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I don't know how the commenters below you miss your point consistently. Discord is featureful and each feature is only a couple of clicks away, and every nitty-

I don't know how the commenters below you miss your point consistently. Discord is featureful and each feature is only a couple of clicks away, and every nitty-gritty is nicely abstracted away under the UI. Surely it was a bit of time to get the hang of their UX, but I can't seriously see _any_ FOSS software to do audio, video, screen sharing, IM with groups and users, all packed into a nice consistent package. For one, Discord must have a serious backend and constant support to back this all up. The other thing is that joining is like zero effort. You click on an invite link, it only asks you a handle, and bam, you land on the server, ready to go. And you have several ways to "upgrade", you can register your handle, download and use the desktop app. With a buttery smooth transition to both. I can see FOSS software outperform Discord, if you pick an aspect, like "low latency audio". But if someone wants to make FOSS successful, they better focus on the user experience. People sacrifice a good bit of everything else, just to get a better UX, and the more developers realize this, the more potential their projects have to succeed.

southerntofu 5y ago
What about Jitsi or BigBlueButton? They're as easy to use a Discord if not easier and are entirely free-software you can selfhost. Plus if you don't want to selfhost it's super easy to find a host for those solutions.
- npteljes 5y ago
  I have yet to try them. I'd love to unseat proprietary IM services in my circle.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    Please do! Only problem is you can't use them through the Tor network, but if that's not a requirement for you (and it's anyway not possible with discord either to my knowledge) then these solutions will probably make you very happy. The last version of BBB released a few weeks ago apparently reduced resource-usage by up to two thirds server-side and brought in long-awaited features. Or so i heard from friendly hosting collectives, who definitely recommend to give it a go.
- gsich 5y ago
  Jitsi is not the same.
enlyth 5y ago
Yeah everyone here bashing Discord doesn't understand that the voice chat aspect is like 5% of what makes it appealing. You can build actual _communities_ on Discord, it's not just about the voice chat. It brings the people together in a way they can share rich content in one space. If you're on voice chat you will very often want to interact with them by sending images, videos or links back and forth, and can do this seamlessly by using Ctrl-V. This is why IRC pales in comparison to modern chat solutions, and proponents will start rambling about open protocols or whatever stuff the end user doesn't care about. Can you paste a screenshot into the chat? Thought so.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  Color me skeptical that being able to have a video or an image show up in the chat is what makes a community. It can be nice to see videos and images, and it can be annoying. Quite often videos and images dumb down the conversation as people post memes instead of saying anything meaningful. It can also be handy to see the image right there and not have to click on a link to open it in your web browser to see it, but that just makes the experience a bit more seamless and convenient, and is not something that is going to make or break a community. Plenty of communities have formed on IRC.. big and small, even without inline images and video.
  - knownjorbist 5y ago
    This sounds like you're limiting the idea of a "community" to something akin to niche FOSS projects, not generalized interests like Discord is more commonly used for. IRC is way less intuitive for building such things, especially for the vast majority of users - who don't even know what IRC is.
- npteljes 5y ago
  I agree with your sentiment. For FOSS to be successful, it needs to focus on UX, and beyond that, on what users expect from a product. It can perform better, be more secure, be absolutely more ethical etc but masses don't choose software like this, it's a means to an end at most. On the other hand, IRC could easily be just used as an IM backend to a hypothetical FOSS discord alternative. You would press CTRL+V in the client, it would upload your clipboard image to the server, return you an URL, and that would be pasted into the chat box, which would then embed the image. GitHub's editor does this for example and it's a smooth experience, and perfectly compatible with a text-only protocol.

southerntofu 5y ago

What about Jitsi or BigBlueButton? They're as easy to use a Discord if not easier and are entirely free-software you can selfhost. Plus if you don't want to selfhost it's super easy to find a host for those solutions.

npteljes 5y ago
I have yet to try them. I'd love to unseat proprietary IM services in my circle.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Please do! Only problem is you can't use them through the Tor network, but if that's not a requirement for you (and it's anyway not possible with discord either to my knowledge) then these solutions will probably make you very happy. The last version of BBB released a few weeks ago apparently reduced resource-usage by up to two thirds server-side and brought in long-awaited features. Or so i heard from friendly hosting collectives, who definitely recommend to give it a go.
gsich 5y ago
Jitsi is not the same.

enlyth 5y ago

Yeah everyone here bashing Discord doesn't understand that the voice chat aspect is like 5% of what makes it appealing. You can build actual _communities_ on Discord, it's not just about the voice chat. It brings the people together in a way they can share rich content in one space. If you're on voice chat you will very often want to interact with them by sending images, videos or links back and forth, and can do this seamlessly by using Ctrl-V. This is why IRC pales in comparison to modern chat solutions, and proponents will start rambling about open protocols or whatever stuff the end user doesn't care about. Can you paste a screenshot into the chat? Thought so.

pmoriarty 5y ago
Color me skeptical that being able to have a video or an image show up in the chat is what makes a community. It can be nice to see videos and images, and it can be annoying. Quite often videos and images dumb down the conversation as people post memes instead of saying anything meaningful. It can also be handy to see the image right there and not have to click on a link to open it in your web browser to see it, but that just makes the experience a bit more seamless and convenient, and is not something that is going to make or break a community. Plenty of communities have formed on IRC.. big and small, even without inline images and video.
- knownjorbist 5y ago
  This sounds like you're limiting the idea of a "community" to something akin to niche FOSS projects, not generalized interests like Discord is more commonly used for. IRC is way less intuitive for building such things, especially for the vast majority of users - who don't even know what IRC is.
npteljes 5y ago
I agree with your sentiment. For FOSS to be successful, it needs to focus on UX, and beyond that, on what users expect from a product. It can perform better, be more secure, be absolutely more ethical etc but masses don't choose software like this, it's a means to an end at most. On the other hand, IRC could easily be just used as an IM backend to a hypothetical FOSS discord alternative. You would press CTRL+V in the client, it would upload your clipboard image to the server, return you an URL, and that would be pasted into the chat box, which would then embed the image. GitHub's editor does this for example and it's a smooth experience, and perfectly compatible with a text-only protocol.