Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.
Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?
Right now I’m on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can’t find a clear “winner”.
Its been a while since I used Revolt, I use element everyday. But I’d prefer something more “third party” too. Revolt was servicable back in 2020, maybe it has gotten better?
What are your thoughts on xmpp? Recently I have come to like a lot and am pretty active with friends there.
There are people using xmpp? Last time I set up a server and tried using it with Pidgin, I couldn’t find a soul that used it
They’re out there. The Venn diagram of people still choosing IRC (as opposed to being forced to use it b/c that’s where the community is) is probably just a circle.
I was a big XMPP user back in the day, but because of the lack of multi-device message syncing and the really shoddy state of encryption, I wandered away. Plus, using XML for the protocol really geeked me out. XML is a document format, and per the spec, to be well-formed it needs to have an open and matching close tag. Jabber hacked around this by making a sort of infinite document - you get the open tag, but never the close tag - and it just felt really icky.
I understand a lot of these things have since been addressed. I don’t know if XMPP still uses that bastardized version of quasi-XML without a close tag. But other things have come along that I like more. About 6 months ago I started running a client on my desktop again, but like you, nobody I knew was still using it, and nobody new was advertising it as their connection info, so… yeah. After a few months, I stopped running the client.
You do eventually get the close tag, when you log out. Lol
Xmpp is mostly used for private groups and 1:1 chat, so more of a WhatsApp than a Discord replacement.
But you can find some public channels here: https://search.jabber.network/
The issues you mentioned have been fixed, and XML was never an issue 😅
@sxan @shortrounddev jmp.chat uses XMPP, and it’s a very viable replacement for Google Voice (and generic SIP options like voip.ms), so that’s what got me back on the XMPP train. No one else other than my family is using it with me, though, but it’s still nice to have SMS, (encrypted & decentralized) family chat, and IRC (via biboumi bridge) in one desktop client.
That’s interesting; the integration with SMS is a nice feature. Thanks!
xmpp is still valid but the new kid on the block is activitypub. I don’t think I’ve ever hosted an xmpp server but to me it’s a better suited (mature, focused)protocol with plenty to offer that AP can’t yet.
having said that, stillll no moderation on free networks.
XMPP feels dated and has to much protocol sprawl.
I’ve been tinkering with old BBS software :)
Kibo lives!!!1
mumble is great for VOIP.
Matrix seems interesting, but i think it might be a little bit too heavy handed, im not personally a fan of web tech, though there are other things like xmpp as well.
revolt is meh, apparently their dev team is hostile to self hosting, so there’s that. There’s also spacebar, which is a reverse engineered implementation of the discord API, could be interesting.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by web tech? I don’t know much about how matrix works
a lot of modern technology and software is built on the foundation of work built by the web browser industry, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not necessarily a good thing either. Provides a lot of nice features, native integration into a web browser, industry standard security and encryption procedures.
That’s about it though, Outside of that, running a dedicated version of that app is almost always some bullshit built in electron, which is a horrible buggy mess with horrible performance. Nothing stops devs from integrating these features into a standalone application… But, they likely won’t since they’ve already developed a web browser version.
I also have some problems with the way web tech is generally built, it’s built with the expectation that you will host and treat it as a web app, which is fine, it works. But i prefer not to host services i use via anything web related as generally i find it both intrusive, and problematic, in the instance that a DNS server goes down for example. (it’s not very likely, i know, but still)
I also think a lot of the networking protocols are fairly bloated, but that’s not as big of a deal, it’s just annoying.
anyway, enough of my ranting. Matrix is actually a specification for a set of communication protocols based on the foundation of web tech, it’s highly universal, and inter-compatible, which is great. But it sort of stops there. There are several server implementations, and numerous front end implementations, none of which seem to be particularly, interesting. There’s numerous electron front ends, a few that aren’t (though they won’t support most features) etc, stuff like that, it’s just. Not clean.
It never made sense to me how popular discord was to begin with.
@Xanza@lemm.ee Among my friends, it replaced Facebook Messenger, Teamspeak, and Mumble instantly. It was fast and the voice quality was excellent. The appeal in 2017 was obvious. The bloat that it had tacked onto it since then is egregious.
Don’t get me started on the “rewards”…
The bloat that it had tacked onto it since then is egregious.
VCs gotta make back that ROI…
Don’t forget free servers.
On TS3 it was to either know a friend that rented/hosted it, rent/host it yourself or use a public server.Funny, I remember in 2017 the voice chat had mic issues all the time but now that works much better. But I suppose everything else got bloated…
It used to be fast and not full of useless bloat like what you see right now. The usual enshittification.
Other voice chat programs were crap, discord was significantly better and more consistent. Simple as. It still has features way ahead of other services. The business side is shitty but it works without anyone needing to know anything with no troubleshooting.
- persistent IRC style chat rooms
- virtual “servers” to organize said chat rooms, manage privileges, control visibility
- integration with bots for all sorts of things (moderation, user welcome, dice rollers, etc.)
- integration with games/music players/etc (I don’t use it but it’s very popular)
- privacy and moderation controls
- client allows fine grained notification controls
- voice, video, and screen casting simultaneously
- “server” templates: use an existing server config (roles, permissions, rooms, etc.) when creating a new server.
That’s just off the top of my head.
It’s enshittifying, but the value proposition is still hard to beat. I’m really hoping Matrix catches up with the feature set soon.
Its popularity is more inertia based
Really? Is there an alternative that hits all the points above? I’m really asking.
I’m not subject to intertia. I could move my friends to an alternative in a week. Tell me which alternative has all those features and I’ll switch.
Matrix.
Matrix is spectacularly cursed to the point of being unusable if you self-host it. The protocol is dumb enough to lock you out of rooms hosted on another server forever if anything goes wrong with the key rotation.
Avoid Revolt as there moderation is questionable
Wym moderation? Aren’t you moderating your own server?
There is a single instance everyone is on
Ah ok, yeah in that case yes. Only solution to this would be federation. But matrix is nowhere there yet in terms of normie usability.
Revolt != Matrix
TeamSpeak exists too
Mumble!
Tmspk egssts tuh
That’s a throwback. Let’s take it one step further and just get back on Ventrilo and play some DOTA. (For the younger folks who don’t get the reference: https://youtu.be/aTJncWndUB8 )
I am certainly not one of the younger folks and had never seen that before. That is awesome, thank you for sharing.
Oh man, Basshunter was huge in the chronically-online gamer space in the 2000s. His other songs are pretty good too.
To put it in perspective, the fact that they’re gaming on laptops and LCD monitors was an enviable flex when his songs released.
I still have my copy. I cannot believe that song is like, 18 years old now. It was such a staple of my college experience.
Used to use Vent playing Eve Online 19 years ago. Worked great back then. Apparently it’s still around, but still no Linux support after all these years.
Teamspeak is alright, in fact we use it along with discord for inter-channel Comms. But discord does a lot of stuff that ts doesn’t touch
rocketchat seems decent
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Is there any option to stay on discord but better? Like vencord or something similar through Linux? I cannot imagine being able to get my friends off of discord ever.
I guess that’s the biggest hurdle, especially when it comes to social apps. One tech-savvy person wanting to migrate is usually not enough to start moving a community, even as a small as a group of friends.
Had to experience that first hand. I tried to get my best friends to register on my Matrix server last September and join a room for our group, and they did, but I rarely see any of them online and I only get responses days later, if at all. One even stopped using it entirely, lol. Ah well, but at least I got a Matrix server out of that that I can use to federate with other like-minded people.
if discord is going public they don’t need my turbo sub anymore
Cancelled mine when they redesigned the mobile app anyway. I don’t want a different interface on mobile vs desktop. I want a unified experience, which was their original purpose.
Somebody needs to create an XMPP/Jitsi hybrid
Jitsi-meet is already using xmpp under the hood.
But there are some efforts to add multi-user video calls to full xmpp clients as well. Dino can already do it for a while, and Movim and Libervia recently added experimental support.
Its not quite a full Discord replacement, but for private groups it works quite well.
Isn’t the video the jingle part that Google added to jabber originally (before it dumped everything to remake it from the group up about 4 more times like a GSoC crossed over with groundhogDay)?
Today xmpp uses a distant relative of those original jingle specifications, which have been modernized to use Webrtc.
Do any of the xmpp clients have screen share?
Movim does, for Libervia and Dino I am not 100% sure right now, but at least for Libervia the browser version should have it as it is really more of a general Webrtc browser feature than client specific.
Time to dust off my old Mumble server!
I was reading this thread and started looking for that app again.
