They supposedly can be disabled in settings- but we all know that won’t last. They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode and it’s only a matter of time.
They supposedly can be disabled in settings- but we all know that won’t last. They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode and it’s only a matter of time.
Discord is a sack of shit anyways…I don’t get the obsession?
this thread is making me realize I’m clearly missing something. How do people actually use discord? Me and my friends basically use it as semi-permanent group chat. A few different topic areas, and no stupid android/ios compatibility issues. I’m also in two servers for some small clubs. Do people really use it the way they would lemmy/reddit?
A few open-source projects I follow use it as their main community tool and it sucks.
I don’t mind my friend groups using it because it’s just for ephemeral chats and gaming anyway, but I want to know why these other communities think it’s appropriate.
Edit: tldr: I think I probably could’ve saved myself a lot of time by just saying that discord is like slack but for friends/fun.
I didn’t think people use it like lemmy/Reddit. People use it like IRC. That’s the analogous tech. IRC is better in almost every way, but not in the most important ways: ease of use, and voice chat.
I know only a handful of people who could set up a server for IRC, but in discord, it’s a one-button process. Sure, you can use a public IRC server, but then your channels are harder to organize and you don’t have as much moderation control. I dn’t think
I would vastly prefer IRC, but even if it was easy to set up, I would still need something for voice chat, and, sure, there are plenty of voice chat tools, but not ones that integrate with text chat so well.
I think a lot of people like the API and the bots built from it, tho personally that’s not something I use much.
I’m in probably ~50 servers: groups of friends, video game guilds, tech chat (eg HTMX, Lit, Svelte), random interests (eg mechanical keyboards), and community servers for video games (eg a couple of LFG servers, a couple servers where I can ask questions to tryhards, streamers’ communities, etc).
I would vastly prefer to use something FOSS, but there just isn’t something that does it so well and so easily – and even then, I’d probably have to use discord for a bunch of these things.
Let’s say it’s like Slack + Zoom, but it ends up used for things that would have made way more sense as a Lemmy/Reddit/old school forum. You can’t find anything old without pausing the scroll, the interaction is piss poor because nothing is visibly sticky for more than a couple of hours even on a slow channel, and then because people (rightly) feel that it’s more like a chat, the feed fills up with low effort nonsense and dick-baggery.
In my company, Slack is useful because we’re all stuck in front of it for 8hours+ per day, we’re all incentivized to be on our best behavior, groups are mostly manageable in size, and to the extent there’s a social aspect, it is to replace “water cooler talk” which was always light and ephemeral anyway. It works… fine. I don’t love it, but it works fine. Zoom too.
Discord is also fine for what it is, but it’s terrible when it’s the only public facing option for sharing information and fielding questions about a project or topic.
For sure. Look, I hate Stack Overflow as much as the next guy but you gotta admit, for the big picture, long term, best practice for the future of software development, that’s the correct format: one question, focused discussion, end.
Discord’s failure to make its history available is really going to put a big hole in the middle of our cultural wisdom.
Every single entertainer (YouTuber, Twitch Streamer, etc.), community game server, some Open Source projects, Indie game developers and anyone who gets public support through Patreon uses Discord as the sole public hub. Colleges, Universities, Online courses also rely heavily on Discord. It’s a social network they can advertise, some servers are for subscribers only and is seen as a reward to get access to that. I’m part of a dozen or so servers for online things of interest to me, even though I hate the platform. It’s all silenced and without notifications, else I would go crazy, and I never chat with anyone there. But unfortunately there are several events, opportunities and activities that are exclusively communicated via the Discord server. It’s like cancer. Just like Instagram and WhatsApp, I have them not because I like it, but because if I remove them entirely or too aggressively it will take my social life with it.
I like to watch twitch streams and play modded videogames (minecraft, lethal company, valheim). Every single twitch streamer has their own discord. Fine I guess, they want control over their space and it’s full of cat pics and tattoos anyway. But the mod makers do the same, patch notes on discord, feature discussion on discord, some even close their githubs and want bugs on discord. I don’t want to be part of your shitty community, I want to know which recolored slime is killing me through walls so I can disable it in the configs. And because the discord search is garbage, I still have to sift through racist memes and wildly outdated info to find what I need.
This is basically how I use it as well. I am in a few game jam channels, but i only use them when the jams are running.
After however many years I finally joined two discord instances for some niche topics where community was hard to find elsewhere.
I haven’t used IRC in a few years I admit, but I’m a few months in with discord, and so far it has never stopped feeling like IRC with a confusing interface, a gaudy new coat of paint, and emojis everywhere.
I have no idea why it’s seemingly the ONLY place anyone wants to create an interactive community anymore for so many things.
Because its zero-effort to make a functional forum (no hosting or backend to be set up) and you have almost full control over the space / it’s isolated from other communities (unlike reddit)
EDIT: I don’t like discord either, but I can see why content creators and the likes would prefer it to other forums
It’s decent for voice chat in games.
I’m not sure why it became the open source world’s documentation platform of choice.
Yeah, but so is mumble.
Great, now you just need somebody to rent a server for you.
That’s where Discord won, along with being able to run in a browser for those who didn’t want to fill their PC with crap comms software for one PUG run through Uldir.
So, the answer is as usual laziness and minimum effort for anything. We really all deserve what we are experiencing.
??? I hope you don’t actually think this
There’s no reason to require everyone on earth to prioritize a better computer interfacing environment over their free time.
My time is worth way more to me than video game voice chat – but it’s not either/or. Thanks to other developers, I can have both.
Well yes, but at the same time if you had to pay a few bucks a month for Lemmy or it only worked on a special app, would you be on it?
Discord nitro is a thing. They are bleeding money like mofos. There’s no more investor money, they are desperate for income.
sounds like it’s time to allow third-party clients distribute the server software, shut down free “servers” and offer paid hosting and support. that would cut costs a great deal.
Yes. In fact, I’m sponsoring the project and I am currently using a special app.
OK. And how many other people would be here for you to talk to?
I remember the times when projects had their own infrastructure or at least used infrastructure they could easily move away from, like irc. It works, we just don’t want to anymore.
there are web clients for mumble
Does it also do temporary passes so you don’t have to give full access to people who only want to play alongside you once?
One issue I had with the Discord web client was the lack of push to talk. Anyone who raided with a Darth Vader will relate. I presume Mumble would be similar. You don’t really want to give a browser full key logging access. Useful for listening in though.
Mumble does that one thing just fine, but it doesn’t do all the things discord does.
And it’s not just the fact that discord does all those things that’s made it so dominant; it’s the fact that it does all those things in one place.
Even just the core features of voice chat, text chat, and the ability to set up a new server where you have extensive moderation control in one click – it’s what people wanted.
They don’t need a handful of different programs to glue together a shittier experience, they need a FOSS discord/slack.