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Revolt also actively discourages you from self hosting because they want to get the network effect going, and you can’t do that if everything is splintered.
I have yet to find a Discord alternative, and I’ve looked a few times.
An alternative for me is pretty much useless if it’s not an alternative for my groups. Those I use discord with. It is more likely we migrate to a corporate solution than a foss one.
There could be a middlegreound if revolt implemented a central openid user registry, presence indication and e2ee direct chat plus self hosted communities using that login (and maybe optional local registration). And maybe a community overview for public communities.
Anyone arguing “Discord has more users” on here can just be reminded that Reddit / Twitter has more users than their fediverse alternatives, and yet here they are on Lemmy, and probably Mastodon too.
A better world is possible.
i think thats a little extreme, cant they just remove the content and block them? also why does discord have weapons of mass destruction in the first place?
Ooh! I would like to hear from all those who were fervently vouching for Discord as a support channel for FOSS projects.
Perhaps the same might happen to a web forum or matrix channel. But at least you get an opportunity to backup and migrate.
I mean, my response earlier probably still works for those who’d prefer discord as a support channel to other Foss channels: This is far more of a Nintendo bad moment than it is a Discord bad. I doubt foss alternatives would have the lawyers to fight Nintendo better than Discord can. And while my mind immediately thought of a hydra anology that Foss might have, hasnt the hydra already activated anyways? Suyu is already jumping into different hosting mediums
That happens if a single company controls the community (Reddit, Discord) and its closed source on top of it…
Good, stop using Discord to host your shit
Especially Open Source stuff.
I genuinely don’t understand why some open source communities rely so heavily on Discord.
Because you need people to build a community, and like it or not, most people are on discord
There are other reasons but I think this is the main one
most people are on discord
There’s a lot of people on Discord (around 200 million monthly active users) but it’s still the smallest out of all the major messaging services that support group chats. For example, Telegram has over double the number of users, and WhatsApp has 10x the users.
For open source projects in particular, something that integrates with Github and Gitlab login (like Gitter which is now powered by Matrix) is a better choice, as developers are practically guaranteed to have one of those accounts.
Yes but it’s a small effort to sign up for somewhere else. Matrix is just as good and they do care about your privacy.
I find it really weird for a project like Home Assistant where the whole goal of the package is to wrestle control of your home from the big tech clouds. Only to put their own comms data in a big tech cloud… :X
Matrix is not as good. It’s getting there with spaces and matrix 2.0 on the horizon but it’s still a bit clunky.
The article says the code was not hosted on discord. Even if it was, the code does not infringe on any Nintendo copyright. Having a grudge against discord doesn’t make it fair to victim blame
Discord hosted the community, not the code. And that community is now destroyed without even a chance to backup. And Discord can absolutely be blamed because people were warning that this would happen. This is as much a result of Discord’s centralized design as it is of Nintendo’s greed. Now the community has to be reestablished on a new platform from scratch.
They are saying comment OP is blaming the user for using Discord, not Discord.
I only said it wasn’t ok to victim blame, I’m not at all saying discord is the victim.
OK, I misunderstood it. However, this was something that people were warning about for a long time.
Stop basing your organization on Discord and hosting all your development work there. Don’t subject yourself to the whims of venture capital and enshittification.
Diversify your online presence, and find a local company that will host a matrix server for you.
A forum is perhaps the best support format for a project. Something like discourse. It can be easily migrated in an emergency and it can be searched from a search engine. You also don’t need an account to browse it.
Discord sucks so much. I wish it wasn’t so popular.
The company sucks and it being closed source with shitty security and privacy policy sucks but the software is still the best messaging, gaming, video/streaming experience if we’re being honest. Nothing has all the features and convenience when it comes to watching shows and gaming with friends. Theres also never been such an easy way for anyone to run their own irc/etc server with as many features and convenience/price as discord.
They are fulfilling a lot of needs and people won’t leave until something 10x better comes out and nothing is even at 1:1 quality in terms of video, voice, streaming, gaming. Some have messaging and history yes but not even bots and different channels/forums setup. Maybe MAYBE telegram if you’re a super user but and thats only for bots and chats no gaming, watching shows, etc
What’s wrong with the privacy policy? Can’t they literally not see your messages unless you get reported?
the messages aren’t end-to-end encrypted, so there’s nothing stopping them from viewing them at their leisure.
They’ve talked about the system, they can’t read your messages unless someone reports them.
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I’ve been tempted for the last year to begin work on designing an experience like IRC, but which includes voice chat and screen sharing capabilities. That’s my dream is a melding of a nostalgic chat protocol, with modern services.
From my understanding IRC’s biggest flaw is that it requires the recipient to be online in order to receive messages, and any software that includes voice, video, screen sharing, and proper servers would by necessity have very little resemblance to it.
I suppose I mean the resemblance to IRC would be mostly in the user experience. However, I personally don’t want to add persisted server-side messaging either. The novelty for me is that it’s a “here, now” social experience.
The problem with non-persistent messaging is that for most things people use Discord for it is a non-starter. Most people who are doing more than just socializing really don’t want to spend half their time repeating things to people who were at work, asleep, or in a different time zone when the discussion came it. Any serious Discord competitor would need to focus on practically and low barriers to entery, which tend to be directly opposed to novelty.
I don’t think my solution would satisfy users who are completely married to the Discord experience. The persisted social media experience isn’t what I’m interested in, personally. I want an old school chat experience, that still works for modern day LAN parties and movie nights.
@sonori the problem is that Discord tried to mix social media with Instant Messaging. This is not something that’s working well. On one of them, you just talk to people, ask them about stuff and whatnot (this is why it is also called *direct* messaging). On other, you want to have stuff that is rather more easily accessible and has various other social functions - and it is also designed around it.
You also have a place where you can centralize all discussion (i.e. the feed) so you can at least get an idea of what is going on.
Discord (as a messaging app, primarily) is totally unfit for these tasks.
Or “How Signal is closer in functionality to WhatsApp by the day, because it turns out people like the functionality of WhatsApp.”
So Matrix protocol?
Time to restore a backup on a different hosting provider… what, Discord doesn’t let export backups, or self-host it? Well, shouldn’t have relied on Discord then.
There is this Matrix-Discord bridge, but I don’t exactly understand the details and if its one way only. https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/discord/
I loving all the discord hate here. I’ve never understood why people like it.
I mean, it’s great for audio and video chats. What I never understood is why people started using discord as a forum, as documentation or as some kind of program (like, why is Midjourney on a public discord chat? It’s probably the worst possible interface).
Discord is excellent for chatting with your friends while playing games, and that’s it.
It’s good enough and everyone has it and knows it
I’m not about to even attempt to ask someone in a game if they’ve got matrix because the answer is going to be no
I think it’s like Windows and Reddit. People don’t use it because they like or love it, but because most are there. Sometimes the only way to interact with the developers or find new people in an active community.
Convenient, easy to use, large user base, one point registration for multiple communities, tends to simply just work.
But is it the best? Nah. And their increased monetisation drives are annoying.
one point registration for multiple communities,
Federation, or at least some form of single sign-on with arbitrary providers (like we used to do with OpenID), is a better way of solving this.
In other words: Matrix.
I’ve never tried Matrix but I’ve heard good things about it.
It’s not as snazzy as Discord but it’s fully open-source and federated. So everyone can run their own server (I do, too). If you don’t care about running your own you can just sign up at https://app.element.io/ . It’s free of course. It basically is for chat what lemmy and mastodon are to social media.
It also offers many “bridges” to other protocols, like WhatsApp, Telegram, even Discord. Those are not quite as mature and mostly third-party provided but they generally work well.
There’s a really great ansible playbook for installing your own. If you would like to have the full bridged experience, beeper is probably best.
Thanks! I’ll have to see if there’s Docker containers available. Ansible is definitely doable too, but I prefer Docker. I’ll stick it on the same server I’m running Lemmy and Mastodon on :)
Actually the ansible playbook creates a bundle of docker containers so you get the best of both :)
Everything here is basically text and maybe images if your lucky. In order to make it into a Discord or Zoom competitor you would need to solve far higher bandwidth things like HD video and low latency audio, and both of thouse are fundamentally very different things for a server to handle as compared to high latency short text messages.
You could probably link account sign in, but any real-time stuff would likely be limited to within that single instance unless you create a whole alternative method of federation that would still only be available between thouse certain supported instances.
It’s also a whole lot more expensive to host, unless you go peer to peer in which case good luck, and vulnerable to bad actors massively running up hosting bills even if you can protect against denial of service attacks.
It would be nice to see, but there is a reason why Matrix is the closest anyone’s come and it’s still more a proof of concept then an actual platform you could direct family or random strangers to.
In order to make it into a Discord or Zoom competitor you would need to solve far higher bandwidth things like HD video and low latency audio, and both of thouse are fundamentally very different things for a server to handle as compared to high latency short text messages.
A large number of Discord servers just use text.
For video, maybe integrate into something that already exists, like Jitsi? Instead of trying to build one single app that handles everything, maybe it would be nice to have a suite of apps that all work together and can all use the same login.
A lot of video conferencing systems are already mostly peer-to-peer, at least for enterprise apps. Skype was originally peer-to-peer too. NAT traversal is usually provided by STUN servers. There’s some issues like that (for example it reveals the user’s IP addresses) but you could proxy everything through a TURN server to solve that.
Peer to peer is the best way to implement end-to-end encrypted communication.
Having said that, very large groups can benefit from a client-server model, like what Zoom does.
One of the main reasons why I use Discord nowadays aside from the fact that my gaming community is there is for its extremely low latency video streaming.
I tried to use other meet softwares but the latency was 10+ seconds. Not useful when I need immediate feedback. Discord offers the quickest and most reliable way for me to get someone else looking at my stream in real-time.
I’ll be looking for alternatives because they’re, of course, not doing anything impossible for others to replicate, they just made it the default.
In order to make it into a Discord or Zoom competitor you would need to solve far higher bandwidth things like HD video and low latency audio, and both of thouse are fundamentally very different things for a server to handle as compared to high latency short text messages.
That falls into the same two fallacies as the ones of complainers against Youtube alternatives:
- that in order to offer an alternative to a service you have to replicate all of it
- that you have to provide an alternative to only one service
Like, really, you don’t need to replace all of Discord, only the parts that matter. The alternative to build not to Discord but to “Discord is being used for documentation” already exists, it’s called web forums. Ditto, the alternative to “Discord is being used for communities” also exists, it’s called XMPP or IRC or Matrix depending on who you ask. The alternative to “Discord tracks user data” is simply called “you don’t do it”, etc.
Like, we are literally on Lemmy. Just about the first thing that we Get It from the internet is that centralization is bad, be it Products or Services.
Forgive me, but I fail to see how expecting video/voice conferencing software to actually be capable of carrying video/voice could be described as a fallacy. It seems to me like that is kind of a core functionality to any software trying to fulfill that role.
IRC has nothing to do with the subject, and while XMPP/Matrix are promising they are still a long way from being able to talk someone without significant tech expertise and who has never seen them before into jumping onto a call in five minutes or so without touching a single setting. That is the fundamental part of Discord, Teams, Skype, or Zoom that matters.
Lemmy isn’t exactly voice conferencing software, so I don’t know why you would want to collaborate on software development work with it as a forum. As for documentation, a static site is probably the best place for that, although in this case keeping it off the clearnet was presumably a core consideration.
See, it’s the entire premise that voice conferencing is needed to have a replacement for “Discord is used for documentation”. It’s not. Almost by definition. If anyone wants videoconferencing there’s Jitsi. That’s the thing I’m aiming to: you won’t ever to get anyone to “replace” Discord if they have to replace all of it. Capitalism doesn’t allow for that. We are trying to do better here. Splitting problems into their component and significative parts makes them much easier to solve.
The closest use case that in the case of these kinds of communities would even need videoconferencing would be something like “Discord is being used for live tech support for modchipping Switches” and for that case there’s also already established alternatives… and it would be wise to not implement for that anyway.
Except this preticular discussion thread isn’t about Discord used as documentation, but Discord use in general as a videoconferencing tool. I also imagine the project started using Discord for conferencing, and documentation grew up around it because everyone was already there, emulation is very finicky, and it wasn’t out in the open for Nintendo to find indexed by Google. They could have used Jitsi, and the same thing would have happened.
A video conferencing program like Discord is hardly the first or best place to put software documentation, but in this case it being hard to find was presumably the point.
It also seems odd to insist that Capitalism doesn’t allow Jitsi, Matrix, or XMPP to exist, when they and many other open source projects do. Jitsi is owned by a major cooperation, but Matrix and XMPP arn’t to my knowledge. Rough around the edges and in need of significant work, yes, but not prevented from ever exsisting.
Video, voice, and text messaging are together the signifiant part of Discord as you put it, it doesn’t make sense in order to split them apart any further.
I would bet all the pieces to make a better communication suite than discord are there. They just need to be put together into a package and marketed well.
Yeah me either. It spies on your computer, they ban third-party clients. It’s owned by bytedance. When I use the web version it kicks me out every day and I have to log in again.
I don’t mind it being around but I really hate the way open source projects (e.g. Home Assistant) use it as their only platform for collaboration. The make me give up my data just to collaborate with them on a privacy tool.
Walled garden platforms doing what walled garden platforms do I suppose…
Walled garden, more like walled room of 1m x 1m.
Shrinkflation strikes again
This has nothing to do with being a walled platform. All these maintainers of all these lemmy servers would have to do the exact same thing if Nintendo came to them. And if they refused then Nintendo could go to the server host. And if that didn’t work you would end up in court. It has nothing to do with walled gardens and everything to do with Nintendo abusing dmca.
And also the maintainers being too trusting. They openly discussed pirate ROMs in the server and such.
It does have to do with being a walled platform though. You as the Discord server owner have zero control over whether or not you are taken down. If this was Lemmy or a Discourse server (to go with something a little closer to walled garden) that they ran, the hosting provider or a court would have to take them down. Even then the hosting provider wouldn’t be a huge deal since you could just restore backup to a new one Pirate Bay style. Hell, depending on whether or not the devs are anonymous (probably not if they used Discord), they could just move the server to a new jurisdiction that doesn’t care. The IW4 mod for MW2 2009 was forked and the moved to Tor when Activision came running for them so this isn’t even unprecedented.
I think their point was, all things being equal, a server on discord vs a community on a Lemmy instance doesn’t make a difference. In both cases, the people who ultimately own the platform have to decide whether to just delete them or go toe-to-toe with Nintendo in court.
Hosting everything themselves is a different story. Though…is it possible for a federated instance to exist inside the tor network? Maybe that’s already a huge thing and it never occurred to me.
Yes, or just register it anonymously from a country that doesn’t care
All these maintainers of all these lemmy servers would have to do the exact same thing if Nintendo came to them.
yes but then the community would move to another lemmy host and it would turn into a game of whack a mole for Nintendo. There is no other Discord host.
I mean, Suyu is already jumping to new locations on the internet, so whack a mole/hydra is still in effect
True but any other company with the size to do so would chuck the request in the trash until the court orders came.
Well, that’s one more small group of people learning not to trust Discord. I hope someone is on hand to show them how to set up a matrix server in a jurisdiction not affected by the DMCA.
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
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Both Suyu and Sudachi began as forks of Yuzu, the emulator that Nintendo sued out of existence on March 4th.
Developers of Yuzu’s forks also claimed they were changing the code further, among other practices, in an effort to avoid pissing Nintendo off.
But it’s possible that people were sharing Nintendo’s cryptographic keys, firmware, or even entire pirated games in these servers despite those commitments.
Even if Suyu and Sudachi were infringing, Discord’s policy does not suggest it would permaban, much less nuke entire servers, on the first offense.
Discord did not answer questions about whether these users were repeat copyright infringers, had received any previous warnings, or were forwarded any takedown requests.
Nintendo isn’t just targeting Switch emulators with its latest round of takedowns but also some of the tools that aid them: it sent DMCA takedown requests to GitHub to remove 27 forks of the Sigpatch Updater, as well as Lockpick_RCM, kezplez-nx, and Incognito_RCM, which help Switch owners and developers obtain encryption keys.
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I see discord is entrenched enough where they dont need to care about their users.
Step 2 of enshittification:
First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
It was nice while it lasted I guess, now to begin the slow search for another private community for the friend group to very slowly migrate to.
now to begin the slow search for another private community for the friend group to very slowly migrate to.
Just don’t pick another proprietary platform again.
That’s not really fair on Discord. The article mentions they received an injunction to remove the content so they were forced to do this. Anybody in the same jurisdiction would have to do the same:
“Discord responds to and complies with all legal and valid Digital Millennium Copyright Act requests. In this instance, there was also a court ordered injunction for the takedown of these materials, and we took action in a manner consistent with the court order,” reads part of a statement from Discord director of product communications Kellyn Slone to The Verge.
I’m sure all these companies have similar policy that they can stop hosting your things if they don’t like to
Backup and migrate. Choose only platforms that support it. The only weak point there is the DNS registrar.
Something something Drake meme Discord/IRC…
