7 ms·

Stop Using Discord

42 points by airhangerf15 2y ago

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
Can't imagine a title that would motivate me less to seek alternatives to Discord.
- larodi 2y ago
  Even though he makes some solid arguments, the solution is less than convincing, as users are not 90s admins in 2024.
- MostlyStable 2y ago
  Not to mention the overall tone. I stopped reading at "brainlets". Of course, I'm probably not the target audience since I already don't like Discord.
  - abnercoimbre 2y ago
    I had to look up "brainlet." I can't believe this kind of pejorative Internet slang was deployed. Are you preaching to some choir instead of trying to move the needle? (I too would like to find a genuine Discord killer.)
JLCarveth 2y ago
The tone of the "article" is off-putting to say the least..
- glonq 2y ago
  Indeed. Blah blah blah BRAINLETS... --> CTRL-F4
  - hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
    It's like Comic Book Guy made a website. Maybe it was a parody or inside joke I'm not party to. I still don't understand what point was trying to be made because it got lost in style and noise.
brigadier132 2y ago
Amazing how someone's style of communication can make me almost disagree with them when I opened it already agreeing with them.
- naikrovek 2y ago
  Exactly how I felt when I started reading. What is it about advocacy that attracts this type of person? Maybe that’s not how it works. I wonder if it’s that this type of person finds advocacy and suddenly has somewhere to legitimately use their need to speak and to be heard.
- mikestew 2y ago
  Wow, one sentence past the disclaimer, and...tab closed. (Not like I have a dog in this fight anyway, but I'm not signing up with that opener.)
- legitster 2y ago
  For real. For a split second, it might make a lot of FLOSS advocates go "wait, are we the baddies?"
- znpy 2y ago
  This is such an interesting point. This should really be a case study. I can't tell you how many times people whose idea, in theory, i share ... ended pushing me to the opposite party.
  - darig 2y ago
    [dead]
mavamaarten 2y ago
Discord sucks for many use cases it's being used for. But in my case I only use it for voice chatting in game, and for typing "one sec, setting up my mic". I don't see what self-hosting a more privacy-friendly alternative would gain me besides more headaches.
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
I know Discord is bad. But have you looked at the alternatives? Look at the first one, Mumble. It looks like it is from 1990. Open source software looking ugly as hell and hard to use is one of the reason why people do not use them.
- xboxnolifes 2y ago
  I can't believe Mumble was even mentioned as an alternative. Mumble wasn't even good 15 years ago.
  - mikestew 2y ago
    I can't believe Mumble was even mentioned as an alternative. Look at the subdomain: it's not just an alternative, it's the alternative the author expects you to use. Between that and the opening sentences, the author isn't exactly making a persuasive case.
  - cthalupa 2y ago
    If you were exceedingly concerned about latency and audio quality it did well on those fronts. It's always had an atrocious user interface, though.
pavel_lishin 2y ago
> If your friends truly are your friends and wish to talk to you, they will follow you to a better platform. If I make an ultimatum to the dozens of people I talk on Discord daily that they either follow me or lose me... they're going to lose me, and I'm going to lose them. > Solid alternatives include Mumble, XMPP, Matrix, Rocketchat, and IRC. Be serious. Unless you significantly extend IRC, it absolutely is not an equivalent replacement for Slack/Discord, and it's foolish to pretend that it is.
- megadal 2y ago
  > Be serious. Unless you significantly extend IRC, it absolutely is not an equivalent replacement for Slack/Discord, and it's foolish to pretend that it is. Maybe prior to IRCv3 this was true.
  - stnmtn 2y ago
    Does IRCv3 include voice chat within the server, as well as easy streaming within that group voice chat? Does it include rich text such as custom emojis, photos, and videos natively embedded into a message?
    - megadal 2y ago
      Rich text yes (markdown rendering, most IRC clients support this) and emojis yes (IRCv3 explicitly supports UTF8, but I am pretty sure servers and clients generally supported this anyway prior to standardization). Also videos/images you just send as links and use a URL previewer. KiwiIRC supported as much out of the box via Embedly IIRC. Voice chat no, you would use another protocol for that. It's a chat protocol, not a communications platform, but a part of one. I wouldn't even contend that video chat is apart of a chat platform. Slack doesn't have them and neither does Google Chat. They are separate tools within the overall suite. But what you could do is use an IRC chat as the chat interface for a video chat/conference room. Given IRC is channel based, this seems intuitive.
      - stnmtn 2y ago
ptojr 2y ago
I think the only compelling argument OP makes is regarding security and privacy. Then again, what companies aren't harvesting this type of data from us?
cthalupa 2y ago
I share some of the concerns about discord, but the problem is, Mumble or XMPP or any of these alternative solutions are not viable replacements for what people actually use Discord for. It's the combination of persistent text chat / community driven features + voice chat / streaming / etc. that all work well together and are tightly integrated. It's easy for someone even with minimal experience to manage Discord servers, even for a large community. Roles and permissions are a breeze. It's easy to add bots that provide a ton of additional functionality. The interface is pleasant for end users. You would need multiple open source projects running to replace all of the core functionality people use Discord for, and they would be in different interfaces, often less user-friendly ones. And I say this as someone that ran Mumble and TeamSpeak servers for years.
- Root_Denied 2y ago
  Absolutely agree - I've been watching the slow enshittification process that Discord has been going through and keeping a close eye on any alternatives and there just aren't any that I could get my less technical friends to join. From my perspective it seems like Discord being free, easy to use, and such a comprehensive solution to online socialization makes it so that no one else even thinks to compete with them. It's going to take significant shifts in monetization or quality to prompt anything similar to get spun up.
- bishbosh 2y ago
  Doesn't Element tackle all these with communities, and jitsi room integration?
  - cthalupa 2y ago
    If you run down a heavily abstracted feature list looking for checkboxes, maybe. If you look at actual user experience, not unless things have changed in massive ways in the past ~8 months since I last tried it. Some form of the Matrix stack + Jitsi is 100% the way to go if you're attempting to self-host a Discord-like experience, but it's quite the heavy lift compared to just using Discord. You're still missing out on things like Discord Forums, which are inferior compared to a real forum, but work surprisingly well for being what they are inside of the general Discord app. Threaded conversations are a very different experience (and Discord of course supports these as well.) Matrix stuff also obviously supports bots, but there's just a metric ton of them available for Discord that server "owners" don't need to self-host or manage beyond adding them to the server. Stuff like managing roles based on reacting to messages all the way to bots that will run your D&D combat... all possible with Matrix, but not generally a "click in three places and it's in your server and working" sort of setup. Discord takes all these things and just makes it extremely friction-free.
IronWolve 2y ago
Is there an IRC client thats like discord? Irccloud? I know discord banned tons of subs in 2020-2022.
bun_terminator 2y ago
Discord is not just exceedingly easy to use and ubiquitous to the point of being the almost-standard for chat communities. It's also impressively well coded. I have no idea how the pull out those searches so fast among the intense amount of data. I know it's evil and won't last, but there's no alternative that comes close
segasaturn 2y ago
Are the mobile apps for mumble any good? I primarily use discord because it works well across all my devices (pc, smartphone, chromebook via web client). I think OP should maybe advocate for Signal instead, which does have a reportedly good mobile client.
- bishbosh 2y ago
  A quick google shows a mumble mobile client exists, but honestly recommending a voice only program as a replacement for discord is genuinely ridiculous on their part. Matrix is the closet they get. A large part of their point is self hosting, and Signal is a bit better, but still fundamentally resides on someone else's servers. And last I checked, Signal required a phone number to make account and connect with others, which personally is a line.
knightoffaith 2y ago
People pushing these views (views I am highly sympathetic to, to be sure) often don't understand how to communicate them properly to people who don't already agree with them. People are already resistant to changing their minds through cordial and well-reasoned discussion, let alone through polemics. If you're a discord user, there's a high, high chance that you don't give a hoot about privacy or anything like that. Convincing people to deal with inconveniences for the sake of something that doesn't yield a short-term reward is difficult, even with things normally acknowledged to be important, like health or finances---with privacy, it's going to be at least an order of magnitude more difficult to persuade someone not just in the abstract but enough to actually get them to make changes. I think you have to be, so to speak, the midwife who helps the other give birth to their own ideas---plant the seeds in their mind and allow them to come to the conclusions themselves. The temptation to shock people out of their dogmatic slumbers is strong, but it's just generally not going to work. I've been the person jumping up and down while screaming about how the 1984 dystopia is coming. It's never convinced anyone who didn't already agree with me. ...things would be different if there was an fully functioning free software, privacy-respecting drop-in replacement to discord; you could just say "instead of discord, why not use X?" with no polemics about privacy needed. That is, I think, the most effective way to actually get people to jump ship. As far as I can tell, none of mumble, xmpp, or matrix are as easy to use and convenient as discord. (As much as I love xmpp.) Maybe Zulip?
jdefr89 2y ago
I can’t begin to start explaining how bad these arguments are from a Security Researchers point of view. He suggest using IRC.. this way we can give some random person virtually all control of your information instead of a company that can be held liable…
legitster 2y ago
I think privacy is a dumb argument in this context, and "privacy" as a worthwhile tech concept is at risk of being cargo-culted to death. A Discord is a public space. For most users, hanging out in Discord is akin to hanging out in your local bar. No once cares too much that anyone at the bar can see everyone and overhear all of their conversations. If anything, I am there to be in a public place. The tables are nice and the drinks are cold. And if the owner sees we are unhappy and having a bad time, and uses that information to improve the bar, so be it. Even if Discord guaranteed absolute privacy, they can't guarantee that some other users is not just scraping the conversation and reposting it somewhere. The danger of "privacy" is when people are being mislead about how alone they are. But just falling back onto a "more private = more gooder" is not an actual argument about risk associated with using Discord. You can try to convince your friends to go to a worse bar with worse service strictly on the basis that it's more private. And maybe that's a good argument for your friends or your context! But you can't actually assume all of your friends are only going to care about that. It's not as convincing an argument as some people think it is to run into a Discord server where hundreds of users and moderators are having very public conversations, yelling "none of this is private!", and expecting them to care.
- bishbosh 2y ago
  With how ubiquitous discord has become for online spaces, I don't think it's unreasonable to hope for some degree of privacy, particularly in DMs or small close nit servers. I think the point being made, with all the abrasion of a sander, was that even in the most controlled case of DMs or two person servers, all information is still available to third party admins, which wouldn't be the case with something like self hosted Matrix server. I agree with you that this is hardly the most convincing point to 'the friend group', but with every electron of the online experience being mined for potential revenue, there is something to be said for technologies that work a barrier to data siphoning.
  - legitster 2y ago
    DMs on Discord are end-to-end encrypted. [edit: wrong] So the only privacy concerns are on the public servers. > there is something to be said for technologies that work a barrier to data siphoning. I think something that gets lost in online conversation is the amount of data that gets "siphoned" for QoS purposes. So even for paid services like Netflix or Discord that don't really have an ad or data business, they are collecting their data specifically to drive investment in uptime, reliability, UI, services, etc. So the quality of the product is almost always going to be better than any privacy-first alternative. But part of the reason I like Discord is they have a sustainable monetization model. They make money on something! That is not ads!
gwbas1c 2y ago
> Due to you brainlets being incapable of reading text on a website, here is some quick information to help you switch. Also learn to put down the phone, and pick up a fucking book and read. Stopped right there and flagged the article.
- thefz 2y ago
  Also > Discord is Extremely Resource Intensive and is Bloated With Unnecessary Features If there's something I can praise Discord for is that for all it offers, it's nimble. 173MB occupied here and I leave my computer on for days.
kkfx 2y ago
While I agree (and do not use discord OR SLACK myself) the main issue in FLOSSland is that all VoIP solutions we have, and are many, are damn complex and long to deploy. To succeed in having people self-host things we need something that can be deployed for distro packages effortless. In the past we have had some example of distributed stuff (aMule, RetroShare, Ring etc) we need something similar. Like a go or python app able to deploy without specific knowledge required. Otherwise most people will simply give up. With RustDesk we have finally a good FLOSS solution to share screen over the internet for all, deploy the server part is BADLY DOCUMENTED, two distinct component with obscene names (hbbs and hbbr), but still something easy to deploy in few minutes not having read nothing about that specif sw or desktop sharing in general before. For VoIP we are still far from being there.
dc3k 2y ago
The way this was written and presented makes me want to buy Nitro out of spite.

Stop Using Discord

42 points by airhangerf15 2y ago

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago

Can't imagine a title that would motivate me less to seek alternatives to Discord.

larodi 2y ago
Even though he makes some solid arguments, the solution is less than convincing, as users are not 90s admins in 2024.
MostlyStable 2y ago
Not to mention the overall tone. I stopped reading at "brainlets". Of course, I'm probably not the target audience since I already don't like Discord.
- abnercoimbre 2y ago
  I had to look up "brainlet." I can't believe this kind of pejorative Internet slang was deployed. Are you preaching to some choir instead of trying to move the needle? (I too would like to find a genuine Discord killer.)

JLCarveth 2y ago

The tone of the "article" is off-putting to say the least..

glonq 2y ago
Indeed. Blah blah blah BRAINLETS... --> CTRL-F4
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  It's like Comic Book Guy made a website. Maybe it was a parody or inside joke I'm not party to. I still don't understand what point was trying to be made because it got lost in style and noise.

brigadier132 2y ago

Amazing how someone's style of communication can make me almost disagree with them when I opened it already agreeing with them.

naikrovek 2y ago
Exactly how I felt when I started reading. What is it about advocacy that attracts this type of person? Maybe that’s not how it works. I wonder if it’s that this type of person finds advocacy and suddenly has somewhere to legitimately use their need to speak and to be heard.
mikestew 2y ago
Wow, one sentence past the disclaimer, and...tab closed. (Not like I have a dog in this fight anyway, but I'm not signing up with that opener.)
legitster 2y ago
For real. For a split second, it might make a lot of FLOSS advocates go "wait, are we the baddies?"
znpy 2y ago
This is such an interesting point. This should really be a case study. I can't tell you how many times people whose idea, in theory, i share ... ended pushing me to the opposite party.
- darig 2y ago
  [dead]

mavamaarten 2y ago

Discord sucks for many use cases it's being used for. But in my case I only use it for voice chatting in game, and for typing "one sec, setting up my mic". I don't see what self-hosting a more privacy-friendly alternative would gain me besides more headaches.

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago

I know Discord is bad. But have you looked at the alternatives? Look at the first one, Mumble. It looks like it is from 1990. Open source software looking ugly as hell and hard to use is one of the reason why people do not use them.

xboxnolifes 2y ago
I can't believe Mumble was even mentioned as an alternative. Mumble wasn't even good 15 years ago.
- mikestew 2y ago
  I can't believe Mumble was even mentioned as an alternative. Look at the subdomain: it's not just an alternative, it's the alternative the author expects you to use. Between that and the opening sentences, the author isn't exactly making a persuasive case.
- cthalupa 2y ago
  If you were exceedingly concerned about latency and audio quality it did well on those fronts. It's always had an atrocious user interface, though.

pavel_lishin 2y ago

> If your friends truly are your friends and wish to talk to you, they will follow you to a better platform. If I make an ultimatum to the dozens of people I talk on Discord daily that they either follow me or lose me... they're going to lose me, and I'm going to lose them. > Solid alternatives include Mumble, XMPP, Matrix, Rocketchat, and IRC. Be serious. Unless you significantly extend IRC, it absolutely is not an equivalent replacement for Slack/Discord, and it's foolish to pretend that it is.

megadal 2y ago
> Be serious. Unless you significantly extend IRC, it absolutely is not an equivalent replacement for Slack/Discord, and it's foolish to pretend that it is. Maybe prior to IRCv3 this was true.
- stnmtn 2y ago
  Does IRCv3 include voice chat within the server, as well as easy streaming within that group voice chat? Does it include rich text such as custom emojis, photos, and videos natively embedded into a message?
  - megadal 2y ago
    Rich text yes (markdown rendering, most IRC clients support this) and emojis yes (IRCv3 explicitly supports UTF8, but I am pretty sure servers and clients generally supported this anyway prior to standardization). Also videos/images you just send as links and use a URL previewer. KiwiIRC supported as much out of the box via Embedly IIRC. Voice chat no, you would use another protocol for that. It's a chat protocol, not a communications platform, but a part of one. I wouldn't even contend that video chat is apart of a chat platform. Slack doesn't have them and neither does Google Chat. They are separate tools within the overall suite. But what you could do is use an IRC chat as the chat interface for a video chat/conference room. Given IRC is channel based, this seems intuitive.
    - stnmtn 2y ago

ptojr 2y ago

I think the only compelling argument OP makes is regarding security and privacy. Then again, what companies aren't harvesting this type of data from us?

cthalupa 2y ago

I share some of the concerns about discord, but the problem is, Mumble or XMPP or any of these alternative solutions are not viable replacements for what people actually use Discord for. It's the combination of persistent text chat / community driven features + voice chat / streaming / etc. that all work well together and are tightly integrated. It's easy for someone even with minimal experience to manage Discord servers, even for a large community. Roles and permissions are a breeze. It's easy to add bots that provide a ton of additional functionality. The interface is pleasant for end users. You would need multiple open source projects running to replace all of the core functionality people use Discord for, and they would be in different interfaces, often less user-friendly ones. And I say this as someone that ran Mumble and TeamSpeak servers for years.

Root_Denied 2y ago
Absolutely agree - I've been watching the slow enshittification process that Discord has been going through and keeping a close eye on any alternatives and there just aren't any that I could get my less technical friends to join. From my perspective it seems like Discord being free, easy to use, and such a comprehensive solution to online socialization makes it so that no one else even thinks to compete with them. It's going to take significant shifts in monetization or quality to prompt anything similar to get spun up.
bishbosh 2y ago
Doesn't Element tackle all these with communities, and jitsi room integration?
- cthalupa 2y ago
  If you run down a heavily abstracted feature list looking for checkboxes, maybe. If you look at actual user experience, not unless things have changed in massive ways in the past ~8 months since I last tried it. Some form of the Matrix stack + Jitsi is 100% the way to go if you're attempting to self-host a Discord-like experience, but it's quite the heavy lift compared to just using Discord. You're still missing out on things like Discord Forums, which are inferior compared to a real forum, but work surprisingly well for being what they are inside of the general Discord app. Threaded conversations are a very different experience (and Discord of course supports these as well.) Matrix stuff also obviously supports bots, but there's just a metric ton of them available for Discord that server "owners" don't need to self-host or manage beyond adding them to the server. Stuff like managing roles based on reacting to messages all the way to bots that will run your D&D combat... all possible with Matrix, but not generally a "click in three places and it's in your server and working" sort of setup. Discord takes all these things and just makes it extremely friction-free.

IronWolve 2y ago

Is there an IRC client thats like discord? Irccloud? I know discord banned tons of subs in 2020-2022.

bun_terminator 2y ago

Discord is not just exceedingly easy to use and ubiquitous to the point of being the almost-standard for chat communities. It's also impressively well coded. I have no idea how the pull out those searches so fast among the intense amount of data. I know it's evil and won't last, but there's no alternative that comes close

segasaturn 2y ago

Are the mobile apps for mumble any good? I primarily use discord because it works well across all my devices (pc, smartphone, chromebook via web client). I think OP should maybe advocate for Signal instead, which does have a reportedly good mobile client.

bishbosh 2y ago
A quick google shows a mumble mobile client exists, but honestly recommending a voice only program as a replacement for discord is genuinely ridiculous on their part. Matrix is the closet they get. A large part of their point is self hosting, and Signal is a bit better, but still fundamentally resides on someone else's servers. And last I checked, Signal required a phone number to make account and connect with others, which personally is a line.

knightoffaith 2y ago

People pushing these views (views I am highly sympathetic to, to be sure) often don't understand how to communicate them properly to people who don't already agree with them. People are already resistant to changing their minds through cordial and well-reasoned discussion, let alone through polemics. If you're a discord user, there's a high, high chance that you don't give a hoot about privacy or anything like that. Convincing people to deal with inconveniences for the sake of something that doesn't yield a short-term reward is difficult, even with things normally acknowledged to be important, like health or finances---with privacy, it's going to be at least an order of magnitude more difficult to persuade someone not just in the abstract but enough to actually get them to make changes. I think you have to be, so to speak, the midwife who helps the other give birth to their own ideas---plant the seeds in their mind and allow them to come to the conclusions themselves. The temptation to shock people out of their dogmatic slumbers is strong, but it's just generally not going to work. I've been the person jumping up and down while screaming about how the 1984 dystopia is coming. It's never convinced anyone who didn't already agree with me. ...things would be different if there was an fully functioning free software, privacy-respecting drop-in replacement to discord; you could just say "instead of discord, why not use X?" with no polemics about privacy needed. That is, I think, the most effective way to actually get people to jump ship. As far as I can tell, none of mumble, xmpp, or matrix are as easy to use and convenient as discord. (As much as I love xmpp.) Maybe Zulip?

jdefr89 2y ago

I can’t begin to start explaining how bad these arguments are from a Security Researchers point of view. He suggest using IRC.. this way we can give some random person virtually all control of your information instead of a company that can be held liable…

legitster 2y ago

I think privacy is a dumb argument in this context, and "privacy" as a worthwhile tech concept is at risk of being cargo-culted to death. A Discord is a public space. For most users, hanging out in Discord is akin to hanging out in your local bar. No once cares too much that anyone at the bar can see everyone and overhear all of their conversations. If anything, I am there to be in a public place. The tables are nice and the drinks are cold. And if the owner sees we are unhappy and having a bad time, and uses that information to improve the bar, so be it. Even if Discord guaranteed absolute privacy, they can't guarantee that some other users is not just scraping the conversation and reposting it somewhere. The danger of "privacy" is when people are being mislead about how alone they are. But just falling back onto a "more private = more gooder" is not an actual argument about risk associated with using Discord. You can try to convince your friends to go to a worse bar with worse service strictly on the basis that it's more private. And maybe that's a good argument for your friends or your context! But you can't actually assume all of your friends are only going to care about that. It's not as convincing an argument as some people think it is to run into a Discord server where hundreds of users and moderators are having very public conversations, yelling "none of this is private!", and expecting them to care.

bishbosh 2y ago
With how ubiquitous discord has become for online spaces, I don't think it's unreasonable to hope for some degree of privacy, particularly in DMs or small close nit servers. I think the point being made, with all the abrasion of a sander, was that even in the most controlled case of DMs or two person servers, all information is still available to third party admins, which wouldn't be the case with something like self hosted Matrix server. I agree with you that this is hardly the most convincing point to 'the friend group', but with every electron of the online experience being mined for potential revenue, there is something to be said for technologies that work a barrier to data siphoning.
- legitster 2y ago
  DMs on Discord are end-to-end encrypted. [edit: wrong] So the only privacy concerns are on the public servers. > there is something to be said for technologies that work a barrier to data siphoning. I think something that gets lost in online conversation is the amount of data that gets "siphoned" for QoS purposes. So even for paid services like Netflix or Discord that don't really have an ad or data business, they are collecting their data specifically to drive investment in uptime, reliability, UI, services, etc. So the quality of the product is almost always going to be better than any privacy-first alternative. But part of the reason I like Discord is they have a sustainable monetization model. They make money on something! That is not ads!

gwbas1c 2y ago

> Due to you brainlets being incapable of reading text on a website, here is some quick information to help you switch. Also learn to put down the phone, and pick up a fucking book and read. Stopped right there and flagged the article.

thefz 2y ago
Also > Discord is Extremely Resource Intensive and is Bloated With Unnecessary Features If there's something I can praise Discord for is that for all it offers, it's nimble. 173MB occupied here and I leave my computer on for days.

kkfx 2y ago

While I agree (and do not use discord OR SLACK myself) the main issue in FLOSSland is that all VoIP solutions we have, and are many, are damn complex and long to deploy. To succeed in having people self-host things we need something that can be deployed for distro packages effortless. In the past we have had some example of distributed stuff (aMule, RetroShare, Ring etc) we need something similar. Like a go or python app able to deploy without specific knowledge required. Otherwise most people will simply give up. With RustDesk we have finally a good FLOSS solution to share screen over the internet for all, deploy the server part is BADLY DOCUMENTED, two distinct component with obscene names (hbbs and hbbr), but still something easy to deploy in few minutes not having read nothing about that specif sw or desktop sharing in general before. For VoIP we are still far from being there.

dc3k 2y ago

The way this was written and presented makes me want to buy Nitro out of spite.