Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't kick people with mental illnesses off the internet. I barely have anyone to talk to as it is
Good one !
I don't think that post was made in jest.
Discord Alternatives, Ranked
241–250 of 489 posts
Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
#242No score for usability?
Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
#243The 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…
Isn’t Telegram at least plausibly a tool of Russian surveillance? My understanding was that its attempts to distance itself from the regime were laughable and only made the relationship more obvious.
I think that’s why it’s rarely mentioned.
Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
#244Ironically, Signal actually ranks a -1 for privacy in this use. Presumably you're already using Signal and getting mainstream contacts to start using it too. You probably have a basic profile that at least includes your real name, and might also have your picture. Maybe you're even one of the 7 people in the world that use the Stories feature in it. Well good news, now all of that is also unconditionally available to…
I dislike Signal as I need to identify myself through info that is protected. Like a phone number for example. Not a privacy app in my opinion. Sure, might be good for some use cases... but overall there are better solutions.
Completely not my experience:
I have lots of Signal contacts I cannot phone, since the phone number is never shared by default. Not even the signal contact is shareable. It is way too privacy focused to work easily.
i.e. I cannot even match two people I have in contacts unless one of them sends me their hidden username. Then they can talk to one another.
And people in my contacts don't use their full name. In groups, they often share the first name, making it confusing as hell. And many use an arbitrary nickname, most often the abbreviated first name I think but sometimes truly random stuff, and might even change that yearly with no mapping in my history to tell me who they were.
Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
#245The most important colon is missing: user-adoption
Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
#246What most people here seem to forget, is once a social platform gains traction and especially attention from the main masses, it undoubtedly require checks and balances. Predators, racism, gore, pedophilia, harassment, stalking and so on.. No matter how high you value security, these are matters that hurt real people today. If you attract the mainstream, you must deal with it.
I am in favor of kicking children, teenagers, and people with vulnerable minds and mental illnesses off the Internet. Then you won't have to make the decisions that most people suffer from.
And who gets to decide the membership of those groups? You?
Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
#247I was considering making a similar list since I was very interested in checking out alternative chat programs, but I have to say this list isn't that good. A lot of the alternatives here aren't ACTUALLY Discord alternatives. Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people, follow news, talk in forums, etc... It also has a lot of features people hand-wai…
All the people I know who joined big servers, have nitro and do it for their emotes. My impression of really big servers is that they also skew really, really young.
That said, I agree that not having to create a new account is a huge barrier of entry removed. A lot of the servers I’m in would probably not be a thing, or at least be even smaller, if everyone had to create an account to join.
Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
#248Matrix 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.
Yes, it like reddit is a community of sub-communities.
The whole fediverse wants to offer that, but I have no idea why single sign on fails mostly to make waves for them. Perhaps it is just user adoption, or technical complexity about privacy protection vs. ease of use.
Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
#249The thing is: None can compete with the Discord in its core features. They either have good chat or good voice, but not a combination of both.
Discord replaced Ventrilo, TeampSpeak and Mumble simply because it merged Slack/IRC-style chatting with an easy to use voice chat that took less resources than skype and less setup than any of the self-hosted version or cheaper than a hosted version.
Low-latency voice chats combined with Slack, I don't know why no one has an alternative for that.
Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked
#250I was considering making a similar list since I was very interested in checking out alternative chat programs, but I have to say this list isn't that good. A lot of the alternatives here aren't ACTUALLY Discord alternatives. Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people, follow news, talk in forums, etc... It also has a lot of features people hand-wai…
This may be a good time to consider whether one program should really be handling all those things, or if it's putting too many eggs in one basket and asking too much of any one program. Discord seems comparable to a Chinese superapp, made to trap its users and become an irreplaceable part of their everyday lives. I think I understand it's hard to give up some of these features once you're used to them, but it seems worth doing. Personally I use a mix of IRC, XMPP, and Matrix, mostly IRC (internet people) and Matrix (IRL friends/family), though. I believe XMPP and Matrix both have some sort of voice or video chat support across some clients and servers, but if someone were to try to call me through them, it would seem "weird" to say the least. I usually get people on Mumble if we're gonna play a game and want a voice chat going. It's rock-solid, everyone I play games with seems fine with it. When we're done voice chatting, we close Mumble, a bit like hanging up a phone call.
As for video calls and screen sharing, not something that's been super normalized in my circle. Some of us stream to Twitch with OBS, but it's rare to say "hey come watch my computer screen for an hour in a 1-on-1 call". There is just one guy who seems like a heavy Discord user who seemed to want to do this sometimes. I showed him Jitsi to placate him, we can both join a session in a browser without accounts and I can see his screen. I wasn't a big fan of that, though, I'd rather just not let that be normalized, personally. A screenshot, video clip, describing it to me, letting it go, any of that seems better than being trapped in a screensharing/video call of uncertain length.