- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
- opensource@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
- opensource@lemmy.ml
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you shouldn’t use discord at all … I think nowadays it’s the only app that uses plain text for all messages avoid discord
I use discord when playing video games with my daughter. It’s improved our experience immensely.
Audio chat, webcam and screen sharing are a great combination.
Can you recommend an alternative?
Matrix is free and works much better and you can run your own server
I’m on board with this, but I may be biased because I also don’t like using Discord for anything else. Every time someone sends me a Discord invite I feel a little defeated, because it is usually after I have agreed to participate in something.
I get that people want a “simple way to chat” and Discord does that well, I guess. I mean, everyone’s talking about the forum aspect but what’s the alternative for chat? Mumble?
Just, please, don’t hide documentation in the Discord. A neocities page costs literally $0. Please. Think of the poor SEO consultants!
Yeah I’m indifferent to discord as a platform. It’ll eventually be enshitified and people will move on.
The bummer is that it’s enabling people to be poor at documentation in a whole new way.
That said, if Discord went away tomorrow most software projects would still have garbage documentation, because most software projects are ephemeral at BEST.
I find that some Matrix clients make it easy to build and interact with a community. Even Element has a lot of Discord’s core features, it just lacks the streaming and some of the gaming-related stuff. Otherwise, Matrix rooms are sufficient for building an “easy to chat” community.
True. Sadly the article is over 2 years old and not much has changed since.
Richard M. Stallman vibes.
Agreed. I love it!
The philosophy, not the man tho
Forums are a better technology but come with hosting costs
The dumb part about that, though, is that it’s considerably easy to spin up a forum with a free forum host and you get significantly more control and customization than what Discord gives.
When things seem free, you’re not the customer.
No
When profit is the motive you are not the customer, the shareholders are
Discourse is a forum platform and now has a similar layout like Discord.
Leave us alone OMG i understand you are purists but be realistic as well, you need to go where people are to advertise your project and reach. We can use discord for our projects without it meaning we aren’t for your general privacy.
Look at what just happened to Yuzu - Years of community just deleted because of a few lawyers.
The same applies to Android OS development. All of it. Android requires a very powerful 1000 USD desktop or laptop computer with 20 gigs of ram and 200 gigs of SSD hard drive space just to compile. This is unacceptable.
Meanwhile, mainline phone linux, like dreemurrs archlinux or postmarketos, can be developed using the same phone it runs on!!! All you need is a 20 USD bluetooth keyboard. It is fully awesome. Imagine a world where anybody with just a smartphone and a bluetooth keyboard could be an OS developer!
Android dev here. It does not require 20 gigs of RAM.
Yeah I don’t understand this comment lol
If you’re desperate for a discord-like experience (because lets face it, irc and mailing lists arent very flashy anymore!) you can try:
- rocket chat - General purpose chat platform, very similar discord
- mattermost - developer-centric platform, similar to slack
- Matrix - open protocol, has a bunch of desktop clients
Yes you wont have voice/vodeo chat for these but IMO that’s rarely useful anyway. And if you DO need it then you can use stuff like teamspeak or zoom***
***yes i know the issues with these options but for devs you dont really ever need to use meetings for very long and sometimes using a shitty free service with all you need is better than self hosting your own. Maybe Nextcloud talk can work?
Yes you wont have voice/vodeo chat for these but IMO that’s rarely useful anyway.
This is literally the only thing keeping me and many others using Discord at all. We have some no-mics in our group who use the channel chat feature extensively to communicate with people speaking. No, my 20 friends aren’t going to start using both a chat platform and a video platform separately. I don’t like Discord, but I don’t want to do that either.
For developers, sure, this makes more sense.
I think that’s actually what discord should be used for. It’s one of the better platforms for voice/video/text chat. It’s mostly just when people use discord for what should be a public forum or wiki that it becomes a problem.
And sure, it’s not a great place for open source developers to do all their communication in, because being able to reference things in the future if a project lead closes the server is important. But it’s probably fine for coding sprints and meetings here and there as long as someone is taking notes to be documented elsewhere. Discord is arguably better than zoom for that use case.
Jitsi Meet for zoom replacement
Jitsi is amazing. Even during 2020 it always has worked way better than Zoom for me, and I haven’t even tried hosting it myself.
Stop recommending closed-source, paid solutions. It makes you look like a shill.
Matrix is the only suitable replacement for discord, as it is the only federated replacement.
irc and xmpp federate…xmpp is highly extensible.
Matrix is the only suitable replacement for discord, as it is the only federated replacement.
No, stop recommending questionable open-source. Matrix is a metadata disaster and XMPP is the true and the OG federated and truly open solution that is very extensible.
Can you explain xmpp? I’d like a federated discord replacement buddy if you could show me the way I’d greatly appreciate it :)
XMPP is like email, a very open standard that was designed for interoperability even with more closed servers that included proprietary features and extensions. You can message anyone by email no matter what’s or where’s their server and can be configured to be secure and private. Here a quick overview of the architecture.
XMPP is the only solution that treats messaging and video like email: just provide an address and the servers and clients will cooperate with each other in order to maintain a conversation. Everything else is just an attempt at yet another vendor lock-in.
Matrix was built by Israeli intelligence & consumes so many resources that it’s not feasible to self-host on most budgets. As such it’s highly centralized & the community is still largely being ran by Matrix.org as the keeper of the implementation server, the most popular client, the specification, the largest server- which syncs back the metadata.
Mattermost is by-design centralized but it’s self-hostable & AGPL so I’m not sure where the closed-source accusation is coming from. At least it’s less wasteful than trying to be decentralized & if you wanted lightweight decentralization, you would reach for XMPP.
Mattermost is by-design centralized but it’s self-hostable & AGPL so I’m not sure where the closed-source accusation is coming from.
The AGPL community edition of Mattermost lacks several crucial features for anything but very small private communities. It isn’t closed source per se, but very much open-core.
Matrix was built by Israeli intelligence
It get some resources from them at the start, but they do not fund it for a long time.
consumes so many resources that it’s not feasible to self-host on most budgets
When you join large rooms like #matrix:matrix.org, it consumes a lot of space. But otherwise it is not that heavy. I hope they fix this, as this can be fixed with better resource planning, the biggest tables on the database are those like state_groups_state that does not hold bare information and just group information together for quick search. (I hosted a server and MatrixHQ room took 100GB…, 95% of the database).
As such it’s highly centralized
Looking at server list it seems very healthy. Also (opinion alert) I think having thousands of public server running by a randoms like there is for big chunk of Fediverse will not be as healthy as dozens of well funded community servers.
the community is still largely being ran by Matrix.org as the keeper of the implementation server
Synapse is not the reference server, there is no one official implementation for a purpose. And old news, it is now hosted by Element under AGPL.
They could still be funding it in other ways. It’s a conspiracy, but one that would make some sense.
I gather you are saying there still are real storage issues. The bigger your server grows the more wildly this can get out of hand once just one of your users joins a big room. The whole model is about distributing the syncing of messages & no matter how they slice it to speed parts of it up, I feel it will remain an issue by design unlike other protocols that treat realtime chat as ephemeral & just give you enough history to get context of the current conversation. I’ve already witnessed 3 servers try to grow a following, then when users came, the bill inevitable shut them down–in the same way that Mastodon can skyrocket bills due to fundamental designs. Other protocols also handle decentralization better in ways that don’t require massive funding & empower users to host their own decentralized server–to which I think is healthy & desirable.
Synapse more or less acts as a reference server in the way that all Twitter-likes are basically required to be Mastodon-compatible.
Matrix was built by Israeli intelligence
Source?
Thanks for the interesting rabbithole.
Well, that’s something I didn’t know, but it seems like they’ve been in the process of removing or giving the ability to remove the parts that communicate back to the main Matrix coordinators since 2019. And it’s been 2017 since they had funding from Amdocs. I’d certainly listen if someone says they’ve recently analyzed that sort of data going back to the organizations servers. It doesn’t look like it though.
At this point, the fact that it’s all opensource and the self-hosting options/configurations let you keep things internal now would make the point of its origin moot. TOR is another example of something that may have suspicious origins but because it’s public and OS, most people trust the privacy of its implementation.
There are ways do funding while being in the shadows. It’s absolutely conspiracy, but something I can see being of importance to spy agencies as Matrix is defacto centralized with all metadata & assets syncing back to the mothership. Signal also had their server code closed for a while, & I wouldn’t be surprised if something regarding US intelligence wasn‘t involved. I think you can trust these platforms more than most, but I’d prefer keeping an arm’s length until we are years removed & see open governance (something Matrix is slowly (finally) transitioning too, but other chat protocols have done for much longer).
Yah, I have my doubts about Signal as well, given the insistence, even now that the username function has been added, of needing a phone number to register. That doesn’t seem to fit with an application that’s supposed purpose is to be a private communications network and has been promoted for political change purposes in developing countries.
How about Revolt? It’s open source and it’s pretty much a Discord clone.
Why does nobody ever recommend GitLab
It can be an improvement on Microsoft’s offering in some ways, but it’s also problematic in other ways. The open-core is without a doubt better than being fully proprietary like Microsoft GitHub, but it’s also not fully open. GitLab is based in the US & is publicly-traded meaning it has to comply with US sanctions (which can ban some of your contributors) as well as needing to prioritize value to shareholders–not users. The architecture is also a bit of a mess being built on slow Rails servers & sluggish React clients (+ requires JS) meaning the user experience is not snappy. I also hear (as I’ve never self-hosted) that migrations, scaling, & maintenance isn’t a fun experience with the service. There also might be too many features in the service you aren’t using but now have to support.
If using Git as your VCS, one may want to take a look into cgit, Forgejo, Gitea, or SourceHut as alternative before committing to GitLab. You may also consider alternatives to Git too!
SourceHut actually had a really nice UI! I’ll consider it. I currently don’t have problems with GitLab save for the UI learning curve (and their EE is source-available) but I’ll consider what you’ve said.
It’s a WIP but if you like the SourceHut UI, you may like Smederee too
I created a discord server for an open source project of mine, but grew to dislike it. It got spammed multiple times, people are off topic and talking about their lives in channels that aren’t for that, and so I started pushing the community toward GitHub discussions.
Discord isn’t searchable, nor archivable, nor public, but GitHub is (I’m aware of another conflict with Microsoft for some people, but to me this is the easiest solution to get contributors and have an easy CI setup).
I haven’t had much success yet, but I’m slowly shutting down all links to the discord and will let it die (for outside contributors at least). I might keep it to stay in touch with a few developers, to refine issues and prepare migrations that aren’t ready to be turned into public discussions/ issues / pull requests.
USE REVOLT INSTEAD
Fmhy used revolt as primary and even they had to fall back to discord
my main problem is issue cannot be searched on search engine
Irc was never searchable, but that was never an issue before.
Popular IRC channels usually have an searchable web archive. But yes, chat is not a good solution for stuff that needs to be documented.
The issue is that we used to have both irc and forums. Discord has taken on the role of both in 1. Unfortunately, that means that it also needs the remote search capabilities of a forum to not screw over the community, long term.
It’s amazing the number of times a 3+ year old discussion on either a forum, or Reddit has bailed me out of a hole. Everything like that on discord is cut off, unless you know it exists.
Chat and forum are different things and serve different purposes. Even matriy doesn’t solve the search problem. Use a forum for this.
The biggest problem with traditional forums is the fact that participation requires yet another account. This is the most significant thing that discord has going for it, nearly everybody already has a discord account. Federated forums mostly solve this issue tho
Discourse is great. It needs flawless activity pub integrstion.
is the fact that participation requires yet another account.
You can literally connect most active forum engines to eg.: OpenID, XMPP, email or any/most kinds of online identifiers. Worst case scenario you can literally enable “sign in with Google”.
yeah that is why discord should not be used for problem-solving or archival purpose. Hell, even mastodon,reddit and lemmy can be indexed properly on search engine.
Mastodon and Lemmy could be indexed relatively easily, but as all social media it raises the problem of consent on broader decimation of content that’s intended for a specific audience.
