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We need to bring back the forum platforms. That is how communities looked and it was great
Discord became big because of the seamless audio / video / screen sharing. Forums are not even in the same stratosphere.
i know, but for casual conversations and banter and a place where to store some knowledge about some topics forums were awesome.
Forums work for knowledge storage, but for casual banter real time conversations trump everything
yeah, forums are cool but I remember changing to another medium like MSN Messenger to do real time conversations
Yea… Forums were (are) great for something that Discord isn’t great at…
The old bulletins of the pre2000s. ASCII art every where.
oh yeah!
Not reviewed in this eval:
- DeltaChat (though would likely score similar to Signal with more points for decentralization)
- IRC
- XMPP
- Lemmy/PieFed/Nodebb (if he’s going to include Discourse…)
Yeah, it was immediately clear based on the scoring that he was super biased toward Discourse. It’s not a Discord alternative, and had no place in that list at all.
Not a single reference to Zulip either (edit: I meant in the comments on this thread)
Personally, I really want Matrix to succed though, hope this discord diaspora (?) gives them enough push to smooth their problems.Why is SimpleX not mentioned anywhere in the article or the comments here? I thought it is similar to Discord. Am I wrong?
Looking at its Wikipedia entry, it looks like a reasonable alternative, I hadn’t looked into it before.
Have you had the chance to try it out?
Some other alternatives not reviewed:
- Spacebar
- TeamSpeak
- Root
Spacebar sounded really promising when I checked them out years ago.
The big Discord.com features currently left unimplemented or with partial implementations are: Voice/Video support (WebRTC protocol support implemented, but lacking UDP protocol implementation)
Unfortunately, seems like it’s still not at a point where it could cover basic Discord functionality.
Edit: I should be clear, I’m not trying to discourage it. I really hope it succeeds to the goal of parity with Discord! Love to hear from someone who has used it a bit.
No, he hasn’t been running a discord server. It’s a channel. Discord is running the servers.
The older terminology, which is still used in the API, was a lot better.
It was Guild. It was a Discord Guild. Probably because Stanislav was working on it after he abandoned Guildwork.
Users (and I think Discord too) call the communities servers, and channels are the individual topics/threads in a community. It might not make sense from a hosting perspective but people do call it that
If Stoat (formerly Revolt) can integrate screen sharing capabilities soon enough, they will be the closest, user-friendly experience to Discord. Even the UI is familiar, if you come from Discord.
Apparently that’s already in the backend since december, they’re just getting their infrastructure up to snuff before they enable it
If they enable that and iron out the iOS app, it’d be a surefire migration for my whole crew.
I can’t even create an account on Stoat yet. New account confirmation emails take hours to arrive and by the time they do, they are already expired.
This is not a discord alternative yet and not be for a long time most likely.
I‘m surprised Stoat is gaining so much traction here. It‘s no open source and will likely go down the same path as Discord if given the chance.
Matrix is probably the most well funded and supported open source platform that might be able to compete with Discord but even then it’s not a fair fight.
Sadly most people won’t leave discord. People will forget about this next week.
They should use some of the funds for UX.
For gods sakes copy the Discord UI EXACTLY and replicate the backend with Matrix. That’s it.
Not whatever they’re doing now.
Look at Cinny if you’re looking for a Discord-like experience
It’s very important to call out this dude either doesn’t understand what a community is or comes from this new generation that thinks docs should be on Discord and not easily accessible.
Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?
Somehow Discord gets a 4 there. A chat server is a community of a kind but it will never rise the level of a platform’s community because it is, by definition, somewhat ephemeral and just a bunch of chat logs. There’s a big difference for example between IRC and bash.org for things like AzureDiamond.
I am getting flashbacks of the mid-2000’s IM landscape. Soon we’ll be using 10 services bundled into some hackjob app that doesn’t support all of the features but keeps the chats in one place.
Dont do pidgin too dirty…
Pidgin was good; it did what needed to be done and wasn’t that bad at it.
The last service I was using it for was a self-hosted XMPP server for a small group of friends that were all refugees of other defunct services. We ended up finally moving to Slack or Discord (the group bifurcated along game-playing lines).
Now I’ve got to find something new yet again!
I’m running with signal for just plain ol bsing. And then maybe steam just for voice chat gaming. Discords been dumped its actually been a refreshing week of something different.
i notice people not mentioning team speak 6. when our discord group were planning everything team speak 6 seemed to be the winner. it’s not free, but if i am hosting it with a license and have more control over the experience, then its not that big of a deal. from what i gather team speak 6 has better faster audio, and a better screen share for gaming. but we only just started poking around at options atm.
Maybe we can use this as an opportunity to use different tools for different purposes. Text chat is the easy part, evidently. The issues seem to be around voice/video/group chat on one side, and forums/wikis on the other.
What we need to recognize for one thing is how Discord makes it easy to host info repositories, but sucks at making that stuff accessible. We need a decentralized platform that makes it easy for someone to sign up and create their own forums and wikis in a user-friendly point and click manner that Discord does, but makes those same hubs optionally public and viewable for users without having to join anything.
Then for more live-oriented stuff, Matrix is already the most mature, established, closest thing to Discord we have. We just need it to be better at voice, video, screen-sharing, etc. If I understand correctly, that’s already being worked on.
Hell, maybe the former could very well be implemented on top of Matrix itself even.
I absolutely love matrixs UI, but I wish they would make the device verification configurable. aware it’s a million times easier to say then implement though.
The enshitification of the internet as a whole killed so many forums. I used to scour forums (and still regularly visit old forums) for info, but now it’s on discord or some bs facebook group. I miss old school forums and wikis and I fail to understand why everybody got away from them :c how on earth is an endless scroll of a FB page remotely conductive to finding information vs searching for the right thread on a forum?! I have no experience using discord so can’t speak for them but seeing all these articles makes me think I never will either.
Trying to find relevant information that’s supposed to be in a Discord server is one of the most hair-pulling aggravating experiences I’ve ever had on a computer. I mean seriously, any aspiring software developer of any kind should outright feel ashamed if they are relying on Discord for anything related to their project. Code repository sites are free, made for that purpose, and already offer everything necessary for collaboration. If communications are necessary, that’s what email is for - everyone has it already.
And yeah I also hate the over-dependence on Facebook. If a companies “site” is their fb page, they don’t get my business.
These things are successful not because they’re good. It’s because they’re easy and convenient. That’s the biggest thing we need to keep in mind when it comes to alternatives.
Ugh yea I have thought about trying to get away from FB, but a few years ago I moved to a more rural area than I was before and it’s incredible how many places -the regional dump among them - don’t have a website it’s just Facebook pages if you want info like if theres closures due to weather or operating hours.
I get that, I had to keep my FB when I lived in a rural area just to pay rent. Lazy.
Can Stoat be used as an alternative?
As an EU co, how will they navigate age verification
I’m glad nobody is mentioning WhatsApp as an alternative. They released usernames a few months ago, all messages are end-to-end encrypted, will add voice and video calls to WhatsApp Web, many people and companies have an account there already… It would be an easy migration, but awful for privacy. Thankfully, the most similar suggestions I found were Telegram and Signal.
WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal aren’t Discord alternatives though? There’s no ability to have multi text and persistent voice channels in groups. WhatsApp doesn’t even support screensharing.
What’s app claims E2EE but it’s not really they store everything on their servers that any one of their staff can access at any point
Your cloud backups are not encrypted either, and you have to explicitly opt out of cloud backups. That means any chats or group chats that involve someone who hasn’t opted out are sitting unencrypted on Meta servers, even if you personally have opted out. Even if everyone has opted out and assume it’s encrypted, they still know who you’re talking to, when you talk to them, how frequently, etc.
It seems there’s also Spacebar.
I don’t know if anyone else has had this issue but I tried multiple times to sign up for spacebar/Fermi and it just didn’t go through. Do they block VPN’s for signups or certain privacy browsers?
I’ve not had an issue with signing up for any other FOSS sites with my setup. Just curious if anyone else was having this issue
I read the article, it’s a good article but it also shows how we don’t really have any options that would match the discord’s functionality and ease of use. Which is very sad.
It’s wrong. There are more variants to check out:
- GameVox
- Fluxer
How many of these have moderation issues? Like, unwanted content uploads and stuff. How many expose you to accidentally hosting illicit content?
That’s their “safety” category in his rankings. They talk about moderation tools and risks like bad actors posting illicit content quite a bit, actually.
Wow, so signal ranks second worst in “safety” with a 2. While discord has a 4.
So it’s worse than discord at dealing with unwanted CSAM uploads? What a wild ranking system this guy has.
We all now the true alternative would be phpBB… /hj
