Me in 2002: “Wow this IRC thing is pretty sweet, I bet people in 2026 will still be using it and it will be even better.”
People in 2026: “I just cannot live without six different closed source, bloated, expensive, corporate versions of IRC which are somehow worse in every imaginable way than IRC was in 2002.”
did irc have voice/video/screensharing?
I already said Discord was worse in every way imaginable.
I’ve been wondering if IRC still exists. I used to use it way back in the day, is it still. Bathing I can get back into?
It is, my old some of my old hangouts are still around on dalnet, anyone else have a bumping server to recc?
Oh please! you only need 3 disenfranchised users to write such article. 99% of people just talk and never walk the walk.
You know how many millions of people are using discords daily. Some servers have millions of subscribers and many have hundreds of thousands where do you think those people will migrate to.
Discord will be just fine! I know people how spend all their free time on it.
I deleted discord when they introduced this plan the first time. Not like it was going to go away, magically, no, it was always going to happen.
Don’t need it
It also says that 90 percent of Discord users won’t have to bother with age verification thanks to its age estimation system.
If you believe this…
Perhaps open source projects should stop using it as a replacement for forums
“I am legit probably going to close my servers and delete my account after all this,”
Oh by gods just fucking do it! All year I’ve had friends say shit like this, but then it turns out me and one friend of mine were the only ones with the balls to do it.
We set up a Matrix server for everyone, but then the excuses come rolling in, and they’re still going “I will close down my Discord account…! If it gets any worse…”
Edit: anyway, they’re not my friends anymore. I had hoped they were better people. They certainly talk like better people.
It’s hard to leave when a huge chunk of your interpersonal connections are tangled in its web. It’s the same reason Facebook and Twitter still exist.
That’s part of the reason why these platforms have such high valuations per capita, opposed to non- or less-social apps. There’s a lot of momentum.
I host a Matrix server myself and even I still use Discord more because that’s where people are. Matrix has its own issues and, frankly, it’s a shitshow; discord offers a lot of features with better UX and it has a lot of people.
The only reason Skype and team speak died* was because Discord provided a better value. Now it has the momentum, and the only way it will die is if something else offers even more value. Enshitification helps shift, but the momentum fights against it; momentum is like a small multiplier on top of its feature value.
Even if the app enshitifies, even if their base value drops; the product is still larger because of the userbase. So it becomes a chicken and egg problem. Until an inflection point is hit, their sheer mass buys them room to enshittify.
People who can walk away early are the exception, not the rule. It’s why people still use Reddit more than Lemmy. I may get some hate for this, but I don’t think the people on Lemmy are inherently “better.” There are selection biases, and I’m sure that holds true by some metrics, but not in totality.
“If everyone accelerated at the same time, there wouldn’t be a traffic jam” is true, but that’s not how the world or its people work; you just need to come to terms with that before you can do anything about it.
Edit: speech to text typos. Probably missed some.
Matrix has its own issues and, frankly, it’s a shitshow;
For what it’s worth, I use it daily with no significant trouble.
I guess it depends on your usage patterns.
My complaints are mostly about UX and privacy. If all you need is simple messaging, it works fine if not just a little clunky. I hate signal as far as I’m concerned it’s basically a sigint op; but I’d usually recommend it if the simple messaging case is all you care about.
For matrix, the client landscape is a clusterfuck and feature adoption is lousy at best. How those features are communicated to a user is plainly bad, or lacking even in the best cases.
Use element and try to make a voice call with your friends: Is it encrypted? How do you know? Is it only the one-on-one call or is the Jitsi group encrypted too? Just TLS or e2e and when can your homeserver or other federated servers see? What about video streams? message reactions? Are media attachments? On disk? Has there been any work at all towards obfuscating or otherwise protecting metadata? What relays are being used and for what features? On and on and on.
All of these questions have answers. The problem is that they are communicated very differently and the answers vary per feature, per client, per room.
I vaguely remember, when I was testing clients, a one-to-one call had encryption drop silently because the other client didn’t support it, and there was no visual signal of that fact in the app at all. Frankly, it’s just disturbing.
And that’s just the technical things that I care about, that I don’t want to dig into the source code or pull out wireshark for. Normies care less, but will get tripped up by the recovery key and verification systems before even having to worry about that. Not to mention that the key hygiene of most people is absolutely terrible. Even some of my very technical sysadmin friends wind up with a bunch of unused device identities in their chains; some clients don’t even show them at all.
/matrix rant
But yeah it’s a fine substitute for discord if you’re willing to give up some features. With a good home server, it can be pretty painless day-to-day.
You shouldn’t get hate for it. Most people aren’t that deep into the weeds of their given apps to worry about this stuff, and honestly, that’s probably healthy 😅
Except when it involves the livelihood of other people.
For anyone else thinking about Matrix for public chat rooms, consider setting them up without encryption. This will remove friction for your less patient and less technical users, and may avoid frustrating glitches in some client apps.
There’s not really much point in encrypting a public room anyway, so you might as well keep it simple. The client-to-server connection will still be encrypted, which is the same level of privacy that Discord has. (And you can enable encryption on a room later if you want.)
And for the love of all the gods, don’t make an account on Matrix.org and complain that it’s slow and sluggish. You cannot and should not treat Matrix like a centralised service.
The issue is many groups only have a presence on Discord, like community groups. I’m part of a couple local communities, and there’s no way you’re going to get hundreds of people to migrate over without something that affects functionality in a major way finally prompting people to make the switch.
This feels relevant for those people
Not giving a shit is frequently the best option for the individual, and the individual is the only one that matters.
Maybe, but I think it really boils down to convenience and ease of use. People will stick around until the pain of moving to a new platform is less than the pain of staying there.
I’m privileged enough and it doesn’t negatively affect me personally, so why should I care
I think it really boils down to convenience and ease of use
Yes. I agree. Lol.
People will stick around until the pain of moving to a new platform is less than the pain of staying there
Another one for you. Basically, it’s gas prices for the individualists:
I think you’re preaching to the choir though. Most people on Lemmy aren’t here because its got the best memes OE anything. It just sucks when it seems like almost everyone in your life shrugs at doing the right thing because it is inconvenient.
Yeah, I agree. Like I said with the first one though, I think it’s relevant to those people who choose not to support their friends, not so much us here.
“It’s one more app” was the answer I got with signal. “I don’t want one more app.” Not an hour later we talked about how they had just downloaded like 4 different airline apps. But one app for me was too much?
Literally this whenever I mention what Discord has been caught with.
My friend reached out to some people I used to know on Discord now that it’s AI and age verification is finally fully active, and the response he got was “I know, but, I didn’t notice any change”.
This comic is referring to holding positions in political context where there is an active genocide being perpetrated by the US on 2 fronts both in Gaza and at home via ICE detention centers. Comparing it to people who are struggling to find a rellacement for a chat app because of age verification is either a gross misue of your ability to comprehend analogy, or you really see consumption on par with mass violence and terrorism.
Maybe you need to sit this out for a bit.
Upvotes say otherwise friend.
If you can’t recognize the similarity, or how consumption and individualism enables mass violence and terrorism because someone remains unaffected, maybe you should reassess your worldview.
Everything exists in a context. And I don’t think anyone except for you thinks I’m equating consumerism and genocide. I am drawing a parallel. Scale and impact are entirely separate things.
Please don’t try and force a narrative onto me. Look up diffusion of responsibility and scope insensitivity to see what I’m pointing to here.
Jesus christ then yeah you really aren’t interested in any of the things you claim. You realize there is NO ethical consumption under capitalism right? That means there is NO right choice. You do what you can with ehat you have available. If you want to only consume the things that produce exactly zero or less net harm in society you’re gonna have to start drinking your own filtered piss. Now because I understand analogy I can say you are basically already doing that.
And leaning on upvotes are a great way to reveal that you were polling from the get go and only assuming what you said might hit. What if you got downvoted because you were in a different community that was getting a different point across? I now just don’t think you actually have a point you’re just agitating because it’s the popular move
The upvotes I couldn’t care less about lol. I just used it to show that others appear to recognize what I’m saying. It did open me up to being a “polling data farming agitator” I guess, on a niche platform to boot, but 🤷
But “no ethical consumption under capitalism” helps me more than it helps you. That phrase exists to say systemic complicity shouldn’t paralyze people into doing nothing, not that individual and collective choices carry zero weight. If choices genuinely didn’t matter, boycotts wouldn’t be a thing worth having opinions about, companies wouldn’t spend money on PR to avoid them, and states wouldn’t pass anti-BDS legislation to head them off. Discord rolled back their verification push after backlash. They added the credit card mechanism because of it too, their words, not mine. Public pressure, people being active, brought a material outcome that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. You and I wouldn’t be conversing if people didn’t give a shit because there’s no ethical consumption and, according to you, it therefore wouldn’t matter.
So which is it? Either collective consumer/user pressure can move outcomes, in which case individual participation isn’t irrelevant and the mechanism I described (aware, unaffected, therefore inactive) is worth naming when you see it. Or it can’t, in which case the Discord rollback you’d have to explain away didn’t happen for the reason it obviously did.
Naming the mechanism doesn’t mean every instance of it carries equal weight, and I take the point that reaching for the heaviest possible comparison isn’t necessary to make it. But dismissing the mechanism itself with “no ethical consumption, so nothing you do matters” is just a thought-terminating cliche being used exactly backwards.
Hey first and foremost I think you’re a reasonable person and you took a step back in a lot of those points to prove it and I appreciate it.
I want to take a look at the whole throughline here though, someone made a claim that the problem you’re going to run into is large communities that either don’t have the means or the organization to relocate platforms. You posted the comic in response and then immediately came out swinging about how complicit consumption enables terrorism. Does this not seem entirely inappropriate to you? Aunt Tracey’s knitting group got together and had all of their niece’s show them how to use Discord, no one can explain FOSS hosting to them, now Al-Qaeda wins. If I’m being dramatic yes, but only as much as you are in response here.
I stopped paying for Nitro the first time this news came out. I haven’t reupped it. Discord is a miserable experience for me now and is an ugly app without the Nitro options. Doesn’t chanve the fact that the few communities I do belong to are still central to and maintained within the Discord environment. If they move I’ll move but some left infigthing jerk off session isn’t going to be what changes their mind.
My real point is I find anything that leads to further alienation is going to be the wrong choice, and that’s including, for lack of a better term, libjacketing people who don’t have a dog in the race one way or another. We’re all looking for a way out man.
And I fucking hate those people. All of them will say “but I won’t move until other people move”, and so nobody will move.
Complacency is not a good excuse.
Just a random reminder that judging people SOLELY on their consumption practices under capitalism is actually an asshole move. Not everyoneone has the time, patience, or means to make all of the same choices you do, and it’s not their fault that availabilty is commanded by monopolies and consolidated power structures.
You can keep hating if you want but those people will not miss you and you will find that your options are rapidly shrinking at a time when you’re going to need people most.
I am still waiting on the teamseak6 fixing the linux screen share or fluxer allowing the desktop app connect to my self hosted server. Then I will leave this ahit behind. Both features should release soonish
Can’t Fluxer Canary already connect to self hosted servers?
Anyway, despite how easy it is to set up a Fluxer server, having E2EE is a hard requirement, and the team has been mostly focusing on the android app.
Canary can do it already? I need to check tomorrow when i’m on the pc again
It… should.
I do agree, but the thing is vendor lock-in is real. Indoctrination by the powerful capitalists does wonders for masses to never leave the app at all. It really takes a changed mindset to switch to alternatives or to quit it entirely.
Vendor loyalty, or letting yourself be in what is essentially an abusive relationship with a corporate product who doesn’t even care you exist, is something ill never understand.
And Matrix isn’t the only option out there
and good ole IRC
Fluxer is still behind on Matrix with clients like Sable.
Sable used to be behind on Fluxer, but Sable made a lot of updates over the months, and Fluxer is more or less currently focusing entirely on the mobile app, while missing some rather important key features, like Federation and E2EE for private chats.
Fluxer is, however, far more easy to set up a self hosted server with. You cna get it done within an hour.
Sable is POG
POG?
I stepped away from Discord months ago and I must admit, I haven’t found a good replacement yet. And if it is decent, no one else I know will jump on it.
Its frustrating.
(I know someone may feel compelled to offer a solution by pointing me towards a Discord-like. I assure you, I’ve already tried or looked into it.)
It’s not quite ready yet but Fluxer is trying to be a drop in replacement for discord with self hosted options. I’m just waiting for it to be a bit more ready and stable before I jump ship, but as soon as they glance my way with age verification I’ll probably jump early
Been using Fluxer since March. Is there something specific you need before you consider it ready?
I would like the iOS app to be out of test flight primarily
Not to press the issue too much here, but is there a specific reason why? I don’t have an iPhone so I can’t comment on that version, but the android app is perfectly usable.
Probably because they use an iPhone. You can’t use android apps on iPhones. Just like you can’t use iOS apps on android.
I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. My point was that the android app is likewise in the play store beta program, but is very usable. But, as I said, I’m unfamiliar with iphone so if the test program means you can’t use it, I see.
On iOS being in beta via TestFlight means only 10,000 people can test the app at a time. After that limit is hit no one can sign up to “test” the app unless someone drops out.
Looks like it’s back to irc and teamspeak.
90% of the reason I’m still on discord is that’s where my oldschool RuneScape clan is
My friend group moved to Steam groups, which… Isn’t a great replacement.
If Steam got rid of removing messages after two weeks, it would definitely be more viable.
i also really miss the easy emoji responses, and gif intergration.
Just set up my self hosted fluxer. All my friends come over. Wild.
I was hoping with the year run-up we’d have a better alternative replacement, but alas.
Matrix is… alright. Element is fine on Linux but Element X doesn’t support spoiler text on Android. Fluffychat looks really nice on Android but has buggy unread notifications. Sable is also pretty feature-rich on Android at least, but it’s also a very laggy app.
Schlidinext is basically element X android but better (it’s a soft fork), and supports tables and spoilers and all that
I thought Next was abandoned for Revenge?
I mean, a new beta was released today, and some of the components are shared between the apps
I deleted my 11 year old account after the first shitstorm. I’m happier now. Discord fucking sucks.
I quit discord over this a long time ago. I am not coming back.
good.gif
Cool. Good for them. Hope they die.
