Discord confirms it's moving toward 'becoming a public company' as it hires a former Activision executive as its new CEO (www.pcgamer.com)
from ryujin470@fedia.io to gaming@beehaw.org on 24 Apr 2025 13:19
https://fedia.io/m/gaming@beehaw.org/t/2095597

Co-founder Jason Citron is stepping down, but will remain with the company as a member of the board of directors.

#gaming

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Fiivemacs@lemmy.ca on 24 Apr 2025 13:23 next collapse

Sounds like a good time to reinstall ventrilo

Boomkop3@reddthat.com on 24 Apr 2025 13:49 next collapse

Adding that to my list, I was looking at element (matrix), revolt and fosscord

otter@lemmy.ca on 24 Apr 2025 14:37 next collapse

I assume that one was a joke, Ventrilo looks very out of date

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventrilo

Revolt is nice though. Once they finish upgrading the app, it would be an easy switch

I didn’t know about Fosscord (now called Spacebar it seems), it looks cool github.com/spacebarchat

Spacebar is a free, opensource selfhostable discord-compatible chat, voice and video platform.

  • Discord-compatible (Use all your custom clients/bots with minimal changes)
  • Selfhostable (Server)
  • Open Source (GitHub Organization)
  • Configurable (Configure every aspect and limits to your needs)
  • Decentralized (no abuse of power and doesn’t have a single point of failure)
  • Extendable (secure and cross-platform plugin system)
  • Themeable (cross-platform theme system with design editor)
  • Secure (publicly audited and hosted FOSS software for transparent foundation in terms of security)
joelfromaus@aussie.zone on 24 Apr 2025 16:17 next collapse

Spacebar looks to be exactly what I’ve been looking for! Unfortunately, according to their FAQ the voice and video features aren’t implemented yet but here’s hoping that someone comes on-board to help set it up 🤞definitely an easy decision for a self hosted Discord alternative if that comes to fruition!

mooncake@lemm.ee on 24 Apr 2025 17:35 collapse

Ventrilo is what everyone used like 20 years ago it’s the OG of course it’s outdated

Ulrich@feddit.org on 24 Apr 2025 15:24 collapse

Fosscord changed to “spacebar” a while back. If you want a more Discord-like experience, try the Cinny or Comet Matrix client. And on mobile the SchildiNext Chat client. Although I really can’t recommend Matrix as a replacement at all.

Boomkop3@reddthat.com on 24 Apr 2025 16:44 next collapse

I just want an experience my friends aren’t too stumped by. I’ll give them a look! Thank you!

Ulrich@feddit.org on 24 Apr 2025 16:48 collapse

Matrix authentication process is confusing and annoying. If your friends aren’t technical, they’re going to have a bad time.

Boomkop3@reddthat.com on 24 Apr 2025 16:50 collapse

Ye, it is. I liked it but I don’t think many will. A non-paranoid mode or service for matrix would be nice

millie@beehaw.org on 24 Apr 2025 21:06 collapse

Do those have push to talk?

Ulrich@feddit.org on 24 Apr 2025 21:32 collapse

Uhhhh I’m not sure, I only use the text functions

Coelacanth@feddit.nu on 24 Apr 2025 13:59 next collapse

Mumble is where it’s at.

[deleted] on 24 Apr 2025 16:14 collapse

.

Badabinski@kbin.earth on 24 Apr 2025 14:25 next collapse

"Get off vent, or I'll have you bent."

I wish those stupid videos weren't the first thing my brain goes for when I see the word "Ventrilo."

Fiivemacs@lemmy.ca on 24 Apr 2025 17:34 collapse

I immediately go to vent pranks from like 17 years ago where they recorded people’s voices in public chats, then played it back to them and cause some amazing confusion

‘found a ring in there last night…dropped your pants?’

youtu.be/b5AkIfgioA4

JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz on 24 Apr 2025 17:55 collapse

4 STRENGTH 4 STAMINA LEATHER BELT! AAAH OOORHG!

the_q@lemm.ee on 24 Apr 2025 14:35 collapse

MANY WHELPS! LEFT SIDE!

Strayce@lemmy.sdf.org on 24 Apr 2025 13:28 next collapse

Well it was nice for a while there.

[deleted] on 24 Apr 2025 13:58 next collapse

.

msage@programming.dev on 24 Apr 2025 22:47 collapse

No it wasn’t

SaltSong@startrek.website on 24 Apr 2025 13:57 next collapse

Moving towards becoming a shit company, you mean.

JaymesRS@literature.cafe on 24 Apr 2025 14:01 next collapse

Everyone loves Activision and what they’ve done for gaming. There no way this could go wrong.

Telorand@reddthat.com on 24 Apr 2025 14:34 next collapse

Two alternatives:

  • Revolt. Has the Discord style down, made in Europe.
  • Matrix. Focused more on privacy.

Both have self-host options.

arsCynic@beehaw.org on 24 Apr 2025 16:16 next collapse

Never heard of Revolt before, nice.

As a community I’d use Revolt if my game/mod/whatever is built upon extensive bot functionality, and Matrix if not.

TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org on 24 Apr 2025 20:33 next collapse

I can’t tell for sure, but it doesn’t look like Revolt has voice chat yet? Which was what attracted my friend group to Discord initially.

Telorand@reddthat.com on 24 Apr 2025 21:16 next collapse

I’m not sure, either. I haven’t used it yet, though that might come sooner than later after this announcement.

SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org on 24 Apr 2025 22:38 collapse

Yeah, sadly most open source alternatives to discord either cannot do voice/video chat or cannot do it as well or seamlessly as discord did, partially because federated voice/video chat is not really a solved issue and partially because of money. Though even most of the centralised ones don’t really have voice/video chat that works well except for a few like Signal because they have the resources.

Another problem is it’s based on p2p a lot of the time, whereas I think things like discord partially use their servers to facilitate it, I’ll check on this though.

msage@programming.dev on 24 Apr 2025 22:48 next collapse

Jitsi

SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org on 25 Apr 2025 00:41 collapse

Jitsi doesn’t have e2ee except in a few situations and they don’t seem interested in bringing e2ee to all platforms, or they can’t. It also is somewhat buggy with disconnects etc. Also it’s meant for one off calls or meetings compared to discord, but yeah, it’s okay for some situations.

Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de on 24 Apr 2025 23:19 next collapse

Matrix could’ve implemented it with classic TURNS for a while now so the feature at least is there for those needing it, but they dug their own hole instead and focused so hard on their idea of a protocol they created software that hardly can do anything, and what is should be able to do it does really badly. Also for some reasons it was more important to throw away he concepts of “Communities” and build… “Places”. Now Element is a convoluted mess that <Error Decrypting Second Part of this Message>

jlh@lemmy.jlh.name on 25 Apr 2025 01:34 next collapse

Matrix uses TURN, and the Matrix protocol is not used for carrying voice/video.

Element is an independent client developed by Element, and not part of the Matrix protocol.

Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de on 25 Apr 2025 01:40 collapse

To my understanding they’re pushing those TURN connections through your home instance though? Wasn’t that the whole reason it takes so phenomenally long?

Otherwise implementing WebRCT with TURN would be rather easy, there are ready-to-use modules and frameworks to do so in basically any language. Whatever it is that’s wrong with the teams behind Matrix, it causes Matrix (especially when used with Element) to be just awful and buggy.

jlh@lemmy.jlh.name on 25 Apr 2025 02:45 collapse

The legacy jitsi-based rtc used turn, and so does matrixrtc I believe. I haven’t tried it myself, though.

SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org on 25 Apr 2025 04:10 collapse

Yeah, the people behind it always seemed to be more interested in getting corporate funding and thus gave corporations more what they wanted/needed instead of typical users and mods. This is part of the reason why I’m no longer interested in matrix main and more hard forks of it.

Inktvip@lemm.ee on 25 Apr 2025 03:20 collapse

Discord routes over their own servers and uses a private I3Dnet backbone to spread the signals across the world. The latter is one of the reasons why discord video is very good.

If discord did any p2p there would be stories all over of people getting ddos-ed after joining a voice call / screenshare.

In general, discords tech is pretty solid overall. The platform itself is just getting shittier.

SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org on 25 Apr 2025 04:08 collapse

Thanks for the info!

Yeah, sadly.

Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg on 25 Apr 2025 03:11 next collapse

Three, before there was Discord there was TeamSpeak and they’re still fighting

Mesophar@pawb.social on 25 Apr 2025 05:49 collapse

Ventrilo would like a word as well

Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg on 25 Apr 2025 17:15 collapse

Have they had any recent developments?

TeamSpeak has been working on a new TeamSpeak 6 client and server that allows users to set up effectively their own personal federation of gaming servers with text, voice, and video chat rooms in a modern cross platform client that supports Windows, Mac, Linux and mobile operating systems.

They’ve also built up their own infrastructure so less technical folks can directly rent servers from them rather than needing to buy through a third party.

Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com on 25 Apr 2025 05:14 next collapse

I’ve got 2 gaming Discords I want to bridge with Matrix (and maybe Revolt too?) can you suggest an instance? one is for Deus Ex Randomizer, and the other is for The 7th Guest fan club

Note that when you join a Space, you are not automatically joining all the rooms inside it.

this is going to be a bit painful for people who are used to Discord

you can search public rooms but not public Spaces? how do you find Spaces? they should’ve copied the good parts about Discord lol (EDIT: I found the way to search public Spaces, I guess it can’t search across instances though which is a shame, it probably wouldn’t require much disk space to index the name and description of every Matrix Space)

I don’t even see rooms linking back to their Space?

tchncs.de has a lot of public spaces, I created my account using my Google but it just assumed my username :(

moonleay@feddit.org on 25 Apr 2025 09:27 collapse

Small note on Revolt: You can’t chat with other people which are on other servers. Revolt does not federate and is not encrypted!

BoulevardBlvd@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 24 Apr 2025 14:37 next collapse

How the fuck are blizzard execs still getting fucking jobs?!?!! Jesus Christ people, could you find a worse person to run the company?

LucidNightmare@lemm.ee on 24 Apr 2025 18:03 next collapse

Probably the point, honestly. If they lose money from it, at least they made it worse for the cattle who stuck with it!

dangling_cat@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 24 Apr 2025 19:06 collapse

Because he “has experience managing a public company” and in his portfolio only focuses on cherry-picked KPIs and no mention of any negatives at all.

I hate that our society encourages failing up and instead of punishment because of poor management skills and decisions, they do mass layoffs and give themselves fat bonuses because of “cost savings”.

Frankly, if a company fails, they will ruin other companies; it’s never their fault because of “complicated reasons”.

Glide@lemmy.ca on 24 Apr 2025 15:39 next collapse

God fucking dammit.

KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml on 24 Apr 2025 15:42 next collapse

Womp womp

Maeve@kbin.earth on 24 Apr 2025 16:53 next collapse

I was recently asked to chat on discord. Add this to a host of other reasons I declined.

whodatdair@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 24 Apr 2025 16:58 next collapse

This whole “spend a ton of money to get your foothold, take over a market, then enshittify to bilk the users” shtik is getting very very old.

Rose@lemmy.zip on 24 Apr 2025 18:18 next collapse

That’s Jason Citron for you.

HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club on 24 Apr 2025 18:46 next collapse

That’s tech companies for you.

Why else would they make all this for free?

ized@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 25 Apr 2025 11:19 collapse

Might finally open the doors for viable alternatives. If Spacebar (former fosscord) garners tractions for example due to mismanagement by discord they might make the transition over from discord to an open source, decentralized alternative for the everyday discord user viable. Although I haven’t tried Matrix in a while… But convincing users to switch to a completely separate service is way more difficult.

smokingpistol@lemm.ee on 24 Apr 2025 19:37 next collapse

Better buy some stock. I kick myself for not buying Reddit stock before it went public

SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org on 24 Apr 2025 19:44 next collapse

[sarcasm] Who could have ever seen it coming? [/sarcasm]

Honestly, the writing was on the wall for a long time, it had no clear business model and was a mess. It was always going to go this way and I tried pointing out that it was a bad platform but nobody either cared or believed me. Whelp, looks like I was a Cassandra yet again.

Hope Open Source people can make something to fill the gap, there really is nothing else (yet). Matrix really doesn’t have the features and that which it does have is often bad UX and doesn’t work everywhere. Not seen anything else which will fill the gap and I’ve been looking but I guess nobody thought discord would go down, go this way, or just don’t really know how to make something that would fill the gap, or didn’t want to.

PixelProf@lemmy.ca on 24 Apr 2025 21:47 next collapse

Any good options recommended for self-hosting something similarly functional that doesn’t take too much effort to get up, audit, maintain? Discovery isn’t really important for me, so federated isn’t really necessary, but a cool extra. I’d love to host something or contribute to hosting for my gaming groups, my class or multiple classes at my school, or otherwise. Voice, chat, screen share, camera, would all be great if possible, but range of options would be good. I’m still using Mumble for gaming…

Haven’t tinkered much with Matrix nor do I know much about Revolt, but I’m curious before I look into it deeper if anyone in the community has experience hosting any communication platforms for small, invitational groups.

Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de on 24 Apr 2025 23:14 next collapse

Nothing comes close to the feature set offered by Discord, Matrix’ bad priorities unfortunately made sure of this. There currently is a project to fix their shit even if it means to break some bad decisions, Tuwunel, however it’s neither ready nor is it clear where it will end up. The previous project it forked, Conduwuit, got bullied into giving up.

You’ll probably be best off with a classic 2-way approach for now. Stick with Mumble for Voice and get something nice for Chat and Organizing like Mattermost or Revolt (or even IRC if you’re a purist). With some luck Discord’s strong enshittification will give projects like Tuwunel the necessary push it needs to force Matrix to finally care for more than just the needs of governments and their perfectionism that gets them nowhere for years now. That or we’ll see some kind of soft-fork with even more bad blood.

jlh@lemmy.jlh.name on 25 Apr 2025 01:55 collapse

This just sounds like FUD.

What should the Matrix developers have prioritized instead? Chat programs are complicated, especially when you’re making them distributed. You’re comparing an organization and a MSP with like $1M/yr revenue with a soon-to-IPO company with $600M/yr in revenue.

What feature is missing from Matrix that is preventing Discord users from joining?

Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de on 25 Apr 2025 08:18 collapse

Is this a joke? Even if you ignore the overly fancy stuff like those Forum-like features Matrix can hardly do the basics correctly. The encryption constantly causes issues, Voice feature is still beta, the UX is a mess, the UI is lackluster, basic features are missing (you can’t even set the Voice Activation level, wtf), there are no integrated admin tools and the third-party UIs are either wonky or lackluster, the software (both server and client) is a bloated mess that takes aeons to do anything and is awful to develop (a friend looked at it and quickly decided it’s not worth all the hassle)…

Of course there’s a difference in size, still they could’ve figured things out way better in the last decade. People ask for voice channels since 2017, and not just did they have a working Jitsi integration, there also are WebRTC frameworks ready to use they could’ve picked. And even now with that Beta feature it is more than obvious they do not want it to work as simple as Discord, but more like a professional software for meetings (that or they just really love creating convoluted UI).

There’s no way to get any majority of Discord users to use this mess. We discussed this once in our local hackerspace, and while the general opinion of course was more complex given some people know how complicated the protocol is, there also was a consensus that the software as it is is “not great to use”. And if even hackers / enthusiasts are saying this there’s no way in hell to convince casual users.

ized@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 25 Apr 2025 11:24 collapse

Matrix is probably be the best bet atm, although I’m hoping for Spacebar to get more mature as they are aiming for feature parity and compatibility with discord. This way you can host your server with Spacebar, use their client and still be friends with discord users/be in discord servers that haven’t switched yet. Only thing impossible with Spacebar is discord users joining your self hosted server, but once they reach feature maturity (esp in regards to voicechat and videochat) it’ll make switching super seamless.

SplashJackson@lemmy.ca on 24 Apr 2025 22:17 next collapse

Lol IRC knockoff

Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org on 24 Apr 2025 22:40 next collapse

That sucks

Yermaw@lemm.ee on 24 Apr 2025 23:15 next collapse

Gonna go ahead and show my ignorance here, but why is this such a bad thing?

antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 25 Apr 2025 00:12 next collapse

Public companies have to account for the shareholdres’ expectation of, well, making money (and more money, and more money, and growing the numbers as much as possible). Shareholders have some degree influence on how the company works, depending on how many shares they own, e.g. they can vote for the CEO. This usually leads to the company to introducing more aggressive ways of making money off the users/customers, enshittification, etc., as it has to satisfy the shareholders and not so much the original customers.

endeavor@sopuli.xyz on 25 Apr 2025 04:39 next collapse

Cause things that make most money for shareholders make the worst experience for the end user.

Sina@beehaw.org on 25 Apr 2025 05:39 collapse

Shareholders want quick profits & they don’t care if the service shuts down in 10 years, or becomes largely unusable in 3-5.

sculd@beehaw.org on 25 Apr 2025 02:39 next collapse

So glad I never got into that thing.

Just doesn’t understand why so many people prefer Discord over forums. In terms of information preservation Discord sucks!

endeavor@sopuli.xyz on 25 Apr 2025 04:38 next collapse

Hey, listen I know it’s bad and all but discord makes it really easy to create your own channel, customize it however you want and organize study/gaming with friends.

Since it’s convenient and easy to setup and use, people use it for things they really shouldn’t.

To bring back forums we need another equally easy to setup and host forums system that modernizes the bbs.

Kichae@lemmy.ca on 25 Apr 2025 14:14 collapse

Modern BBSes aren’t an issue – they’re out there, and they’re pretty good these days – but the lack of VC funding that lets them fund massive user growth isn’t there, so the level of friction re: setting up your own remains high.

Discord’s advantage is that it’s not just easy to set up, but also free. You’re not going to get that in the forum space anymore. ProBoards isn’t going to invest the money into making them sexy anytime soon.

Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com on 25 Apr 2025 05:22 next collapse

I think the main thing is that it’s the lowest friction for just sending a message, making a “post” gives people pause, but sending a message people will do no problem, so small communities get more activity in Discord than anywhere else

Ronno@feddit.nl on 25 Apr 2025 05:59 next collapse

It’s even become mandatory by communities in some games, which is something I hate with passion. For instance, many MMORPG communities are on Discord these days (e.g. Guild Wars 2, more specifically the raiding scene).

So I subscribed to these communities and started using Discord. I still don’t get the appeal, it’s a cluttered mess all over the place and it doesn’t feel intuitive to use. Maybe I’m getting old…

ized@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 25 Apr 2025 11:16 collapse

I hate how discord has replaced this forum culture in many places for this reason, but overall it’s incredibly good for participating in communities in real-time, especially smaller ones. I agree with the forum part, but aside from that it has also replaced IRC, Skype/MSN/ICQ, TeamSpeak, etc. all in one place, while even expanding on their features. It’s unbeaten for friend groups or smaller communities to create a space just for themselves that features text chat, voice chat, screen/video sharing etc.

Unfortunately though the open source alternatives, even the ones trying to be fully compatible with discord, have not yet reached this featureset and usability level. Also one big issue with communications tools like this is they rely heavily on adoption. Doesn’t help me when I can convince my closest friends to switch to Matrix for example, when there’s so many more people that I interact with on a daily basis through discord who I have no control over. Especially when the alternative just doesn’t cut it for all these normies who don’t understand the implications of big companies controlling such exclusive spaces.

OneRedFox@beehaw.org on 25 Apr 2025 05:44 next collapse

And so the hell-loop continues. Matrix seems like the closest successor, but having used it for awhile I would describe the experience as janky-but-workable. Signal’s good, but requires a phone number. I hear that Mumble’s good, but it’s overly focused on VoIP. Hopefully the alternatives polish themselves up before the enshittification gets too bad.

MaggiWuerze@feddit.org on 25 Apr 2025 06:07 next collapse

You can nowadays create a signal account without a phone number, you’ll get a user name instead

OneRedFox@beehaw.org on 25 Apr 2025 06:23 collapse

Oh? When did they change that?

nixnoodle@beehaw.org on 25 Apr 2025 07:01 next collapse

I also thought you could create an account without your phone number nowadays, but since I already have a phone-connected account, I haven’t tested. Only thing I found in their blog was this: signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/

Until now, someone needed to know your phone number to reach you on Signal. Now, you can connect on Signal without needing to hand out your phone number. (You will still need a phone number to register for Signal.) This is where usernames come in.

There are some newer post about other changes, but I haven’t checked them in detail.

MaggiWuerze@feddit.org on 25 Apr 2025 08:19 collapse

Pretty recently I think

Kichae@lemmy.ca on 25 Apr 2025 14:09 next collapse

There’s a huge opportunity not just for Matrix, but also for other open source or distributed players here, if they can move quickly enough.

They won’t, though.

biteychan@beehaw.org on 25 Apr 2025 21:58 collapse

I use Matrix, but like a lot of the Fediverse (I know it’s technically a different protocol, but still), it’s not normie friendly. If it were more plug n play it might take off. I just don’t look forward to when they’ll have ads or start making us pay. It’s so tiring shuffling from platform to platform because of some greedy CEO.

Almacca@aussie.zone on 25 Apr 2025 08:45 next collapse

Well, that’s that ruined then.

Etterra@discuss.online on 25 Apr 2025 09:39 next collapse

A former Activision CEO. Can you announce “hostility to our users” any louder, Discord?

postmanbrown@lemm.ee on 25 Apr 2025 11:47 next collapse

I apologize for sounding ignorant but what do people use discord for exactly?

It could be that I don’t enough friends on it to replace text messaging.

I tried to join a bunch of communities to replace Reddit with discord but the stream of consciousness design of the channel posts kinda muddles everything since you can’t really separate the replies from the submissions.

I guess I should be happy I didn’t get invested in something that looks like it’s changing for the worse but kinda curious when I see people get really upset about change and wonder what I missed out on haha

millie@beehaw.org on 25 Apr 2025 19:31 next collapse

Personally? The vast bulk of my interactions with people online. Voice chat, DMs, servers for pretty much everything. Being involved in roleplaying communities in DayZ and Conan, the vast majority of the behind-the-scenes stuff is taking place on discord. Servers for particular game servers as well as groups make up a pretty big portion of my list, along with smaller private discord servers of networks of players from various other servers. It’s how I stay connected with dozens of people I’ve known for years.

I’m also in quite a few discords related to modding and game development. Nearly every modder has their own discord, which is extremely useful if you’re running your own game servers and need to be in contact with them or if you make mods yourself and want to seek advice or information for compatibility. The same is true of a lot of other non-gaming software, with many developers having their own servers where they post updates and where you can find advice or post suggestions.

I’ve got a few queer community servers on my list, which were particularly helpful when I was early in my transition before I really had gotten around to rebuilding my social network and finding accepting people. There’s even a discord for a group of animators I used to spend a lot of time with back in the mid 00s; back then we were using forums and IRC mostly, and a little bit of Skype, but these days it’s been a good way to keep in touch.

If I’m home and on my computer, I’m almost always in a discord voice chat. It’s basically the modern equivalent of AIM or ICQ or Facebook, but with loads of added features and without Meta being involved. I even use it for note taking and storing images and screencaps.

Even something like Matrix, at the moment, doesn’t really cover all the voice and video chat features that Discord does. It’s close, but it’s missing essential components like push-to-talk, and it requires workarounds to enable things like screen sharing.

Discord turning to shit would be a real pain in the ass.

AndrasKrigare@beehaw.org on 25 Apr 2025 22:21 next collapse

For me, the huge value-add of Discord is for gaming (and is what Discord was created for). In college, my friends and I were originally using Skype calls when we’d play League together, but it was super annoying; essentially in order to not have to create a new call and add everyone who happened to be playing every time we just had one giant call with everyone we’d “redial” when playing. The downside is that if you were on Skype but not part of the game (in class or something) you’d get the Skype call invitation and have to decline it.

Switching to Discord was fantastic. We’d just have a persistent voice channel for different games, and you could chill in there to indicate it’s what you were playing or wanted to play, and if someone wanted to join they just jump on the call. It was also nice for organizing our text chats into different subjects (using different text channels), so if you were trying to ask if anyone had any advice for a certain class, you wouldn’t have your messages drowned out by people talking about news about a upcoming game. We just have a “games” text channels and a “classes” text channels and a “weekend plans” text channel, etc. This became particularly important as the server grew from friends to friends of friends and would’ve been overwhelming to have everyone stuck in one chat.

That’s pretty much been the extent of my Discord use, and I’m continually amazed to hear how others have been using it. I’ve seen the “join us on Discord, X, Facebook, etc.” for different games coming out, but never thought much of it or ever considered doing that.

postmanbrown@lemm.ee on 26 Apr 2025 11:33 collapse

Sounds like a fantastic way to use the app. My wife has a friend who does that playing online games and I guess I always thought they just called each other haha.

But actually sounds like an interesting idea to try and get my friends (all in our late 30s) to talk a little more and maybe actually get some plans together.

Thank you!

cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 25 Apr 2025 23:44 next collapse

im in a bunch of twitch streamer communities

jarfil@beehaw.org on 26 Apr 2025 06:31 collapse

what do people use discord for exactly?

Too much.

It’s a chat platform geared towards gamers, with voice chat, screen sharing, and streaming options… that’s been coopted by vloggers… but most unsettlingly, it’s being used for customer support and documentation.

A lot of knowledge bases are buried in the walled garden of servers, and a labyrinth of chat rooms.

postmanbrown@lemm.ee on 26 Apr 2025 11:30 collapse

That last point is exactly how I feel about discord and telegram. Maybe not walled off yet but definitely a labyrinth of chat rooms of data that I can’t easily digest.

JokeDeity@lemm.ee on 25 Apr 2025 12:17 next collapse

My friends and I can always find 50 other apps for voice chatting, texting and screen sharing. What pisses me off royally is the thousands of companies/groups that decided instead of making forums or websites or GitHub pages, they would just host EVERYTHING from within Discord’s walled garden.

Scary_le_Poo@beehaw.org on 25 Apr 2025 20:16 next collapse

The thing is that discord has fostered fantastic communities in the way that forums never could have. I have personally witnessed no less than 5 communities that are thriving due to primarily using discord. Their forums were an utter shit show.

The fact that you can’t seem to understand why people have done this means that you do not understand the fundamental issue at hand.

JokeDeity@lemm.ee on 26 Apr 2025 18:12 collapse

Wild response. Why don’t you kindly suck both my dick and my balls?

Scary_le_Poo@beehaw.org on 26 Apr 2025 22:32 collapse

Yes… mY rEsPoNsE was “wild”. Ok dude.

Zetta@mander.xyz on 26 Apr 2025 13:29 collapse

While it sucks for us users, I do hope discord will continue to get more and more shit and force these losers who chose to host documentation on Discord to rethink their choices.

rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee on 25 Apr 2025 16:38 next collapse

It’s joever fellas 😔

DaedalousIlios@pawb.social on 25 Apr 2025 22:09 next collapse

Great time to plug that revolt.chat is coming along nicely! The Android app is being reworked and is in rough shape at the moment, but the biggest feature missing from the desktop app (where I figure it matters most) is screen sharing. Otherwise it’s an entirely serviceable Discord clone that is FOSS and would benefit greatly from additional support. I, for one, will be taking the money that was paying for my Nitro and donating it to Revolt instead.

Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 25 Apr 2025 22:35 next collapse

How is this app supposed to ensure its continued existence? I see no mention of donations, federation, or advertisement

DaedalousIlios@pawb.social on 26 Apr 2025 00:39 collapse

The desktop app has a donation button in the settings. There’s also links to their donation pages on their github, but I do think in both instances they should have their donation link more front and center; it’s proven to work out well for multiple other FOSS projects.

Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 26 Apr 2025 19:44 collapse

Ah, I see. I was only looking at their website

cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 25 Apr 2025 23:43 next collapse

if revolt puts out a ppa repository they’ll already be better than discord

DaedalousIlios@pawb.social on 26 Apr 2025 00:41 collapse

It’s not an official packaging, but it is on Flathub, so maybe they have somewhere?

flathub.org/apps/chat.revolt.RevoltDesktop

Allero@lemmy.today on 26 Apr 2025 11:53 next collapse

Did they fix the self-hosted option? If it works well, I would immediately jump to it.

DaedalousIlios@pawb.social on 26 Apr 2025 13:32 collapse

I don’t believe so, and honestly I don’t think it needs to be. It’s already FOSS. And honestly self-hosting would just complicate the process more for normies who apparently can’t figure out Mastodon as it is. Maybe if we have at lest one thing that’s dummy simple and familiar that’s FOSS, maybe it’ll be the foot in the door to getting them more comfortable with the FOSS world and out of the corporate sphere.

And honestly I just really want my friends off of fucking Discord, and the more Revolt continues to literally, in every way be “Discord but open source,” the better the odds of that happening is.

Allero@lemmy.today on 26 Apr 2025 13:54 collapse

Whenever there is a single party controlling critical infrastructure, there is a potential for enshittification - even if it starts as a FOSS endeavor.

Ability to self-host a full copy of the service is the best protection we have so far.

DaedalousIlios@pawb.social on 26 Apr 2025 14:03 collapse

While that’s true, the nature of it being FOSS also ensures the potential for forking and going our own way. So for right now, maybe it’s better that it’s not self-hosted, long enough to get a large number of Discord users on-board, then fork it if it does enshittify and make the fork self-hosted. At the very least, again, this is an opportunity to get a large number of normies to see the value of FOSS projects and enter the FOSS world. And that has immense value not just for Revolt, but for the FOSS world as a whole.

Allero@lemmy.today on 26 Apr 2025 15:05 collapse

I see your point!

DaedalousIlios@pawb.social on 26 Apr 2025 15:16 collapse

And I do see yours as well! I agree self-hosting gas greater resistance to devs going rogue when all the hosts can just stop participating. But the beauty of Open Source is that if it’s ever truly so bad, the project can always just fork.

SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org on 27 Apr 2025 02:25 collapse

Does it have e2ee messages (even in group chats) and calling? One reason we never used discord is because it lacked that (except in calling towards the end).

Edit: Seems they are “working on it”, which makes us a bit nervous but hopefully it’ll be implemented everywhere: github.com/orgs/revoltchat/discussions/597

DaedalousIlios@pawb.social on 27 Apr 2025 02:32 collapse

No, it should be treated as what it is: a public forum. The only app I would trust to keep my messages truly private is Signal.

signal.org

SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org on 27 Apr 2025 02:33 collapse

They are working on it: github.com/orgs/revoltchat/discussions/597

Also we disagree as not all groups on even discord are public since many require invites or accepting requests to join.

Edit: Also, even if they are public I’d rather the server not be able to see my messages even if the users in any given group can. Yes, I know it’s a minor difference but I can probably trust the other users, I cannot necessarily trust the server.

DaedalousIlios@pawb.social on 27 Apr 2025 02:35 collapse

I certainly won’t say no to additional privacy! But until I see cryptography experts call it secure, I’m going to continue to treat it as a public forum.

SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org on 27 Apr 2025 02:36 collapse

Fair enough.

cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 25 Apr 2025 23:42 next collapse

im on a year paid sub but ill be cancelling that shit

ABetterTomorrow@lemm.ee on 25 Apr 2025 23:46 collapse

Fuck you, byeeeeeeeeee