- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
Discord isn’t exactly known for generous file-sharing limits, still, the messaging app offered a 25MB limit to free users. The company has now updated its support page to reflect the upload limit for free users has been lowered to 10MB.
Could anyone explain the attraction of discord? To me it’s UX is atrocious.
Back in 2016 I managed to get all of my gaming friends on discord simply by saying “It’s like Skype but it doesn’t suck”
We simply needed something that worked and let us do voip calls without having to jump through the hoops of setting up ventrilo, mumble or teamspeak. Skype was so aggressively bad that any alternative was like finding a waterpark in the middle of the desert.
Discord got big in online gaming because they offered a VOIP and text chat browser cliemt. Just copy or type the short link and you’re in in a minute. They also did free hosting which was huge.
Compared to Teamspeak or Ventrilo, literally just eliminating the steps of downloading a client, installing it, and typing in an IP address caused them to explode overnight. Also you could “host” without changing router settings (most kids/students have to ask their parents or jump through hoops for this).
Technically there was stuff like Skype but that never had the convenient team speak style chat rooms to drop in and out of freely.
Within months of suddenly getting popular, discord had a huge userbase that everybody was using already, and that momentum got us to the point where in some aspects its even replacing the role of wiki’s and forums even though its terrible at it.
Also I remember while teamspeak was paid, discord was free.
Eh. There were free licenses. As long as you could show you weren’t using it commercially.
There’s no open source equivalent that does seamless audio and video streaming on every platform.
There is one actually.
It’s obviously a WIP. A discord clone essentially
Last time I checked you can’t even share your screen
dealbreaker
It’s the place where things like game communities use primarily for instant chat.
We’ve found it to be the “least bad option” for DnD. Have a Discord window open for everyone to video chat in, have a browser window open with Owlbear Rodeo or Foundry / Forge for your tokens and character sheets, all works smoothly enough. The text chat is sufficient for sending the DM a private message; for group chat to share art of the things you’ve just run into or organise the next session.
Completely agree that for anything “less transient”, then the UX is beyond awful and trying to find anything historical is a massive PITA.
Google Whiteboard could have been better. Hell, I can think of a dozen apps in the Google graveyard that could have been better.
But Discord still exists and they don’t, so…
My dumbass friends who work in tech thought IRC was too much of a hassle. So we ended up on dickschord
You know that IRC has waaaaay less features, right?
Yeah but we’ve only used text for years now, so go doodle your features
we’ve only used text for years now
Speak for yourself, I send quite a bunch of pictures and so do plenty of users
I don’t get it either. They aggressively try to sell nitro, they have ads embedded in their ui. I have no idea why people don’t hate it.
they didn’t 5 years ago. enshittification at its finest.
Its really convenient if you’ve got a group of friends spread out across the country for gaming. The voice channels allow people to jump in and out at will. No calling each other. That and bots are really eady to build for it. Sure its all unencrypted but im not putting anything of real value into it.
The NSA agent assigned to monitor me has a character on my Foundry instance.
I’m sure there are dozens of you caring about screen share!
on mobile it’s just a huge pile of stinky shit anyway
*everywhere
Just use signal or any e2e instant messanger instead of it.
Matrix works pretty good.
Is there a Matrix for dummies guide? It seems difficult to get started with, finding the right client etc.
It’s kinda like lemmy here, but a little more pain because not only do you have to pick your provider, but you also need to be very mindful of how your key pair is managed. Like… don’t just uninstall a client without going through the effort of trusting and verifying a new one first, or you may lose the ability to decrypt a lot of history and also break trust with relationships you have.
Security first is a major concern in the system, so it doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination unfortunately.
That said, once you convince yourself to set it up, and convince anyone else to do the same, it works pretty nicely. It’s like an inner venn diagram of discord, telegram and IRC.
I also haven’t used it in a few years. Chat systems in general don’t cooperate with the way my brain works.
Yeahh no shit! Been using it for a short while now, glad Im able to find a couple groups to chat with, such an underrated service/protocol or whatever. I hope it and element keep getting better maybe I can get more friends to use it! Been tryna ditch Instagram cus half for the reason I use it nowadays is simply to keep in touch with friends and family as I don’t use any other messaging service ATM.
It… Is?
are you fucking kidding me?? TEN MB IN 20 FUCKING 24.
Discord is such fuckin TRASH
I was a member of a number of groups in a larger gaming community most of which migrated from Reddit/Mumble to Discord. It destroyed the quality and accessibility of written content and lore and I wish it had never happened. Then again, we can’t go back to reddit at this point either.
Guess I’ll be posting my screenshots in 640x480 from now on!
Being part of multiple servers becomes such a painful experience with that interface…even with the “folders” and the search palette.
Unlike other platforms, we store your files for as long as you need them, so it is crucial that we manage our storage sustainably
I mean, its great that they offer that, but all my files dont need to be permemnant. I would love the ability to review and delete old files
Yeah, makes no sense that they store some pdf I was dragging over to someone one time. Super inefficient. They should allocate an amount of storage per user that then rolls and deletes the oldest files when the cap gets exceeded to make room for the new files.
It’s probably because it’s their property now and personal data is precious
Maybe, but then they’d want more data, not complaining about needing to limit it. Or maybe it’s just because they want lots of small files like text, and not waste it on inefficient sound and video files.
They want more data and literally can’t store it efficiently enough. You can read their eula and see, they instantly own anything you upload and you no longer have rights to it, which is absolutely bonkers and pretty dubious in many countries if this is even legal. We found out when they overviewed the security of our studio and we use other communication software now because of it. They could literally argue that they own the assets to the games we make if we send concepts to each other.
Hmm, I wonder if they would get in trouble if someone uploaded child porn to their servers.
Does anyone know of a Discord alternative?
Revolt is the only feature-rich swap in option.
deleted by creator
There isn’t a full alternative, but if you just want text chat with some voice chat added on there are options like Matrix.
Matrix is the closest replacement, and XMPP can replicate some functionality too.
My vote is for Matrix
I haven’t heard of Matrix but I’ve heard of Revolt.
Matrix any good?
Revolt tries to be a discord clone/replacement and suffer from some of the same issues. Matrix happens to have a lot of feature in common, but is focused on privacy and security at its core.
Matrix is a laggy dumpsterfire. Messages take longer to send in Matrix than they do in Lemmy, and Lemmy isn’t even supposed to be a real-time chat app.
Try Element X if you have a mobile. It’s rebuilt on the new sdk and offers a new architecture that has messages come in way faster than on Element (original)
It works tho!
Did you blindly sign up for matrix.org?
Yeah, pick literally any other instance. I went with Mozilla’s, but there are plenty of alternatives. Or host your own!
The first time yeah, but I tried it again on another instance and it was better (at least it didn’t fail to load half the time), but still super slow. The 2nd time is what I was talking about.
What is the best instance with the largest user base?
Edit: and …yes I did
I don’t know. Why do you want a large user base?
Guessing at one reason:
It feels good to know that you’re not signing up for someone’s instance that they’re just trying out admining for the first time and maybe if they’re too busy to do the proper updates next weekend they’ll just close shop.
(And by shop I mean fantastic free volunteering effort of course!)
Matrix.im maybe? I wouldn’t know.
My homeserver is a one-person Conduit installation, and slowness is not something I have encountered. However, in groupchats that happened to be encrypted there were moments when my messages failed to decrypt for others. That might’ve been due to my own carelessness with the VPS though.
Homeserver issue most likely.
Well, it is better than 8, but still sad.
I guess locking basic features behind a paywall didn’t work for them after all, eh?
the enshitification will go faster now i bet
They want your data, everything you upload to discord belongs to that corporation. Corporations do not have souls
It’s a big lie. Why not offer the option to delete automatically after 24h if 15mb extra is so much storage?
Or is it about bandwidth? Why no automatic compression on desktop? Oh wait, that feature existed in the past was scrapped. They think you’re fools.
A feature that’s be nice is giving you a higher upload limit if you make your upload temporary.
Or let you host from your own machine, rather than paying Discord for the privilege of using their wildly overpriced services.
Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link, prevents you from getting hammered with download requests if your upload becomes popular, and allows your content to be accessed when your own machine goes to sleep or has any kind of networking interruption.
Before discord people used to self host teamspeak or some other software. One of the big things you don’t have to think about is the person you just made a joke about or beat in an online game trying to DDOS your machine, because they don’t know where you are.
Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link
You don’t need the whole image, just the route to your machine to retrieve the data. Glorified Bit.ly.
One of the big things you don’t have to think about is the person you just made a joke about or beat in an online game trying to DDOS your machine
Definitely a perk of a bulk centralized system. But the pricing model is still messed up. If Teamspeak sold you gems to buy widgets to mask your IP, I still wouldn’t pay for the service.
I hate discord a lot, but this feature kinda destroys the reason discord exists. We used to have irc which is direct communication and needs both systems to be online ( yes, bouncers exist, but they arent perfect ). We moved away from irc so systems didnt need to be online and it was all in the cloud. Direct communication/file sharing from pc would kinda revert all that lol
( lets gooooo, bring irc back :p )
Huh, I wonder how enshitified it has to get before I stop seeing discord on FOSS projects.
It begins lol.
That they don’t collect as much user data is not enshittification. That is when greed kills it. They have been greedy a long time but not being able to hoard as much free user data is a good thing
discord on FOSS projects
I don’t understand why this was even a thing to begin with. FOSS projects using non-FOSS platforms is kinda weird, especially platforms with unclear financial situations like Discord.
Because you don’t need to have significant experience or rent a VPS in order to do that, and I can respect that. We don’t need to force FOSS developers to become proficient in everything.
What needs to happen is some kind of tool (ideally FOSS) that lets you spin up an actual forum with the same difficulty to set it up as Discord.
Because you don’t need to have significant experience or rent a VPS in order to do that, and I can respect that
I’m not saying you have to self-host… You could still use something that’s open-source and remotely hosted.
Sentry (error logging and bug reporting system) is like this for example. They have a hosted plan, including a generous free plan for open-source projects, but Sentry itself is open-source.
That looks like a really nice policy. But my question then becomes, what happens if the company sells out someday? What if they get bought out by a larger company, or a private equity firm? Did they take funding, and if so, how much leverage do the funders have to influence them to make money and cut out programs like this?
It’s great to see companies trying to break that trend and I highly commend them for it! But we have already seen this pattern a million times before and it always ends due to something similar to this.
It is, but then again many (most) are hosted on GitHub.
Nice! They get less free identity data an own less copyright