In an apparent effort to boost revenues, gaming social media startup Discord plans to implement ads into its free service. The step is expected in the coming days after 9 years of ad-free experience.
I don’t think people on this sub use it, but it’s great news for us. The worse it gets the likelier people move on.
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APRIL FOOLS!!???
No…?
Oh, okay…
It will be interesting to see if PC ad blockers are able to mitigate them or whether they’re going to tunnel them in like FB/Instagram do.
We need FOSSCORD!
I think the only way to get an open-source Discord is to recreate discord (their backend).
https://spacebar.chat/
granted it’s a slow process but it can pay off if done right. I contribute what little I can to the project, as my Typescript is not the best and Discord knowledge even less.
There are many, even revolt.chat is similar.
But easiest to transition for me has been matrix
Gotta switch to revolt. My username: super_user_do#0384
the desktop versions of AdGuard can filter requests from the desktop version of discord
There’s also services like adguard DNS and nextDNS that can help cut down on any bullshit like that.
Adblocking needs to be multi-layered just like antivirus protection
…Maybe I should try to make an account on one of those competitors… what’s it called? Revolt or something?
revolt is great, but development is quite slow and its just copy of discord
A copy of discord without the fuckshit is all I want really.
https://matrix.org/try-matrix/ With the Element client, it’s a pretty close experience to Slack/Discord.
cinny.in is much closer to discord then element
Not at all unless they have introduced voice channels instead of the antique group calls
Yup, its not widely used mainly because of the chaotic development, lack of a devcent mobile client and an actual selling point since it is basically a 1:1 recreation of discord
I feel like I have like three decent mobile clients, including the default?
Discord has a monopoly on the organized group chat platform, there isn’t a competent competitor, or at least none I’m aware of
Matrix.org (Try Element)
Revolt.chat
I must say that Matrix is so competent that it can compete against whatsapp and Discord at the same time
I don’t know why so many people in the fediverse consider Element a competitor to Discord. I regularly use Element, but the non-text functionality just isn’t ready to point people at as an alternative. They will have a bad time and write off Element potentially forever if they are shown that app as an alternative right now.
Some examples of functionality that is important to discord but is not a good experience or is not ready in element yet: voice/video channels, screen sharing, custom emotes and reactions, channel organization and browsing (their latest attempt just doesn’t do it for me).
Additionally, there are times when encryption just has a hiccup still or someone sets it up wrong and things can be messy because of it.
I really like element and they’ve done a good job so far, but It’s just not ready for people to be pushed there from discord.
I’m on the verge of quitting after dealing with fucking groomers and nazis in ever server. I’ve already pulled out of every server and have remained DM-only. As I lose my last few friends my incentives to stay are going to be severely tested by having to deal with advertisements.
I don’t use discord but I don’t think it’s a bad idea. Those servers costs money
They already have a premium subscription model
They already can support them:
Discord generated $445 million revenue in 2022, an 42% increase year-on-year
They are getting greedy it has nothing to do with server cost
Revenue alone doesn’t mean much, how much was profit?
Tried to find net, didn’t find a lot of info on it but I also didn’t try very hard. If anyone finds I’m very curious what it is.
Every info seems to point that Discord hasn’t had a single year with positive profit. Here’s one of the sources
Source
They’re not public anyone who’s seen it has signed an nda.
Discord can do shit like this because they know many won’t ever try to use an alternative. You need more than just “open source” “privacy” or “FOSS” to convince people.
More, you need to convince the that this shit being inevitable is why you need FOSS.
Ads are not enough reason to stop using it for the majority. You need to offer more than just ad-free. You need to offer the same or better adoption, features, and overall user experience. Discord has these all nailed.
Discord has literally like one feature matrix doesn’t; stickers. And it kinda has those. Stop talking shit and try it out with some friends. This is so much more important than just chat, and the hour is getting late as fuck.
The big thing is the network effect. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
I’m not leaving my communities for yet another app. When they migrate I will too.
Dude. You can install multiple apps on your phone. I’m pretty sure.
Steam supports direct voice chat. My friends use it for gaming.
Also, teamspeak.
Steam doesn’t let me make my own survers with categorized groups and stuff
To be fair, there was a time before Discord. People once used MSN, Skype, Teamspeak, IRC, etc.
They shouldn’t get too comfortable with the idea that people won’t just up and leave.
Discord has real advantages over many of those, and communities are slow to pick up and move. It’ll take either a very bad decision from discord or a good competitor. I want that competitor to be Matrix, but it’s far from perfect.
I don’t think it will take just one of those, it will take both.
Well, adding ads could easily be that very bad decision, if anything can position itself as an attractive alternative fast enough
There has to be something to leave for
Closest I know is Revolt.
Matrix
Element.io
This. Open source apps are generally awful at presenting themselves to a broader audience.
Even for me, who’s technical enough, an app being FOSS is not enough to even bother checking out. Yes, I’ve said it. Sorry, tinfoils, but I do put features above else. And, want it or not, general public does the same: if the featureset is not clear enough at first glance, and an app doesn’t explicitly provide clarity on what it does and how it is better than competition, most people aren’t even checking it out.
We need to fix people. This proprietary shit is dystopian.
Make the apps pretty, sure, but long term; fix people.
My experience as someone who has barely dabbled in Matrix, tried comparing clients, and knows a lot of people who stick to Discord: a lot of Discord users heavily use custom emotes, voice chat, and screen sharing. It’s not even easy to figure out which Matrix clients support each of those features without installing everything and trying it out. There’s a clients comparison on matrix.org that mentions Voip but not stickers or video.
For stickers alone:
Being able to freely use custom emotes without paying for a Discord Nitro subscription nor server boosts would be a great selling point but it’s not something most users would be able to figure out before signing up. The limited client support isn’t great; e.g. Fluffy is the only Android client that supports sending custom stickers but some people may dislike the chat bubbles style UI.
It’s an unpopular opinion but I completely agree. I’ve tried Matrix, not only could I not get more than 2% of my community to try it, but it’s horribly unintuitive and limited for server owners. Shut it down after a few months.
I have a rocket chat server going now, some similar issues, but at least it has more control than Matrix. Still only a fraction of my Discord and Telegram user base has joined, but it’s similar enough that people are at least willing to try.
FOSS alone is not enough, the wider public doesn’t care, they just want something easy and convenient.
Curious, what didn’t you like about Matrix specifically? I’m in the process of evaluating it for my friends. With the Element client, so far it seems pretty dang similar? Space = server, room = channel, there are also access controls. Seems like there’s voice and video chats too.
Speed was a big thing. Switching channels could take a few seconds to over a minute to load, on good hardware.
The biggest issue, and a huge glaring oversight imo, is that users can create their own channels, encrypt them, and instance owners have no way to know what goes on in there. Some of the channel names alone were enough to make your skin crawl.
Oh, and you want to ban somebody? Cool, just ban them individually from every channel, because there is no global instance-wide ban. Moderation is horrendous.
did you host your own matrix homeserver or use matrix.org? that can change how fast it feels massively and yeah built in moderation tools are pretty much nonexistant https://github.com/the-draupnir-project/Draupnir is the only moderation bot that you can run to ban users from all rooms at once if they break your rules and lets you subscribe to banlists so if a user spams in other rooms that have write access and gets added they’ll be banned from your rooms as well
Hosted my own, was basically trying to move a large group off telegram and onto my own servers.
I did use Mjolnir for a while, but that was a hassle in and of itself as well. Nothing was intuitive.
That sounds laughable. Gross. No thanks.
Enshittyfication as normal
Is there any alternative with screen share feature and music bots?
If you don’t use Discord for voice much, Matrix has a pretty solid bridges you can use.
Hosting your own Matrix server is suprisingly way easier than I though - got a VM on hertzner for like 5$ a month, and there is an Ansible script that takes care of the setup for you. It’s also one of those rare cases where someone made an Ansible script that actually works, instead of you getting stuck in dependency-hell (seriously, fuck npm. Not a single docker or ansible tool that has used it ever worked for me out of the box. Python can get simillarly annoying).
They have a pretty easy to follow guide, and the whole setup took me like 20 minutes. I only edited a few options in config.yml (mostly to add Messenger and Discord bridge), and ran the ansible, and it worked at first try.
So I could at least ditch both messenger and discord apps from my PC and phone, without having to convince anyone to quit their poison - with only issue being that you can’t use Discord voice. And that the messenger bridge is still unreliable sometimes, but those are still minor inconviniences in comparison to my deep-seated hate for Meta.
Of course - Meta still gets my chat data and content, same as Discord. But at least they don’t get anything else from my phone or PC.
Matrix bridges are nice until you realize that you have to be a mod in the server to add the bridge, you need to do it not only for every Discord server you want to use on matrix, but every channel as well. It’s a huge chore. And ofc it doesn’t work with Discord DMs.
Not blaming Matrix or the matrix bridge developers here because it’s not their fault. But let’s be honest: matrix bridges are a pain to set up for Discord and for a majority of people aren’t worth the hassle. Moving to Matrix would be the better choice if at all possible
you can do a puppet bridge for your discord account so it bridges all the guilds your in to matrix without needing discord guild admins to add the bridge to it
This wasn’t my experience at all - all I had to do was message the Matrix bot with servers I want to join (I’m not a mod on any of them), and it bridged all channels in that server. Also, Discord DMs are working fine.
I’m using the mautrix bridge, which doesn’t use a bot or anything like that, but uses your Discord session instead.
Goddamn I wish it wasn’t so hard to convince friends that discord sucks. I’d rather just send SMS than use discord to communicate with my social circle.
SMS? You mean the paid, vendor lock-in, MITMable traffic? Possibly one of the only options that is actually worse than Discord
I don’t always force my friends to use Discord alternatives, but when I do I force them to use Signal.
Took fucking years but i dragged them to signal kicking and screaming, people are such little bitches