshit clutter. Can't imagine watching youtube without it.
One of my favorite things about discord was the fact that your experience was similar on both mobile and desktop. I honestly thought it was fantastic from a UX perspective since your knowledge of the app transferred easily between platforms. The new update destroys that and tosses out a large amount of shared knowledge.
Another, more important, complaint is the changes to the colors/themes makes the accessibility significantly worse no matter what theme you use for anyone with eye issues. They changed the light mode font to gray???? They reduced the contrast on the other modes significantly making it genuinely difficult to read text on a MESSAGING APP.
To me this whole thing, and the earlier username changes, feel like changing for the sake of changing rather than actually improving anything. This is just for the shareholders and not because literally anyone asked for it.
Also why is dms it's own tab I really liked that they were listed next to the servers!
Mobile apps aren't supposed to work like desktop ones tho.
text is already impossible to read for me due to the font. idk every time i try to switch to the new react native version i go back because text takes me like 4-6 attempts to read.
It annoys me to no extent when there's something I could do in 5 seconds on the desktop version of an app but I can't find it on the mobile version because they hid things. Microsoft is soooo annoying with this (and many other things because fuck them)! Every version of each of their apps on every platform is an entirely different program with the same name that barely even does the same functions.
As for the text, this is a problem they could've solved! And instead they made it worse while also making the UX worse! Every update from discord recently has made the app more and more buggy and slow. I genuinely don't understand how they manage it.
Seems very ok, did not give me any strong opinions after a minute.
Update:
Did they get rid of the server user list?
Yeah, that's one of my big complaints about the new UI. Otherwise, I don't have many huge issues with it so far. The beta they tried earlier this year was terrible, but at least they ditched the horrible server page that one had and kept the server/channels sidebar in this new update. That was the main thing that would've made it a dealbreaker for me.
This app is awful now. There was literally nothing wrong about the old UI. They went and messed it all up.
Didn't even know it changed until I saw this thread. Opened it up, saw that chats and servers are sensibly separated and on the bottom now where they're easy to reach with a thumb. Also way easier to reply to messages now that the swipe doesn't show who's online (to see who's online, tap the channel name at the top of the screen).
I like it.
Seriously, chats and servers previously being as far away from the thumb as possible was a terrible design. The new one is much cleaner and simpler imo
Same it's different, but it's not a bad different. And it's not on the level of reddit where they basically strong armed third-party with cost to quit them from making apps.
A big big problem is accessibility. The new themes are all worse for the eyes than the previous ones and there's been complaints of vision issues. My fiancé had to install a third party discord client because the actual discord one makes their head spin on every theme.
Also on a more personal note, I really hate that the dms are separated from the servers. My favorite aspect of discord is that knowledge transfers between platforms. It feels like I'm using discord and not discord mobile and then also discord desktop. Now it's all fucky and it took me like 5 minutes to figure out how to even see who was in the server (it's in the top left, the area furthest from the average person's reach).
It's also apparently really buggy and noticeably slower. Earlier I sent a pic into a server and it just silently sent to my most recent DM instead. After a search I found I'm not the only one that had.this happen either.
I really don't like this update. Dark mode is now a different, darker color which I'm not too fond of. My muscle memory is completely useless. Viewing server members is now all the way up at the top instead of being conveniently behind a swipe. Swiping between tabs is weird (it's not really swiping between tabs, it's more like the back button Android already has, so it's redundant). The activities menu at the top is a waste of space. The search function is harder to use now, you have to click a little button at the top to filter your search results. Chat pins also don't show image, links, or file previews now. Plus, Discord Mobile and desktop shared a similar user experience, so anyone could just pick up from the desktop version and be able to figure it out very quickly, now you can't do that anymore. So much functionality and convenience just completely gone now. This might be the worst update I've ever seen for a messaging app, and it's not even close.
My biggest problem is that searches don't fucking work anymore. It now defaults to searching the channel you're in, but what if I'm look for a particular message and I don't know what channel it's in? Then there's also searching PMs is so much more complicated now and doesn't even show you who sent the message in the results.
I have security concerns with an app that's been modified by a 3rd party, not to mention it's an ancient version as well.
All patches should be open source / freely to inspect afaik, I think the official installation process even involves patching an official Discord .apk file locally
You can downgrade to version 199.15 to get rid of the new ui without using a third party modified client
Make sure you use an open source tool to download any important conversation or channel history.
https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter
You'll have to use the browser version of Discord to grab your unique Token since they've disabled the inspector console on the application and also removed the ability to turn it back on in the ini file. Don't ever share it with anybody, either.
If you delete your account then you won't have access to your chat history. Because the account will be gone. The account tied to all of the messages. And with which you accessed servers. Because you can't log in to it. Because it's gone. Because you deleted it.
Honestly I like the new UI. Takes a bit of getting used to after knowing the old one for so long but it makes more sense in the end.
The channel switcher, one of my most frequently used features, is now hidden away on top of the channel list instead of a prominent place in the middle of the bottom bar of the swipe-right menu. Going from a DM conversation to a specific channel, instead of "swipe right, tap channel switcher" (so I can type 3 letters of the channel name and switch to it) became "swipe left, tap 'servers' twice, tap the search box". I like most of the other changes, but this really irks me and makes my mobile discording much less efficient :(
If it works just the same, why would they just outright delete the UI most of us like? There's no good reason not to have options.
not saying that i don't hate the UI changes with my entire being, but there is absolutely a good reason to not keep the old one. that would mean that discord would have to support two entirely different codebases that would both have to be modified independently whenever they wanted to e.g. add a new feature
