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>Sadly, they are a few years too late, it's going to be extremely hard to beat Discord now for anything that doesn't consider libre software and/ or privacy as

>Sadly, they are a few years too late, it's going to be extremely hard to beat Discord now for anything that doesn't consider libre software and/ or privacy as critical. Can't we just wait till they run out of money for all the free services they are currently giving away ? Next they will try to agressively monetize their user base, which will make people migrate to something else - ideally self hosted or federated & based on open protocols this time.

BlueTemplar 6y ago
I remember people saying this about YouTube and Twitter. Yet it doesn't seem to have worked out despite both having several competent alternatives.
- Kalq 6y ago
  Yeah Discord is not going to go away anytime soon. If they ever start to actually struggle for money they'll just be bought up by some tech giant.
- samoa42 6y ago
  commercial content distribution platforms _will_ fall victim to copyright and censorship in general. its already underway and most progressive ideas have to be expressed elsewhere.
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    Capitalism has no trouble accommodating / subverting progressive ideas. It's the conservative ideas that tend to be silenced. EDIT : Also, interesting that the American right has moved from Twitter to not Mastodon, but to Parler instead : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25097145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25097145 I wonder why ? Mastodon presenting itself as being too left-wing ? (Though make no mistake, a lot of the American right is 'conservative' only in name, and is instead wildly anti-conservative both in their speech as well as in their deeds.)
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    Just learned about Gab 'invading' Mastodon : https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-network-gab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentr...
maqp 6y ago
Their business model will increasingly be data. They will most likely start monitoring content to look for your preference of Doritos they can advertise you. People won't abandon Discord until all your private chat/call logs are hacked and dumped. When that happens, only a fraction say 10-15% of the userbase will look for a permanent solution (i.e. something that has always-on E2EE). My guess is about 40% will change to another service with better track record, but that isn't architecturally any more secure (i.e. that's still TLS-only). The remaining 50% will stay on the service because 1) they don't care, 2) their peers don't care or, 3) because they consider the incident response and related PR good enough. To get people to switch from discord you need something that's faster, that just works better, that fixes some issues faster than Discord staff can fix them, and that adds something the users didn't even know they needed, say, in-game HUD for discord that fits the theme of the game or something, more intuitive management like push-to-talk management commands for the client via secondary button. As long as it's about decentralization (value/belief system stuff) or about privacy (It's just in-game talk I don't care), and not about helping the user focus on head-shots and kill-streaks, it's not going to be adopted.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Sure, this might not be enough to make gamers move to a more open solution, but might be enough of an impulse for some open source projects that moved to Discord out of convenience.

BlueTemplar 6y ago

I remember people saying this about YouTube and Twitter. Yet it doesn't seem to have worked out despite both having several competent alternatives.

Kalq 6y ago
Yeah Discord is not going to go away anytime soon. If they ever start to actually struggle for money they'll just be bought up by some tech giant.
samoa42 6y ago
commercial content distribution platforms _will_ fall victim to copyright and censorship in general. its already underway and most progressive ideas have to be expressed elsewhere.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Capitalism has no trouble accommodating / subverting progressive ideas. It's the conservative ideas that tend to be silenced. EDIT : Also, interesting that the American right has moved from Twitter to not Mastodon, but to Parler instead : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25097145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25097145 I wonder why ? Mastodon presenting itself as being too left-wing ? (Though make no mistake, a lot of the American right is 'conservative' only in name, and is instead wildly anti-conservative both in their speech as well as in their deeds.)
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Just learned about Gab 'invading' Mastodon : https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-network-gab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentr...

maqp 6y ago

Their business model will increasingly be data. They will most likely start monitoring content to look for your preference of Doritos they can advertise you. People won't abandon Discord until all your private chat/call logs are hacked and dumped. When that happens, only a fraction say 10-15% of the userbase will look for a permanent solution (i.e. something that has always-on E2EE). My guess is about 40% will change to another service with better track record, but that isn't architecturally any more secure (i.e. that's still TLS-only). The remaining 50% will stay on the service because 1) they don't care, 2) their peers don't care or, 3) because they consider the incident response and related PR good enough. To get people to switch from discord you need something that's faster, that just works better, that fixes some issues faster than Discord staff can fix them, and that adds something the users didn't even know they needed, say, in-game HUD for discord that fits the theme of the game or something, more intuitive management like push-to-talk management commands for the client via secondary button. As long as it's about decentralization (value/belief system stuff) or about privacy (It's just in-game talk I don't care), and not about helping the user focus on head-shots and kill-streaks, it's not going to be adopted.

m4rtink 6y ago
Sure, this might not be enough to make gamers move to a more open solution, but might be enough of an impulse for some open source projects that moved to Discord out of convenience.