201–210 of 489 posts
Most Discord alternatives fail not on tech, but on polish. Signal → private but bad for communities Matrix → flexible but rough UX XMPP → powerful but fragmented Discord → centralized but frictionless Users pick frictionless every time. We probably don’t need new apps or protocols we need a client that works well.
You should be able to create an account once and then join several servers (real servers) with the same account.
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To be an alternative it had to be an alternative . Not "we had a great community with image uploads, voice chats, client parity across all platforms, miltiple servers set up in one click, songle login, game integrations etc., so now we move to this broken disjointed landscape of inconsistently implemented features"
Most users don't need every single one of those features. It reminds me of the conversations about lemmy and the fediverse after the reddit api uproar. The alternative link aggregators didn't need to do everything well, just the core things well enough to build a community that sustains engagement and becomes discoverable. But it failed at the major pieces: performance, scalability, media handling, moderation, govern…
I think this will be a pretty similar case because discord straddles "small personal servers with ten friends" and "large official servers with 500 users for a particular game" and "tech support forum for an open source project", and one user might be in all of those servers pretty easily.
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You should be able to create an account once and then join several servers (real servers) with the same account.
That's called email
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.
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.
Now excuse me while I go post to my Facebook about my new MSN Messenger and ICQ addresses.
Matrix is the only one that offers the killer feature of Discord, which is being able to join many communities from a single login. Sadly Matrix has never had a good UX for me. IMO they spent too many complexity tokens on e2ee and there are simply not enough left.
That's one of the features I hate most about Discord, the difficulty of having separate identities in separate places! You can set a "display name" for convenience, but everyone can see your root identity.
It's open source, trivial to self-host, and can support an arbitrary number of rooms and users.
Sure, it doesn't have all of Discord's bells and whistles (for better or worse), but then neither do some of the alternatives mentioned in the article.
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How do you search messages from before you joined the mailing list?
You check the mailing list archives - those usually have a web based interface.
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Didn't know that the UK, the Netherlands, or Portugal aren't part of Europe... Also, you can buy phone numbers with monero for 0.08$ https://smspool.net .
And what happens when the next guy buys that same number and registers on Signal? Phone numbers are recurring costs. And to keep a truly private one you must keep paying without ever disclosing personal info and that is really hard. Signal is a privacy nightmare for long term use.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059792-Si...
The Telegram drop off for doing something really bad recently? I have not seen a single person mention it as an alternative. I don't really use discord that much except for the few friends I have that are not on telegram. Actually all of my family and friends are on telegram, even my grandmother is on telegram. When playing games with friends we just do a group call in telegram. I don't even see it on this list thoug…
i just wonder why TeamSpeak is not there