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I knew enshitification wasn’t far, since Discord has investors now.
I guess we can start looking for an alternative.
Discord has had investors for well over ten years.
Alternatives that move us backwards towards the old days are things like TeamSpeak/Mumble/Ventrilo.
Alternatives that are similar to Discord and not owned by a for-profit company are:
- Matrix
A huge missing piece of almost all not-for-profit alternatives is a lack of low-latency game streaming / screen streaming. The best Matrix gets is running a jitsi meet. I think Matrix is the only one that theoretically could work for some users because Discord bridges allow people who are finally fed up to move to Matrix for text chat.
It’s difficult, though.
Matrix is not a good platform. Especially as a discord replacement. All clients suck in their own unique ways, and so does server software. It doesn’t have any meaningful moderation tools. It doesn’t have half the user facing discord features (like streaming or functional pins). The search sucks.
You’re not getting out of the corporate hellhole that easily
Any other alternatives I’m unaware of to look into? Or are we just SOL?
None that aren’t at least in some way corporate. Maybe in another life, who knows. Or in a few years we’ll have something that’s actually useful and not corpo owned. With that out of the way, I’ve heard of but not tested these two:
- Guilded is basically discord but not yet enshittified
- Revolt.chat looks interesting, seems to be still in beta, is European, and iirc it’s developed by a non-profit
I saw Revolt Chat recommended on another post but to me it looks like early Discord that will, eventually, just head to the same place with monetization. It doesn’t have video as of now either from what I could tell.
It’s FOSS at least, but when a Discord replacement kinda needs all the users on the same server (one of the subtler evils of discord is using “server” to mean “chatroom”), you’re still in the hands of the master company’s decisions regarding their instance. The only theoretical protection from corporatization on Revolt is that when they do start shilling Revolt Ultra (and locking features behind it), someone else can fork their codebase but must still convince “the community” to migrate - including new accounts, reconnecting to all friends, communities moving to the new fork (likely without their history coming along for the ride)…
Matrix is feature-bare at the moment, but as a federated platform it is more tolerant of Matrix Dot Org going corpo. It’s the same situation as what’d happen if Lemmy.world or Mastodon.social started piping in ads and subscriptions - bad, but not platform-killing. Revolt is basically analogous to Bluesky, with Matrix as Mastodon. Bluesky obviously won the fight over Twitter refugees. I think Mastodon would have had a chance if they had polished up onboarding and focused on ease-of-transition a couple years before Twitter imploded. Hopefully Matrix devs do that push before Discord finally gets to the tipping point where people are willing to actually go somewhere else. It needs to have Discord-level convenience and quality on screenshare and group audio/video rooms on day one of Discord imploding to have any chance. To have a good chance, it needs to be as good as or better than Discord Nitro, for free, on that day.
I think one thing Matrix does better than Discord and Revolt is allowing p2p file sharing as an option, in addition to serverside hosting. File size limits in a chat client are a lot more tolerable when it’s “whoops, we don’t want you uploading a 2gb video file to our servers… But would you like to send it directly? Your contact will need to accept the download.” As a general rule, chat apps being more p2p means they’re more sustainable (because the servers don’t have ballooning storage requirements) and more private (because with p2p e2ee communications, nobody but one of the peers can share your data with anyone). P2P is notoriously hard to wrangle for group chat situations though, or validating 5 clients per user like how people use Discord. Also, resilient data is often considered a downside in social situations- people like being able to delete and edit their messages. Yes, someone could already be screenshotting/archiving their Discord chats but a p2p system would have everyone automatically doing it.
Yeah, I feel the same. Revolt Chat is just an eventual Discord 2 if it gains traction. It doesn’t really matter how open-source it is. It is centralized, and so will eventually need funding for hosting. Without the ability to run my own server and everyone be able to connect to it in their clients, it’s not a valid alternative.
Matrix is my personal vote as well. Encryption by default is already much better, though we would need a lot of community work for parity with Discord (though I’d argue most of the fluff on discord isn’t exactly necessary).
I think Discord bridging requires encryption to be off, unfortunately, and I personally see bridging as the only way for Matrix to overcome the network effects of Discord.
though we would need a lot of community work for parity with Discord
Not sure if it was FUD or not, so please treat this as an unsubstantiated rumour, but I recall another lemming telling me that Matrix was quite insular and not very accepting of outside code contributions.
So if that’s true, it could be a spanner in the gears.
rogerwilco.exe
Oh wow, that’s before my time. Thanks for sharing its existence with me.
ngl discord had it already with the profile decorations, nitro, server boosting and whatever else
Fucking called it.
This shit isn’t hard to predict, yet huge numbers of people treat you like a delusional conspiracy theorist when you say that a tech service provided by a company/org that converts into a public corp and plans to do an IPO… is now fully shifting into ‘make everything shitty and squeeze as much money out of it as possible’ mode.
Yep this is the explicit strategy. 1) fund growth off of VC cash at a huge loss; 2) when VC gets tired and no other VC wants to step in, turn to enshitification to provide the VC with liquidity options.
That’s it, that’s the playbook for the past 20 years and probably longer.
As one of the earliest Discord users, it pains me to see this, but it doesn’t surprise me. Ever since Nitro became a thing, Discord has been slowly but surely digging its grave.
I have no particular attachment to the platform, we will just move to something different if alternate Discord apps aren’t available to disable the ads.
Good riddance to this un-indexable deep-web mess, where information goes to die and never be found again. We only really used it for the voice chat anyway 🤷🏻♀️
Before everyone freaks completely out, the headline is a little bit clickbaity. Yes, they are ads, and yes they will be on mobile, so I suppose that technically wasn’t a lie. But they are probably not what you’re expecting based on reading “mobile ads” alone.
Desktop Discord has had “quests” for a little while now. You watch a thing and then get a thing. Normally it’s an in-game item, or might be a temporary discord profile frame or something.
These are optional and in my experience they’ve only popped up once a month or so. They are a mild annoyance to hide once in a while at worst and at best I have watched one or two for games I actually play.
This is that, coming to mobile now.
Yeah, not buying it. I’m getting spammed with „quests” from multiple apps now that got the same idea. Seems like a workaround for Apple App Store rules where apps shouldn’t be using notifications for ads, but „quests” are fine somehow. It’s always apps that need notifications and are so important you can’t uninstall them. Gee, what a coincidence.
Considering my mobile app doesn’t even load half the time I try it, I look forward to ads crippling it even more.
I cannot comment on the apple ecosystem, and personally don’t have any experience with other apps doing what Discord is doing with these.
These applications likely know they can get away with it, as people classify them as “too important” to uninstall.
The solution is to make them wrong: To uninstall. Who woulda thunk.
Yeah, so get this. One of those apps is a shipping company that’s close to being a monopoly. You could pick up their parcels with just a phone number but now you need account for safety. So I can’t uninstall it. I need notifications on because I’m a klutz and need reminders. And so I’m also invited to collecting some dumb coins or NFTs they sell. Discord made way into people’s lives too, they’re now dependent and screwed.
No, this is worth treating with just as much disgust as if it was what people think “mobile ads” means. It’s ads in the client, on mobile. Desktop discord “quests” and nitro upsells and flashing graphics on a “shop” button that shouldn’t exist in the first place are ads too.
I acknowledge they are ads. I suppose I have a different tolerance than you.
Every time I’ve opened mobile discord this week, several times a day, I’ve been getting a full screen ad asking me to upgrade to nitro.
That’s annoying enough. This will be worse, soon.
The code is already there, just swap out nitro for world of tanks and the conversion to crap will be complete.
Granted, I already pay for Nitro so I was not aware that was a thing.
Discord just needs to accept that they won and rake in the profits. Surely there are enough nitro subscribers to keep the lights on
If nitro was $10 a year I’d have signed up immediately. I like discord but nitro costs more than my mobile phone plan.
Discord already allows users on other platforms to hide in-app promotions for specific Quests, or opt out of personalized promotions. These options will also be available for mobile users.
Wonder how long that’s going to be an option… The way every tech company is going I’m fully expecting them to force ads on everyone in the next two years.
I’ll see if Vencord gets a plug in for this, or else I’ll try a different app
I can’t leave discord because I’m connected to too many people
I haven’t updated discord in like a year at least. It’s still working fine for me.
Brawl stars!
