Oooh yeah, dust off the hotline auto clickers.
Online software development life cycle in a nutshell:
Startup - Geeks are in charge and you’re creating a cool communications platform.
Mature - Accountants are in charge and you’re gamifying ad clicks.I admittedly haven’t looked very hard for an alternative. But I fully expect to be forced to move elsewhere in the next year or two due to their increasingly belligerent chasing of profits.
If you’re after text, there are a number of options. If you’re after group voice, there are a number of options. You could mix and match both, but “where everyone else is” will also likely be a factor in that kind of decision.
If you want both together, then there’s probably just Element (Matrix + voice)? Not sure of other options that aren’t centralised, where you’re the product, or otherwise at obvious risk of enshittifying. (And Element has the smell of the latter to me, but that’s another topic).
I’ve prepared for Discord’s inevitable “final straw” moment by setting up a Matrix room and maintaining a self-hosted Mumble server in Docker for my gaming buddies. It’s worked when Discord has been down, so I know it works. Yet to convince them to test Element…
What genuinely confuses me is who they’re finding to buy this shit to begin with.
I’ve seen so many of these failed “Join our club to score points to get tokens to buy virtual dongles that you can use to get into our more-elite clubs with better points and color tokens” schemes over the last ten years. It’s like everyone wants to be Chuck-E-Cheese, nevermind that the company went bankrupt five years ago.
Even if all you care about is profit, it seems like this is an abysmal means of generating it.
Oh it’s undoubtedly going to fail, but it should milk enough money out of their users to keep them going while their investors cash out
ah yes, seeing deepweb market-esque exit scams on the surface web is a sign of a healthy system
Microsoft had a check ready for $10B.
I can’t imagine how a new flavor of Buttcoin could compete with that.
It is a bit baffling. I think it’s more ethical than the alternative though: pay gating useful functionality. Offering paid pallete swaps doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, someone who would never pay for that, but it does at least mean I can just ignore it. If they were to, say, restrict voice calls to a paid subscription, suddenly I’m in a position where either I’m paying for the service or ditching it entirely.
They already do pay-gate useful functionality, this is just an alternative revenue stream
increasingly belligerent chasing of profits.
The word you’re looking for is enshittification.
It feels like literally the entire open source and games communities are on discord. Will they move too? I care about that even more than my DMs.
They were on IRC before and on a number of other chats systems before that.
They will move as soon as something better will come out, for various definitions of better
Keep an eye on Revolt.
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Is it open-source? Sounds like it does exactly what I want. Maybe I’ll create a shadow group there and make the permanent jump once discord becomes untenable.
You read my mind
The end is coming
Next thing you know the ‘orbs’ will be NFTs and we’ll all be expected to grind away at their ‘quests’ (probably training AI) to earn ‘real money’.
discord orbs
Is there a peer to peer equivalent to Discord? That feels like it would be the best option, since it wouldn’t rely on a centralized company that could enshittify the product.
I’ve never used Discord – is it similar to Mumble? I tried Jami but found it too unreliable to recommend. What about Nextcloud Chat? I do use that though it is kind of clumsy.
It serves the key purpose of Mumble, in that it provides a reliable way to get in a voice chat with people. The other features (text chat, video calls, screen sharing, “servers” that let people aggregate for a dedicated purpose/community) come together to make a legitimately good product that’s hard to replace.
They truly have zero clue how users actually use their software. Not a single person is going to use this just like every other stupid gimmick feature they’ve added in the past and then promptly removed.
Users on reddit and lemmy always seem to think ad-based stuff is going to fail, and then it turns out people in the real world are depressingly accepting of ads. I would bet that this program is more likely to be expanded than canceled.
I swear they are soulless NPCs put on this earth by demons to torture us.
Part of that is because ads that are enjoyable and for things people enjoy often don’t even register as ads to people. When people think of ads they typically think of unwanted distractions for things they don’t want. They don’t necessarily think of something like a free sticker for their favorite video game given to them at s convention. They may even put it on something like a laptop or water bottle. The same people may say they “hate ads”.
I’m not trying to throw shade on those people, I think pretty much everyone is going to be accepting of at least some type of hypothetical thing that’s enjoyable and/or useful to them. A prime exam is having a business listed in a directory. Someone mentioned that as an alternative to advertising as if companies don’t pay to put their names in those directories.
None of this is meant to be any sort of criticism against anyone based on what they do or don’t view as an ad, I’m just trying to help explain why, at least some of the time, it seems “people in the real world are depressingly accepting of ads.”
The bigger servers i am in always have someone “boosting” it.
I close every popup, ad, and whatnot. Read nothing, join my voice channel and talk with friends.
Discord has no features imo but voice and text. Everything else is useless and not needed. I will never give them a dime. No point.
Wel there goes my discord account. Bye you won’t be missed
Realistically tho, until participation becomes mandatory you can ignore quests and orbs and just keep doing what you’re doing.
Nah, switching takes time. Better start now.
Hopefully Revolt (a Fediverse alternative to Discord) continues to improve and can completely take the place of Discord relatively soon.
Edit: it might only be FOSS, not federated. Still a promising project though.
I’ll check it out! Even without being federated, it’s good to have a discord alternative. Matrix hasn’t been what I need yet, unfortunately.
Is Revolt federated? I thought it was only FOSS
Oh maybe it is only FOSS.
I’m open to using non-federated software. I think federation is cool and useful but I don’t see it as necessary in any way when choosing what to use.
The biggest things are features, existing username, and/or ease of getting my friends on it. User base size is why I didn’t use Mastodon for niche hobbies of mine.
Afaik it’s a fork / copy of the actual Discord source code. With all its bugs
Chortle my orbs
Jesus Christ (● ˃̶͈̀ロ˂̶͈́)੭ꠥ⁾⁾.
There is one community I’m active in on Discord, and it’s a very wholesome and positive one id hate to lose, but damn I’m hating Discord.
Is there a CLI Discord client for Linux? I could tolerate that.
enshittification is full force now
RIP Discord.
