Oh god, here you go the next “enshitification” victim… Matrix isn’t really that good of a replacement, I wonder what we will end up with.
Where are the Discord alternatives? Just in cause Discord goes to hell
I heard about “guilded” but i don’t have direct experience.
divolt looks pretty good, has bridge support so you dont need to make all your friends move to something else
We could always go back to ventrilo servers for voice chats! I miss hopping into vent with my WoW guild for raids back in the day.
Matrix is the ultimate alternative to Discord! It’s a FOSS protocol, which has numerous server and client implementations available—much like the ActivityPub protocol.
Good. Discord is the cancer of the free searchable internet.
If you really need communication, use XMPP or Matrix.
And for everything else use stuff like forums and Lemmy and mastodon reddit Twitter whatever. But not closed walled gardens that are not searchable on the net. It’s astonishing that so many people gatekeep content behind this Discord crap.
Why does everything need to be free searchable on the internet?
Call me crazy but I don’t want my group chats publicly available on the internet. Discord feels… private. I know they have access to all the data, but it’s not like a public website, forum, or even an open irc chatroom. It’s my walled garden to chat with friends, stream games, game chat, post dumb memes, etc.
That’s like saying signal is cancer to free and open internet. Or hell, email because it’s not indexed and searchable?
I don’t get the sentiment.
undefined> Why does everything need to be free searchable on the internet?
imagine everything is behind a gateway of account + phone number. you wouldn’t be here on Lemmy because you would’ve never heard about it and couldn’t search about it, or reddit etc.
It’s not hard to get your head around why searching the internet is the most important part to get things going. You wouldn’t get ANY information if you need to get your phone number out for every single site/forum/whatever.
And if you have no experience with Discord and how it evolved over the last years, I can’t help you. Discord already replaces many sites and forums, or give support via Discord only… now these things are no longer searchable because people somehow like to idle in Discord servers and search for things in there.
If you can’t see the issue with this, even right now already and especially in the future if it continous like that, then I can’t help you, sorry.
You cherry picked one line of my post and didn’t address the entire context or intent of it. Im not defending companies or businesses using discord as a drop in replacement for forums or support pages. Imo that’s a mis use of the tech.
I think that’s stupid.
But discord isn’t designed for that. It’s a chat app (voice and text). I don’t want my chats with friends publicly searchable on the internet. That’s dumb. Having my emails publically searchable on the internet is dumb too.
If a company started using Signal or Whatsapp for support, would you be clamoring for all signal and Whatsapp messages to be searchable on the internet?
That doesn’t make any sense. You seem more upset that companies are misusing Discord than mad at Discord.
people don’t just use discord for private communication, and that’s what should be searchable. also, you do realize that discord doesn’t feature any encryption and some people can read your “private” messages, right?
Seriously. The worst is when developers distribute their software on Discord. WHY.
lol, that, or when they insist discord is the best place to store documentation…
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Discord is a chat and the default setting of every server is that to see the content of it, you need to join the server.
It make sense for a chat.
However, companies and communities have largely misused discord and basically turned it in forums.
Lots and lots of knowledge is spread on these chats with no way of finding it unless you know which server to join and provided they do not shut down at some point.
On top of that, the discord search feature is barebone at best.
This is the problem with discord.
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What has discord to do with privacy? you really going the privacy route here while using Discord? Is this a troll or should I need to send you their privacy policy and tos? Nobody is talking about private chats you have with your buddies on Discord. Nodoby want to see this anyway. (expect Discord ofc) we are talking about PUBLIC discord servers with thousands of people in it, where content is posted that only is accesable via a gateway of making a discord account + phone number and is in no way searchable on the internet.
Now imagine, everything would be like that, you wouldn’t even be here arguing with me because you would’ve never known what Lemmy is or even reddit. Because nothing would be searchable on the internet.
Not sure what is so hard to grasp about that.
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Yeah, Cinny does look like Discord anyways but it’s lack of voice chat is a bummer
I really disliked my cinny experience, element was much superior
Totally, I too think that one should prefer Element for multiple reasons (feature richness, app availability, … I mean, the web widgets absolutely rule imo), after all, it’s UI is similar to Discord/Slack but it also feels somewhat different here and there. For the first 1-2 hours it can be a bit overwhelming for newbies. Cinny’s UI is much closer to Discord’s UI, and it seems fine for chatting as far as I have tried it.
the encryption broke first just for the desktop app, later also for web browser several times, people couldn’t see what I was writing to them, all while it worked in element. I was able to create nested rooms but nobody could see them for joining… the overall experience was painful and it probably cost me my one chance to convince people to get away from discord after their policy change to record audio from calls
Weird, when was that ? In onboarded 6 non-tech people recently on element and it went fine and easy.
Yes element works, I use it still. I had issues with cinny as a discord replacement. This was in the time from march-april.
Oh shoot nvm then. I only used it for like two weeks before I went back to Element because of it’s feature richness. And even during the time I used it I rarely chatted.
use XMPP or Matrix.
XMPP is mostly dead these days. The protocol is very inefficient (it’s all XML) which isn’t ideal on mobile devices since it uses more bandwidth to transfer and more processing power to parse.
I work at a big tech company, and at work we use Mattermost hosted outside our data center for cases where our internal stuff doesn’t work. It seems fine and I think it’s open-source, but I don’t know a lot about it.
I’ve heard about Matrix but haven’t tried it yet! Is it good?
What about IRC?
Matrix is searchable through https://archive.matrix.org/
This couldn’t be more wrong actually.
Xmpp is far from death. Just because many started to use matrix instead doesn’t mean it’s dead. Even though matrix is a Ressource and performance nightmare much more so than xmpp will ever be.
I’m an IT specialist and work in IT too. I also selfhosted a lot of stuff publicly.
XMPP is used by many companies like Facebook , Google, Nintendo, GitHub, zoom, WhatsApp, Apple etc.
Xmpp is a an official Standard.unlikr things like matrix.
And if you think that xmpp has battery issues.oeadays then that tells me you used any xmpp app like conversation/snikket etc. like many years ago.
My xmpp Apps use way less battery than any matrix app ever could.
XMPP is fast, reliable and just works. Matrix is a nightmare to selfhost, too.
IRC? Irc has no E2EE whatsoever. Therfore isn’t even comparable to xmpp with omemo or matrix.
Xmpp is far from death. Just because many started to use matrix instead doesn’t mean it’s dead. Even though matrix is a Ressource and performance nightmare much more so than xmpp will ever be.
How is matrix a performance nightmare? been running a matrix server for years with almost no issues. I guess the only exception was the few times I ran out of hdd space, but that’s it.
Xmpp is a an official Standard.unlikr things like matrix.
What’s an official standard? Matrix is a protocol just like xmpp and the specs are public, just like with xmpp.
Matrix is a nightmare to selfhost, too.
It’s literally as easy as running a docker container and editing a yaml file, at least for synapse.
It is very well known that Synapse is a ressource hog. Heck, you can’t even enable presence because it would kill your server ressources. Why do you think almost all instances have it disabled? Cmpared to an XMPP server ressource usage, Snypase is a nightmare to host. I also hosted a public server for a long time.
XMPP standards: https://wikiless.ftw.lol/wiki/XMPP https://xmpp.org/extensions/ https://xmpp.org/about/technology-overview/
It’s literally as easy as running a docker container and editing a yaml file, at least for synapse.
just like xmmp is, difference is, matrix snypse uses like 20x the amount of ressources. Just try to host a public server for more than 100 people and you will know.
There is a reason why people make stuff like Conduit or the matrix team works on Dendrite as a new server.
I actually discovered Matrix through the comments on here and am now using Element. I’m really glad about it. I knew there was something fishy with discord suddenly being so intrusive about their super long “birthday celebration” (with annoying unread notification needing me to click on their gift reveals ugh) and making activities free or whatever lol.
And it’s their 8th birthday. EIGHTH! WHY DO THEY CARE ABOUT THEIR EIGHTH?!
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The only x0th birthday I cared about was my 10th.
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Gonna leave this here for the inevitable dissenters: https://element.io/
Do they even have a consumer version? I’ve seen them linked before but their whole site looks like they only want Enterprise users. The lowest pricing plan is “Business - $5/month/user”. I’m not an organization and while that’s not extremely expensive as an individual, it adds up if I’m paying separately for everyone in my family to join. My “senior executive discussions” consist of polling the family about what we want for dinner next week and what other groceries we need, not how we can achieve nationwide scalability for our household.
If they have offerings for individuals outside of business, they really need to point people to it and have a better landing page for them.
Element is just a client that can connect to the Matrix which is federated and decentralized just like Lemmy. Element is heavily promoted because element is the most well-developed client out there (made by the same people behind the matrix so they get the new features first) but far from the only one.
Regular element is free on all operating systems including windows, linux, android, etc. And there’s even a web version.
And just like Lemmy you can register on any instance and communicate with any other (federated) instances. Matrix.org being the biggest one but there are countless and you can even self-host.
If you’d rather use another client you can use any of these listed here: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
To use Element on the web you just need to go to:
https://app.element.io/
As long as I can still use all the current free functionality then I don’t mind these things. It’s when these things become the only option ala Reddit killing 3rd party apps that it becomes a problem.
I never understood why everyone moved to discord. Regardless of this, it actually just sucks and is hard to use. Discord really gives me hope that the fediverse will succeed, just because the UI sucks so fucking much.
because skype was worse
I mean I guess? Aside from the calling it’s fine imo. UI was also easier for me to use
wasn’t the calling the main thing Skype was used for tho?
This is the classic tactic of make a product free and run it at a loss until you have full market share then you can extort users for whatever.
Or as Cory Doctorow calls it - “Enshittification”. They’re now in the second stage - open the gates for other companies to market to Discord users:
Here is how platforms die: 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. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
I’m confused, this changes nothing for most users. All this does is allow creators that use Patreon tiers to grant certain roles in Discord to do this entirely through Discord. If you’re not in one of these servers, this probably won’t affect you.
Even if you are, it’s still barely a change
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No, it’s automated via Patreon as well.
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The “enshittification” continues
Matrix has always been a great alternative. Any service that is owned by a corporation will eventually be monetized. I never liked discord in the first place.
I’m loving Matrix.
Matrix rules, but I can’t get my friends to leave Discord because that’s where all their friends are, they run servers, etc. it sucks.
My instance is discord bridged. If a discord user wants to voice chat, I fire up discord just for that.
But my discord text chats and servers? All in matrix baby.
Makes it a lot easier to convice friends to swap, too. Especially when I show them that telegram and whatsapp can be bridged, too.
Everything in one app.
I have that too, but you have to be admin to be able to do that, and I didn’t figure out how to connect the 1-1 chats in Matrix yet.
Once you have the bridge plugin set up, you need to talk to it in matrix to set up your stuff. Just open a chat with whatever your config says its username is. I set mine to be @discordbot
I have it set up with rooms where several people are in but have no idea how to set it up in 1-1 rooms.
Oh, you’re using it for just bridging group chats.
For one to one you need to link your matrix account to your discord account using the !login command. After this you can access everything that your discord account can access. Manually managing anything except for which servers you want bridged is completely unnecessary.
Matrix won’t seem to let me on via my vpn so I can’t even download the client on my computer. Makes it hard to see what the fuss is about.
You’re comment makes no sense. Matrix is a federated chat protocol, and works kind of like lemmy. Matrix itself has more in common with ActivityPub, the protocol that the fediverse uses. What’s more comparable are the matrix clients.
There are many, many matrix clients to choose from, and even more instances, including the option to set up your own.
