Can we stop building communities in non-indexable locations? The death of forums and hence “google-ability” for problems and solutions is so depressing. The UX is worse in every way
Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord
451–460 of 562 posts
Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord
#452The self hosting instructions aren't that friendly imo.
I'm sorry, but what?? The self-hosting guide even walks you through setting up the VPS on a specific platform. What more do you want? One could even argue that if you need your hand held through setting up a VPS, you probably shouldn't be self-hosting anything, so from that viewpoint, these instructions are a lot more friendly than they had to be.
> ...if you need your hand held through setting up a VPS, you probably shouldn't be self-hosting anything...
Since when does IT tell corporate what to do?
You and I both know that corporate calls the shots, and if they tell someone to do this, and that's not their field of expertise, they'll need their hand held.
There are plenty of non-profits and other orgs that have IT staff of 1, and that guy is IT because he knows how to format a word doc.
Your argument is a bit disingenuous.
Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord
#453Can we stop building communities in non-indexable locations? The death of forums and hence “google-ability” for problems and solutions is so depressing. The UX is worse in every way
I think this is largely a consequence of the escalating commoditization of human attention, political polarization, marketing yadda yadda.
Communities disperse, and are drawn to solutions that make them a little trickier to bot into and be absorbed by the marketing apparatus. A little friction that makes it harder for sock puppets / gpt bots carpet bombing your communities wholesale is an ephemeral competitive advantage right now. Not a perfect defense, but what is anymore? Is it even possible to build an effective captcha now?
Tell you what would really gum them up, make some communities require people buy a physical X$ RSA token. Sure you could make bots for that, but how long to automate the unboxing of those tokens? It could become an arms race where the packaging becomes the captcha.
Some humans are going to always try to keep moving ahead of the noise wavefront. I'm rooting for them.
Wanting all things to be index-able these days kind of feels like asking early 90's internet kids to be normal and go hang out at the mall.
Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was a little bit of everything, really. Discord exploded in popularity because: 1. Its free functionality was more generous than many comparable services. Nobody wants to pay for a Mumble server. 2. Its UI and audio quality and noise cancellation settings put much of the competition to shame. 3. Only needing one account for every Discord server in existance gave it the same kind of appeal that let Reddit/Facebook…
The UI is awful, Discord volume isn't exposed, no option to do it, either, so you have to adjust game audio or individual user audio. They put the whole kitchen sink in, for some reason, too, there's a text chat in the voice rooms that needs to be user-revealed for some reason, instead of being exposed by default. Most of it is unintuitive at first use. Then there's the many contraindications e.g. privacy policy, wal…
Weird, I have never noticed a single one of the issues you mention. There really isn't much I don't like about discord, though I wished threads worked more like Slack.
Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord
#455Nice and I'll try it out, but I can't help but to wonder what about all of the open-source Slack alternatives like Ferdi, Franz, Rambox, etc. Is it just because Slack is just no longer in vogue that there's a market for this?
Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking from being very early on the train for Discord, it also had an extremely solid userbase right from the start because much of the early pre-marketing pull into it was for raid groups in the then-new Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. People really needed a chat client to coordinate a big number of players and it was totally free, functional, and new on the scene. It spread a ton in the community and the peopl…
Teamspeak and others were so well entrenched at the time. Wouldn't players of WoW, CS, etc. have brought those tools to FFXIV? What made that special?
Those tools were all, comparatively, trash. Literally ALL of the gamer groups I was familiar with switched en masse. You can’t compare Mumble and Discord IMO. There was so much setup friction that anything was better than what we had at the time.
Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also the shady components of discord. All manner of illegal activity thrives behind custom access control. The most notable instance in media is the leaking of classified materials, the creation of swatting/ddos communities which gave us the 'BigBalls' hacker employed by doge, But more sickeneningly recently it allowed this doctor to successfully target countless children, including convincing a 13 year old g…
This isn’t fair to say. Any platform that’s popular will have its share of undesirable users, out of the company’s control. Discord has very good moderation in contrast to other platforms (Constant banwaves on illegal/shady servers, terminating accounts frequently, etc)
Haven't heard of any other platforms that use cartoons in the UI, actively associate with kids hobbies, and also make it one click to join active pedo grooming communities.
"very good moderation" makes me believe you work for them because that is a laughable notion.
I would bet that Big Balls swatting/SIM swapping/ddos community "the comm" still has dozens of discords that have been up for years
Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
As opposed to IRC? Forums? hell - even an email list... All things that are a lot easier to search then Discord, have much lighter clients, and can be done free. Do you really think there was 'no way to communicate' for projects before discord ?
In 2025, a company using IRC to communicate with its users would be like using ham radio. Sure it exists, but it is far too niche to be worth the effort.
How so? You literally just open a web page, and choose a nickname. It's easier than creating a Discord account and verifying your email address and phone number.
Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If I need support with an open source library of some sort, I don't mind using IRC , MS Teams or anything in between. I honestly cannot think of something worse. Chat applications are not forums and they generally suck at replacing them. Not only does this make topics harder to follow and much harder to find to begin with, it also makes the maintainers bother with the same questions again and again, because users ca…
it sure beats mailing lists. look at LKML. I prefer discord over LKML any day. But some people prefer them over anything else. That's kind of my point, I don't have the time or energy to complain about this, I just want to talk to the right people. No one asked my preference, so in practical terms, it doesn't even matter.
> it sure beats mailing lists. look at LKML.
You mean the the 31 years of simple text anyone can index or search using any search engine? How awful.
Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think Discord has anymore shady activities than any other large scale social media platform. When I helped moderate a very large server, we had access to Discord Trust and Safety team and they were trying against what is a massive flood. Automated moderation is extremely difficult even with all AI tools unless you 100% block any NSFW content and sexual messaging and even then, you will get false positives. I…
> I do find it interesting that we hold these platforms liable but not the phone/pager/mail service. Phone and mail networks in letter and spirit obey the law: they don't listen to people's private conversations and they give up complete user info on request by law enforcement. There is nothing more they can do. Discord has built the capability to read every message, public or private, that any user sends. So they ar…
>Discord has built the capability to read every message, public or private, that any user sends
So they need to get rid of that capability