It's crazy to me to think how TeamSpeak and Ventrilo had more than a decade to iterate and never came up with something like Discord. Xfire came close multiple times, but never got the voice part right, though for the time the client was acceptable. Granted, the server model was very different for TS and Vent (more so the latter), but it was normal then. Kudos to the Discord team on making a solid product.
teamspeak 5 is looking to be a nice self-hosted alternative to discord if it ever comes out
Note: Discord has 14x more active users than Slack. Discord has a technology and feature superset over Slack. The Discord audience is becoming the professional audience just about right now.
When I joined the Elm community I thought it was weird they use a Slack for real time discussion and not a Discord. When I asked why I found out that Discord's features are most certainly not a superset of Slack's. * Slack threads are an amazing feature and frequently used on the Elm slack. One discussion or one person's question can become a thread and then the channel won't be continuously pinged by the ongoing dis…
Slack provides all sorts of feature for businesses that Discord does not. Integrations, APIs, plug-ins, workflows, etc. at a high level they seem similar but I have investigated replacing Slack a number of times and can never find anything that checks all the boxes and makes it easy to do business with. Slack also has critical mass now where many of our customers work with us on Slack. Good luck getting Discord on corporate desktops :)
Let's hope that Discord doesn't end up going the way of Slack. Since Slack got overconfident over Microsoft Teams and lost and got acquired by Salesforce.
Personally, I'm finding the transition from Slack to Teams absolutely maddening. Do people actually prefer Teams or is it that many large enterprises already had Office 365 licenses?
They are both garbage. Neither of them gets webrtc right in 2021, while Discord has had it working for years now. It is a rare thing, that I cannot hear someone on Discord and I can use it with any browser, while Teams and Slack still give me the middle finger for trying to do a call when using Firefox.
So whatever makes people use Teams, it's not Teams working well, that much is for sure.
> Teamspeak, which has other problems like server admins viewing the IP addresses of other users in the server, if that counts
I never understood what was wring people seeing my personal, private IP address... I can call my ISP and get a new one in seconds, or turn my router off for 5 minutes to get a new one.
I can call your ISP and get your subscriber information (unless you're behind CGNAT).
It's crazy to me to think how TeamSpeak and Ventrilo had more than a decade to iterate and never came up with something like Discord. Xfire came close multiple times, but never got the voice part right, though for the time the client was acceptable. Granted, the server model was very different for TS and Vent (more so the latter), but it was normal then. Kudos to the Discord team on making a solid product.
I've met the creator of Vent. Cool dude, moderately wealthy and I believe very happy to sit on his "fuck you" money and give back to the community upon occasion (Quakecon giveaways, for example). Vent 4 was DOA. Teamspeak though, yeah, I'm surprised it didn't try to integrate streaming into its mechanism. Mumble is still alive and well, and very functional for audio-sharing. Nothing in the way of video or streaming,…
My friends and I ran our own free vent server. Limited to 8 people as per the terms.
Vent 4 release saw our v3 server die. It was then we realised that a "phone home" was part of the deal.
Matrix the protocol is not there yet. Element, its main client, lacks too many features to have the same experience: - No concept of servers (in discord parlance). Its equivalent (matrix spaces, in https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc177... ) is in progress - No included audio/video calls. You have to link them manually and use a third-party stack, such as Jitsi - Even if you have Jitsi the exper…
> - No included audio/video calls. You have to link them manually and use a third-party stack, such as Jitsi To be explicit, no group audio/video. I run my own Matrix server for my partner and I and it uses webRTC based audio out of the box for 1:1 calls which we use every day, and sometimes video. No Jitsi enabled in my config. (I only share this so other readers can gauge if Matrix can meet their needs.)
Mind sharing the Synapse configuration changes you made to enable the audio/video calls over peer-to-peer?
Speaking as an 18 y.o. doing my first year college online, I wouldn't have made it through quarantine without Discord. I've a server with my high school friends and since Discord lowers the barrier to join a voice call so much it's super chill to just hop in a channel when doing homework or playing a game or whatever else, and anyone else who's free can join. I really wish there were competition, but there's nothing…
The voice chat rooms reminds me exactly of this program called Ventrillo or “vent” as we used to call it back when I was in high school. I’m officially old!
One thing that would probably be welcome is some builtin support for threads. On the Python discord for example, there is a system of help channels which get assigned to the first person talking in it and returned to the pool after 30min of inactivity or once the problem has been solved. A bot keeps a few channels in a "free" pool, marks some as "occupied", and moves the surplus to a "dormant" section for UX purposes…
Slack became a much worse experience when they added full threads IMO. Discord's new approach of allowing you to reply to a specific message, but not outright fork the channel, is a much better compromise.
this - Discord's approach of allowing you to reply, but having the message show up in the regular conversation flow keeps the feel of an actual conversation.
Personally, I'm finding the transition from Slack to Teams absolutely maddening. Do people actually prefer Teams or is it that many large enterprises already had Office 365 licenses?
The voice call part of teams works better in my experience and has a higher user limit.
Teams voice/video is better than Slack, worse than Zoom. In basically every other respect it's inferior to either Discord, Slack, or Zoom. The fact that I can't move the video thumbnails from their default location at the bottom of a call boggles my mind every day.
But Office is the standard, so bundling it Microsoft won the enterprise by default.
He wasn't talking about mass data collection used to sell advertising, he was talking about a the admin of a server with maybe a dozen users having access to his IP, which potentially could be used for DDOS or geolocation. The kind of 'data collection' which could have visible impacts upon his life.
And I am saying that there are human people working at companies too. The only difference is that if they cause you indirect harm their legal liability is abstracted enough you can't do anything.
They're not talking about Discord and their employees having your IP, they're talking about teamspeak server admins being able to see it and using it for nefarious means. On Discord, just because someone joins a server you created doesn't mean you get their IP. With teamspeak being decentralized, your IP is sent to admins which are much closer and interested in the same topics you are, so if you make them mad, they have the ability to retaliate by performing a DDOS or geolocating you to expose your location. With Discord, there's trust that Discord isn't going to suddenly make your IP address public for some reason - even if you make an employee mad, them accessing your IP just to leak it would be jeopardizing their cushy VC-backed job all just to 'expose' someone on the internet.
