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Discord Alternatives, Ranked

taggart-tech.com

421–430 of 489 posts

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#421
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And video calls + screen sharing. No alternative platform does this.

Teamspeak6 does have screen sharing. I've been using it with my group of friends for a about a month now. Its quite solid in my opinion, uses a peer to peer system with an option to host a central server for video.

Have they finally added persisent, usable text channels as well?

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it works but it lacks QOL features like automatic compression of videos or images when sending attachments. A bit too barebones.

Why would you want to automatically degrade the quality?

It does not have to be automatic. Easy to expose that through options, most clients do that. Also, I don't need pictures shared to be at the utmost best quality.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#423

I 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…

IMO most Discord channels I have to use could be better replaced by a traditional web forum. Then at least could you find the knowledge in there using a web search.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#424

I 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…

>Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers, only when forced to by some projects that refuse to host their content anywhere else- and its always a terrible experience. 99% of my discord usage is just a group chat with my IRL friends, so when looking for alternative I dont…

My experience using discord for technical projects and communities is largely similar to IRC. I jump in, ask a question in the appropriate channel, someone answers quite quickly, i say thanks, I leave.

I’d prefer having openly searchable forums and chat archives and to use IRC but I can’t say the experience is that onerous.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#425
post #126

I don't understand the appeal of any of those, least of all Discord itself. It's unsearcheable, focused on immediacy, confusing and full of blinking things. The old Reddit interface (or current HN one!) are unsurpassed IMHO.

Discord murders reddit. It has groups and I can meet other devs there and many times people are more than willing to jump to direct call to explain something. Reddit is just a forum.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And screen sharing, like actually good screen sharing unlike Microsoft teams That is a huge feature for many people

What's wrong with Microsoft teams screen sharing?

Only one participant can stream in a call. An arbitrary restriction that I just dont understand. You also can't properly full screen when you're viewing a screen share, for whatever reason....

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#428
post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm planning to send both matrix and xmpp through bitlbee so I can use a terminal client as well (I know matrix has one technically but it is reeeeally crufty). I don't understand why every modern chat client has to be 99% empty whitespace separated by squircles.

matrix.org used to feature weechat-matrix among the recommended clients, but last I looked it wasn't there anymore. Dead project, probably. A shame.

There are other terminal clients.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#429
post #401
post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's overwhelmingly more of an outsider talking point than an actual issue in practice. There's a category of people that just says any extensible protocol must fundamentally have massive amounts of incompatibility, and brings it up every chance they can... and while that is technically always possible, it only happens in practice if clients diverge greatly. XMPP clients mostly work together much better than Matrix c…

Don't get me wrong, I have been hearing about XMPP forever, and I would love to have an opportunity to try it. Unfortunately it hasn't happened. I have been forced to use Slack, Discord, I have had opportunities to try Matrix, Zulip, of course I have been using IRC for a long time. But XMPP? I may have installed an app, but I haven't had an opportunity to actually use it. Is there a list of communities there? Then ab…

Pidgin is a universal client that supports many protocols/networks including IRC, XMPP, and has additional third party plugins from stuff like Discord and Slack.

Re: Discord Alternatives, Ranked

#430
post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get me wrong, I have been hearing about XMPP forever, and I would love to have an opportunity to try it. Unfortunately it hasn't happened. I have been forced to use Slack, Discord, I have had opportunities to try Matrix, Zulip, of course I have been using IRC for a long time. But XMPP? I may have installed an app, but I haven't had an opportunity to actually use it. Is there a list of communities there? Then ab…

XMPP has had less allure as "the new thing" since it's been around for a very long time. It was _the_ chat protocol in the 2000s when it started, and all chat apps used it (when AOL Instant Messenger, Trilian, Purple, Yahoo, ICQ, etc all interoperated). Vendor lock in started taking off not long after though, so Facebook Messenger (also originally XMPP) stopped interoperating and went fully closed along with a number…

> It seems because you haven't seen people already adopt it, you believe it must not be good.

On the contrary, I have been hearing about it for so long, I believe there must be something there.

But maybe there is something fundamental in the fact that because it is actually interoperable, it's a lot harder for it to get traction. If a client gets a lot of traction, it probably quickly gets tempted to leave the interop world and do whatever they want (and lock the users in). In other words, XMPP sounds like a success story of diversity, but the cost of that is that normies don't even know what it is. Similar to Linux in a way: if someone gets interested in Linux, the next thing they see is a gazillion different distros and people arguing about them (disclaimer: I have been a Linux user for 15 years).

Matrix is different in the sense that it does not look like a success in terms of diversity. Matrix is pretty much Element. And Matrix seems to be about converting everybody to Matrix: I have seen bridges to IRC that made the IRC experience so bad that people would move to Matrix. Not because Matrix was necessarily better, but because Matrix was killing the IRC experience.

In a way, I find it interesting that those "interoperable protocols" (both Matrix and XMPP) are all for diversity, as long as it is their protocol. XMPP wrote a blog post about the EU Digital Markets Act, saying something along the lines of "the DMA is a good idea, the only thing that they miss is that they should force everybody to use our protocol, XMPP". Matrix has a similar stance: "we don't consider it interoperability if we can't make it work with our protocol, no matter how much we destroy the experience on the other platform". Because the end goal is not really interoperability: it's interoperability under their conditions.

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