6 ms·

Discord became popular because it was free group/team voice chat. Mumble, Ventrilo, Teamspeak all needed servers/clients, paid hosting etc. Discord is text cha

by haunter 9mo ago

Discord became popular because it was free group/team voice chat. Mumble, Ventrilo, Teamspeak all needed servers/clients, paid hosting etc. Discord is text chat (with history) + voice chat in one place. If you want an alternative it needs to do this both first and foremost. People saying IRC are trolling or never used Discord.

xnorswap 9mo ago
It's also images, videos and message boards.
- juliangmp 9mo ago
  And screen sharing, like actually good screen sharing unlike Microsoft teams That is a huge feature for many people
  - forgotusername6 9mo ago
    What's wrong with Microsoft teams screen sharing?
    - BLKNSLVR 9mo ago
      The 'Teams' part
    - juliangmp 9mo ago
      Only one participant can stream in a call. An arbitrary restriction that I just dont understand. You also can't properly full screen when you're viewing a screen share, for whatever reason....
- Buttons840 9mo ago
  It's also a UI that makes covert (bot) advertising basically useless. Any form of communication that is not one-on-one-real-time has a bad UI and is heavily deprioritized.
Bombthecat 9mo ago
It also needs users, the network effect aka lock in is gigantic with discord, I don't see discord ever going away. Or anything else gaining traction.
- einsteinx2 9mo ago
  Exactly, I’m in like 50 discord groups, that’s literally the only reason I use it. Those groups don’t exist elsewhere so there’s no other option.
  - Melonai 9mo ago
    But I remember when Discord began, I was actually the person who got around 10~ people onboarded onto the platform back in 2015-2018, because I simply thought it was the best way to communicate with a group of people or single person, in multiple ways like text, voice and video, with extremely low friction to do all of these things. Eventually the hold-outs joined too on their own volition, and that was because of network effects. A platform does not start growing because of network effects, that's what keeps a platform alive and growing later on, but it starts its growth because people really prefer it to the alternatives (which back then for me was Skype and TeamSpeak). Nowadays I'm not too happy with Discord anymore, some of it because of enshittification, but most of it is me being spoiled by what we already have, and being used to having this huge centralized (as in, can handle lots of different activities without switching to another platform) social tool that does everything I want it to, without me having to think about it at all. Thing is, the alternatives, are not as good as Discord, and it really isn't close enough for me. Matrix would be the one I would love most to succeed, but everytime I used Matrix and Element, it's been a massive struggle, encryption constantly breaks (still), joining rooms still fails, rooms are spread about randomly, either standalone or in the new Spaces, searching for rooms is usually broken except on the large matrix.org instance, recently a bunch of rooms migrated because the event syncing completely failed and the decentralized state was broken. Not to mention the contant CSAM attacks (Does anyone know why this happens so much on Matrix? Is it really only because of the bad moderation and the fact that it auto-downloads the illegal images? Just feels so disappointing...). I really hope we get a really good Discord alternative, maybe even an open-source and decentralized one, if possible. I would really rather not jump onto another proprietary platform.
WhereIsTheTruth 9mo ago
[flagged]
- rcakebread 9mo ago
  First laugh of the morning. Thanks.
  - WhereIsTheTruth 9mo ago
    It's better to laugh than to get censored, thank god, this is not Iran
71bw 9mo ago
And video calls + screen sharing. No alternative platform does this.
- su-m4tt 9mo ago
  Teamspeak6 does have screen sharing. I've been using it with my group of friends for a about a month now. Its quite solid in my opinion, uses a peer to peer system with an option to host a central server for video.
  - 71bw 9mo ago
    Have they finally added persisent, usable text channels as well?
    - cwillu 9mo ago
      I can't speak to usable because the group doesn't use it, but chat is persistent now, at least.
spike021 9mo ago
Discord for sure has way more features and use than IRC. On the other hand, IRC lets me /ignore a user and my client renders channels without ever showing a hint of that user's existence. Meanwhile, in Discord both ignoring and blocking a user still shows a "3 ignored messages" or "1 blocked message", etc. There are always going to be pros and cons to one or the other.
- dtdynasty 9mo ago
  I actually learned recently that you can ignore users in discord as well. https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/28084948873623-How-to-Ignore-Users-on-Discord https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/28084948873623...
  - spike021 9mo ago
    as i said in my comment, ignoring a user still shows they've put messages in a channel.
benrutter 9mo ago
> People saying IRC are trolling or never used Discord. I think it's probably that Discord has such a range of use cases. I only ever use Discord for open source projects that have communities there. Discord supports a whole load of stuff around voice chat etc, but I've genuinely never used it. Open source projects I've seen mainly just use it as a text chat, so they could in theory switch to something else with only a tiny fraction of the features.

by haunter 9mo ago

xnorswap 9mo ago

It's also images, videos and message boards.

juliangmp 9mo ago
And screen sharing, like actually good screen sharing unlike Microsoft teams That is a huge feature for many people
- forgotusername6 9mo ago
  What's wrong with Microsoft teams screen sharing?
  - BLKNSLVR 9mo ago
    The 'Teams' part
  - juliangmp 9mo ago
    Only one participant can stream in a call. An arbitrary restriction that I just dont understand. You also can't properly full screen when you're viewing a screen share, for whatever reason....
Buttons840 9mo ago
It's also a UI that makes covert (bot) advertising basically useless. Any form of communication that is not one-on-one-real-time has a bad UI and is heavily deprioritized.

Bombthecat 9mo ago

It also needs users, the network effect aka lock in is gigantic with discord, I don't see discord ever going away. Or anything else gaining traction.

einsteinx2 9mo ago
Exactly, I’m in like 50 discord groups, that’s literally the only reason I use it. Those groups don’t exist elsewhere so there’s no other option.
- Melonai 9mo ago
  But I remember when Discord began, I was actually the person who got around 10~ people onboarded onto the platform back in 2015-2018, because I simply thought it was the best way to communicate with a group of people or single person, in multiple ways like text, voice and video, with extremely low friction to do all of these things. Eventually the hold-outs joined too on their own volition, and that was because of network effects. A platform does not start growing because of network effects, that's what keeps a platform alive and growing later on, but it starts its growth because people really prefer it to the alternatives (which back then for me was Skype and TeamSpeak). Nowadays I'm not too happy with Discord anymore, some of it because of enshittification, but most of it is me being spoiled by what we already have, and being used to having this huge centralized (as in, can handle lots of different activities without switching to another platform) social tool that does everything I want it to, without me having to think about it at all. Thing is, the alternatives, are not as good as Discord, and it really isn't close enough for me. Matrix would be the one I would love most to succeed, but everytime I used Matrix and Element, it's been a massive struggle, encryption constantly breaks (still), joining rooms still fails, rooms are spread about randomly, either standalone or in the new Spaces, searching for rooms is usually broken except on the large matrix.org instance, recently a bunch of rooms migrated because the event syncing completely failed and the decentralized state was broken. Not to mention the contant CSAM attacks (Does anyone know why this happens so much on Matrix? Is it really only because of the bad moderation and the fact that it auto-downloads the illegal images? Just feels so disappointing...). I really hope we get a really good Discord alternative, maybe even an open-source and decentralized one, if possible. I would really rather not jump onto another proprietary platform.

WhereIsTheTruth 9mo ago

[flagged]

rcakebread 9mo ago
First laugh of the morning. Thanks.
- WhereIsTheTruth 9mo ago
  It's better to laugh than to get censored, thank god, this is not Iran

71bw 9mo ago

And video calls + screen sharing. No alternative platform does this.

su-m4tt 9mo ago
Teamspeak6 does have screen sharing. I've been using it with my group of friends for a about a month now. Its quite solid in my opinion, uses a peer to peer system with an option to host a central server for video.
- 71bw 9mo ago
  Have they finally added persisent, usable text channels as well?
  - cwillu 9mo ago
    I can't speak to usable because the group doesn't use it, but chat is persistent now, at least.

spike021 9mo ago

Discord for sure has way more features and use than IRC. On the other hand, IRC lets me /ignore a user and my client renders channels without ever showing a hint of that user's existence. Meanwhile, in Discord both ignoring and blocking a user still shows a "3 ignored messages" or "1 blocked message", etc. There are always going to be pros and cons to one or the other.

dtdynasty 9mo ago
I actually learned recently that you can ignore users in discord as well. https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/28084948873623-How-to-Ignore-Users-on-Discord https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/28084948873623...
- spike021 9mo ago
  as i said in my comment, ignoring a user still shows they've put messages in a channel.

benrutter 9mo ago

> People saying IRC are trolling or never used Discord. I think it's probably that Discord has such a range of use cases. I only ever use Discord for open source projects that have communities there. Discord supports a whole load of stuff around voice chat etc, but I've genuinely never used it. Open source projects I've seen mainly just use it as a text chat, so they could in theory switch to something else with only a tiny fraction of the features.