Maybe this bullshit will be the spark needed to move us all off Discord. It’s fine for voice-chat in games, don’t get me wrong, but I HATE how its replaced forums/wikis for so many games/mods/etc. Searching disparate Discord servers is like looking for a nonferrous straw-colored needle in a haystack.
I mean, I share the complaint of Discord having tons of unindexable knowledge locked away in it, but forums are not good replacement for my friend group. So yeah we kinda want a Discord alternative specifically.
Worse, it also makes it seem like developer support that is provided through Discord needs to be always on/always available since you can be pinged on Discord 24 hours a day. Why would you do that yourself, I don’t know. At least with forums you can choose to respond on your own time frame and people have less recourse to act like you should be around and available. It’s just asking for higher demand from the userbase since you’re chatting with them in real-time, they begin to expect real-time fast responses.
I tried Mumble and Teamspeak in the past and it’s pretty far from the same level of comfort.
Don’t take that the wrong way though, I’m all for supporting open alternatives, I’m just saying you have to think about the features of the alternatives too.
I just saw something about Stoat.chat which seems like a good open source software for that application but a lot of people will have to bear the cost of self hosting these servers.
I know I will think carefully before slamming the door on discord.
I’ll swap to a shared calendar and any other voice chat software. Sure I can’t post on those but that’s why we also have a group chat for the different gaming groups I’m in.
No. Recently I played a bit using a friends mumble server. And it’s a friend that is already privacy conscious. But these friends are not the norm. They are the exception.
Interesting to see Teamspeak evolved but still you have to pay to host a server so that’s a huge difference.
Well yes, I would say it’s very much an integral part of my social life.
I spend a lot of time with my gamer friends and it revolves around our discord servers.
We even have a discord servers dedicated to our role play sessions.
IMHO Discord is a bit more than just a voice chat app. It’s also rooms with persistant chats. It’s the ability to share media etc.
Also their noise reduction tech is top notch.
I knew when I got in that it would be another “Gmail” for me. It’s great but you have to give a bit of your soul to it and I knew it would enshitify eventually.
For context my country (France) is trying to pass a law that forbids the use of social networks to users younger than 15yo. So I suppose this move from Discord is partly due to that.
Now that being said I would hope the verification process will have much more scrutiny in Europe than it would in the US.
I would definitely not be happy about it but if they are not allowed to keep any of the verification data afterwards it could be “acceptable”. But if I have the feeling they keep any data I will actively look into building a Stoat instance and try the even harder task of convincing my friends to switch over.
Didn’t have much of an aim beyond trying to cook it up from scratch as a personal research project. That includes the protocol, since I’m handling keys in a creative way to facilitate both encryption and user identity verification.
Well, looks like I’m leaving discord.
Maybe this bullshit will be the spark needed to move us all off Discord. It’s fine for voice-chat in games, don’t get me wrong, but I HATE how its replaced forums/wikis for so many games/mods/etc. Searching disparate Discord servers is like looking for a nonferrous straw-colored needle in a haystack.
People are already looking to migrate to checks notes apps exactly like discord.
I mean, I share the complaint of Discord having tons of unindexable knowledge locked away in it, but forums are not good replacement for my friend group. So yeah we kinda want a Discord alternative specifically.
[cries]
Worse, it also makes it seem like developer support that is provided through Discord needs to be always on/always available since you can be pinged on Discord 24 hours a day. Why would you do that yourself, I don’t know. At least with forums you can choose to respond on your own time frame and people have less recourse to act like you should be around and available. It’s just asking for higher demand from the userbase since you’re chatting with them in real-time, they begin to expect real-time fast responses.
Agreed. As if every company just having a subreddit wasn’t bad enough.
Sure.
But what are you replacing it with ?
I tried Mumble and Teamspeak in the past and it’s pretty far from the same level of comfort.
Don’t take that the wrong way though, I’m all for supporting open alternatives, I’m just saying you have to think about the features of the alternatives too.
I just saw something about Stoat.chat which seems like a good open source software for that application but a lot of people will have to bear the cost of self hosting these servers.
I know I will think carefully before slamming the door on discord.
Stoat looks promising, open source
https://stoat.chat/download
They won’t even send a verification email to my gmail account so I can sign up.
I’ll swap to a shared calendar and any other voice chat software. Sure I can’t post on those but that’s why we also have a group chat for the different gaming groups I’m in.
Were you trying Teamspeak 6? The UI is different, but the functionality is on par I believe. Not open source, but at least you can self-host.
No. Recently I played a bit using a friends mumble server. And it’s a friend that is already privacy conscious. But these friends are not the norm. They are the exception.
Interesting to see Teamspeak evolved but still you have to pay to host a server so that’s a huge difference.
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Yes, many of my childhood best friends live a 9 hour flight away.
Well yes, I would say it’s very much an integral part of my social life.
I spend a lot of time with my gamer friends and it revolves around our discord servers.
We even have a discord servers dedicated to our role play sessions.
IMHO Discord is a bit more than just a voice chat app. It’s also rooms with persistant chats. It’s the ability to share media etc.
Also their noise reduction tech is top notch.
I knew when I got in that it would be another “Gmail” for me. It’s great but you have to give a bit of your soul to it and I knew it would enshitify eventually.
I see luck with “combos”
XMPP + Mumble is a common one. The room is on XMPP, some users are in a mumble server with info in the topic.
Matrix is buggy and doesn’t scale imo, it isn’t a sustainable alternative. Stoat looks like a great option and there are lots of open instances.
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For context my country (France) is trying to pass a law that forbids the use of social networks to users younger than 15yo. So I suppose this move from Discord is partly due to that.
Now that being said I would hope the verification process will have much more scrutiny in Europe than it would in the US.
I would definitely not be happy about it but if they are not allowed to keep any of the verification data afterwards it could be “acceptable”. But if I have the feeling they keep any data I will actively look into building a Stoat instance and try the even harder task of convincing my friends to switch over.
I did start a projects aiming to be a more decentralized/federated discord more akin to how IRC was back in the day. Time to revisit it, it seems.
A federation based discord would be amazing !
But still that’s a big challenge as voice chat will be costly to host.
Also out of curiosity do you aim for something that would connect through the fediverse ?
Didn’t have much of an aim beyond trying to cook it up from scratch as a personal research project. That includes the protocol, since I’m handling keys in a creative way to facilitate both encryption and user identity verification.