Discord Alternatives
- Stoat;
- Matrix;
- Rocket.Chat;
- Zulip;
- Discourse.
Beginning with a phased global rollout to new and existing users in early March, users may be required to engage in an age-verification process to change certain settings or access sensitive content. This includes age-restricted channels, servers, or commands and select message requests.
I hope that discourages open source projects and similar communities from using discord as forum / user support.
Yep, hate when I want to follow some project and they link you to X, Reddit and Discord lol
I can say as a member of the PCSX2 project that I understand why we and other FOSS emulators use it as official support – but nevertheless wish that we didn’t. We’ve discussed practicalities before, and the project doesn’t stay there just from inertia or because of personal preference; there are major practical reasons to prefer it over a forum (which we have), a wiki (which we have), or Matrix.
I’d be willing to endure the pain points and to scale back support in order to be off of that shithole, but I also get that’s a fringe minority sentiment shared by only a couple others. All of us would be tech-literate enough to use a client like Signal or Element for intra-project discussion, but very few people would come to Matrix for support (nor would we probably want them to due to the much greater moderation burden per end user), and the chatroom model – to most of us – is much easier for support than a forum. The only reason I’m still begrudgingly on Discord is for PCSX2.
I share your hope, but I seriously doubt this will come even close to dislodging us. Smaller projects, perhaps.
Damn it. I did not come here for a reasonable and valid explanation.
ಠ_ಠ
Begrudgingly puts away pitchfork
I get it, but if bigger projects don’t move to alternatives, those alternatives have a lot less pressure to evolve. If a big project bites the bullet and moves, then there are more technically minded folks with a vested interest in making the platform better.
Thanks for the insight.
There are layers to this.
Persistent chat rooms are here to stay.
As a user? I dislike this. I am sure you do too.
As a developer who gives a shit about the users? The number of times I have had to spend sometimes upwards of a dozen back and forth emails trying to explain to someone that I am not lying to them and the answer they found on the forums are for a bug that was fixed 5 years ago… Let alone having to, politely, tell a greybeard to shut the fuck up because they keep telling people to search instead of ask for help…
Whereas a more ephemeral approach that actually encourages people to ask questions? Yes, it does cause long term issues when someone is trying to debug a project that has been on life support for years. But, by and large, just checking the current FAQ and then asking in a chatroom results in a better experience for the users, the devs, and the community managers trying to bridge the gap. And… you should really try to avoid being dependent on said EOL software. Not always possible but… yeah.
And that isn’t going to change. So they’ll either stick with discord or use something MUCH less stable… like Matrix.
This is bad.
Whereas a more ephemeral approach that actually encourages people to ask questions? Yes, it does cause long term issues when someone is trying to debug a project that has been on life support for years.
It isn’t just long-term, it causes issues right off the bat; no fix is searchable. All fixes require a community member to respond.
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For the user this causes significant delays. A problem that could be solved in minutes with a search now requires hours or days for someone to respond to their specific problem. A problem that likely was already solved 10 times before. And god help you if the server is active, your problem might get burred instantly and no response will ever come.
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For the support people, they have to answer the same questions over and over and over because there is no way for users to search for and solve their own problems.
These issues compound on each other as support staff burn out and users get tired of waiting. Leads to people just going elsewhere.
For me, a lack of support forums signals the creators don’t care about the software working right and don’t care the software will be unmaintainable the moment they step away. Ie: a lack of support forum is a strong signal to find greener pastures.
It also causes the problem that no fix is searchable. All fixes require a community member to respond.
Incorrect. While I find the search capabilities of Discord (and the Discord/Teams likes) to be… bad, it isn’t THAT much worse than a phpbb in a lot of ways.
What you lose out on is the ability for search engines and, increasingly a concern, LLMs from being able to index it. I shouldn’t have to explain why that might be a “pro” as far as the folk actually doing support are concerned.
As for delays? If it is a well supported bit of kit, a quick search and a skim of the FAQ (Discord is actually really nice for having a way to aggregate questions like that in an almost ticketing like system) is going to cover the major stuff. And my experience (on both sides) with Slack et al is that users are generally glad to help out.
It does suck because, unless it is a super common issue, you need to actually ask a question and interact with a human. But it also tends to mean that people are a lot faster to have you run a few tests rather than respond once a day to a thread.
For the support people, they have to answer the same questions over and over and over because there is no way for users to search for and solve their own problems.
Tell me you’ve never provided support without telling me you’ve never provided support, heh.
It also causes the problem that no fix is searchable. All fixes require a community member to respond.
Incorrect. While I find the search capabilities of Discord (and the Discord/Teams likes) to be… bad, it isn’t THAT much worse than a phpbb in a lot of ways.
What you lose out on is the ability for search engines and, increasingly a concern, LLMs from being able to index it. I shouldn’t have to explain why that might be a “pro” as far as the folk actually doing support are concerned.
As for delays? If it is a well supported bit of kit, a quick search and a skim of the FAQ (Discord is actually really nice for having a way to aggregate questions like that in an almost ticketing like system) is going to cover the major stuff. And my experience (on both sides) with Slack et al is that users are generally glad to help out.
It does suck because, unless it is a super common issue, you need to actually ask a question and interact with a human. But it also tends to mean that people are a lot faster to have you run a few tests rather than respond once a day to a thread.
For the support people, they have to answer the same questions over and over and over because there is no way for users to search for and solve their own problems.
Tell me you’ve never provided support without telling me you’ve never provided support, heh.
Yeah, I have to back you up here. This person’s alleged experience is completely divorced from my experience working on PCSX2 and tells me they have no idea what they’re talking about. We have to answer questions over and over and over again, but usually there’s a command to quickly give a canned answer.
And the questions aren’t repeated because there’s no way for users to search (there is); it’s because it’s usually lightning-fast in that kind of environment to just ask and because dedicated help forums are a form of selection bias. You’re generally going to get more thought-out questions from users who use dedicated, thread-based support forums because either a) they needed to make an account just to ask that question, b) they already have an account and so are more dedicated than the average user, or c) all the others who didn’t want to make that investment either just gave up or found the answer some other way.
Edit: I guess people who have no experience with FOSS user support are upset at reality. Next time, give me a list of things you want me to say, and I can bring that along with some choccy milk and some ointment for your sore ass.
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Discord genuinely thinks they got the users by the balls… Thing is, people move platforms extremely easily. It happened to MSN Messenger, it happened to Skype, and it’ll happen to Discord too.
For those who are looking for something very similar, look at Stoat (formerly known as Revolt). Their URL is https://stoat.chat/.
One problem will be that there are way too goddamn many software projects that use Discord as a shitty replacement for a blog and documentation, and they’re gonna be a pain to move to proper content platforms.
“Look, Discord requires me to upload a pic of my face or ID, to which i can’t legally agree to. Please provide another channel or i can’t contribute.”
That’ll work for individual users, but getting all that chat history out will be a problem for the owners once the users dry up.
And I’m sure Discord will do their best to make it impossible.
Serves them right for picking chat software in the first place, let alone one they don’t control.
“Look, Discord requires me to upload a pic of my face or ID, to which i can’t legally agree to. Please provide another channel or i can’t contribute.”
Mass migration like that occurs (from my memory at least) when the newer alternative has much better functionality, performance, and ease of use compared to the status quo service and has a low barrier to entry (sign up is quick and straightforward). Do any of the decentralized Discord alternatives fit these criteria (honest question, not rhetorical)?
Well, Stoat has the same features as Discord, including many premium ones for free, the ability to write HTML/CSS for your own server, with the only thing missing being video feed. Otherwise, it functions the same while being much faster.
Also sign up is very quick, but right now they’re getting hugged to death, so sign up emails might take a while to arrive.
On one hand yeah sure, people ditched Skype and MSN as soon as something better came along but that was a long time ago. Discord has sadly been the go-to for people for over a decade. Many users literally grew up with it. They are conditioned. A lot has to happen for them to leave their comfort zone. It‘s like asking someone to stop drinking coke or get McDonald‘s after they‘ve had it for their entire life.
I‘ll say this probably won‘t be the straw that breaks the camel‘s back but there is a silver lining. Discord will lose revenue over this and might change course quickly. This already rolled out in Canada and from what I‘ve heard many users cancelled Nitro at least. That‘s a start. Discord may also try to milk remaining users even harder as a result very soon and that will definitely put them into a down spiral.
Guess I’m not using discord anymore lol
You know what doesn’t require full face scan? #irc
I love IRC, just need some user friendly client recommendations if we want wider adoption by less tech savvy folks. Though I get the impression there are a good few IRC users who prefer how that filters out the “normies”
I hate to sound gatekeepy, but a flood of new users into an IRC network would be pretty unpleasant for the existing users. There isn’t generally any form of support, so that burden falls to the other users.
I refuse to verify my age with a face scan or government ID for an online account/profile… It’s too easy to imagine how fucked up that will go.
The more I delete profiles to platforms with
unwanteddisturbing features the more recluse I become. It must look to acquaintances that I don’t care to speak (to them) but what can I do? I cannot imagine convincing even computer-literate friends to switch to something - as they will have the same problem.Do I need to retire my Discord gaming server before I’m locked out of controlling it?
Seriously, like, actually seriously, I want to believe that this time everyone will leave Discord, and not just a small group of weirdos like us who “care about privacy” and ended up on Lemmy.
The reality is, is that we’re going to be the only ones who care.
Everyone didn’t go from GMail to Proton or others. Everyone didn’t go from Reddit to Lemmy. Everyone didn’t go from Telegram to Signal. Everyone didn’t go from Twitter to Mastodon (Bluesky I guess works?)
This is going to be no different.
I have felt like this for some years. Like I was fighting a tide and those around me called me crazy for my cautiousness.
But more people are asking questions, more people are voicing they don’t like how things are turning. Not all are willing to take the leap …just yet but it’s a start.
From my experience, the average joe will just do whatever is asked of them to continue using a service.
seconded. i’m so sick of it being the only live chat app people use like i tried matrix but the servers were kinda dead :/
Seeya ✌️
“Content filtering” is just corporate jargon for subjective censorship, dynamically and discriminately restricting access to knowledge. I abhor all censorship.
Care to make a remix of “7 Words You Can Never Say on TV” for blahaj? YOU might abhor all censorship, but your admins don’t, and I’m inclined to agree with them.
Yeah … A complete anything-goes free for all is always going to devolve into a nasty cesspool dominated by the worst actors who have driven everyone else away. I get it, there’s a lot of awful censorship out there, but on the flip side you need to have at least some rules to prevent the otherwise inevitable descent into the worst environment possible
RIP Discord. Good riddance
It seems like the restriction should be lifted for accounts without verification after 5 years. After all, you’re not even allowed to sign up if you’re under 13, so by 5 years you have to be at least 18.
EXTREMELY INVASIVE SURVEILLANCE OPERATIONS ARE NOW PUT IN PLACE FOR you to have a better sense of community and meaningful communication <3
I have children, so I supervise their internet and don’t let them send their pictures to strangers.
What alternative should we all switch to?
Also thinking AI fake IDs will end up being an easy way around this.
Drop anything that’s not opensource and federated, except if you want to live the enshitification process over and over.
Matrix might be the closest to Discord. XMPP should also be considered.
I’m still trying to understand why XMPP isn’t more widely used. Probably the whole no single centralized service thing like most other federated protocols/services
XMPP biggest issues:
- The absurdly and laugably slowness of the protocol evolution on critically needed features: it was bleeding edge years back. The XSF totally screwed up the VoIP extension management. Google dropped a working out-of-the-box solution on the table in 2005: “Take it and use it! You’re welcome!”. They took 4 years to improve it before declaring the extension stable. Only then did clients start implementations, and bummer: the spec was not perfect, there were a lot of hiccups and “client A can make calls to B but not C” issues, because, who would have guessed, the only way to improve a spec at some point is to test it out there, and not stare at it and make some minor changes. By the time, most XMPP users of the time who wanted VoIP had moved on to others tools, XMPP went from at the top to very late. They’re doing it again with MIX (next gen rooms): the first draft is from 2015. It’s still “experimental”, though some servers team started implementation (such lack of patience…)
- An ocean of servers/clients with no consistency. You get to Matrix, and you have Element for all platforms. It can be native code everywhere, but it’s the same look and feel. You can tell your pops “just install Element”. In the XMPP world, there is no equivalent, though Snikket seems to be going there (consistent UI across platforms): all clients are different, different UI, platform specific with different set of features, some are a 1 guy project. If you’re not guided by a tek-savvy person, you have no idea where to start.
With all that said, I run a server for our family and its resources consumption is barely a blip on the radar. The lightest Matrix servers are an order of magnitude hungrier. And the difference increases with scale!
XMPP is the absolute best solution to multiply small servers, a very good thing for a healthy federation.
Appreciate the info, thanks for taking the time to reply. I loved when Google was using XMPP for their chat just because that meant I could chat with people who insisted on using their Google accounts, without having to use one myself
Zulip is great for text based communities, but doesn’t have built in voice or video.
I’m just gonna do all the tricks the kids did last time we heard about this. I’m gonna use some 3d model game character and just scan that bozo in if I can
There’s always https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ if you need a lifelike photo
Werent people also using cheap richard nixon masks and getting by too?
Some options:
Use Steam groups, which has almost all the same core capabilities (voice chat, push to talk, image and other sharing, etc.)
Create a teamspeak server if you have the know-how.
Create or join a TeamSpeak server.
Teamspeak needs to get off their ass and release the Teamspeak 5 server already
