31–40 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.
getDeviceMedia and getUserMedia are very powerful these days. I haven't actually tested it but I believe a chromium browser would have no issue capturing the hw accelerated output from a game. You can pipe these media streams directly to WebRTC peers for playback on the other side. A server with a simple selective forwarding unit could enable larger scale meetings (100s of participants). All of this can happen in Mobile clients are a bit cursed right now. The best solution is to maintain a standard client in the app stores. Forcing everyone to sign their own mobile apps is way too much friction. And you do need native for this on mobile. Browser only / PWA has no chance in hell of providing a smooth UX on iOS or Android.
Zulip actually looks pretty good if they made it a little sexier.
Ironically, 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…
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.
IRC → perfection, impossible to improve
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with XMPP is that it's a suite of RFCs. It's like describing DNS, which is a conglomerate of RFCs so complex that it's unlikely to be implemented correctly and completely. XMPP is a design fail in that regard, because if you have to tell your chat contacts to download a different client that fulfills OMEMO or XEP-whatever specs, then yeah, ain't gonna happen for most people. (I am still a proponent of XMP…
This has been brought up on HN before, and people smarter than me identified that this view is about 10 years out of date. Yes it's a bunch of XEPs, but there are standardized "sets" apparently that include all of the things any other similar tools do. It sounds like only very niche old/minimal XMPP clients don't support encryption by default for example, and virtually all servers have supported it for many years.
The main site https://xmpp.org/software/ lists lots of different options but I have no idea what core/advanced means and comparing all of these would take ages.
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.
You could join a discord server with a single link.
Account creation could come later.
Considering the competition at its heyday was Teamspeak or Skype, the mere fact you could just actually see the hell you were getting into without some stupid ass "Hol' Up!" instantly made it popular with basically everyone who didn't even know what it was.
My account is dated June 2015 which is apparently a month after it launched, and both me and every single one of the early adopters in that channel that is still up to this day have this same story to tell. We used it because we didn't even have to login at all in the first place when we first got it.
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.
What is your greatest UX concern that you would like to see fixed?