Fediverse

hideshow 113 child comments

[–] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 202 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Companies putting their stuff into discord is like all the businesses that ditched a dedicated website and moved to facebook however many years ago. Yay, now it is on a format that doesn't work well for presenting static information and will inevitably require account registration!

parent

[–] mars@lemmy.ca 65 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Newest iteration of "this meeting could have been an email" has become "this Discord could have been a wiki".

hideshow 3 child comments

parent

[–] Dil@is.hardlywork.ing 5 points 2 years ago*

wiki + ai search = discord except ppl are the ai remembering stuff said in the chat lol, reddit + google was once good, nowadays I click on the other results since the reddit reply is its already been answered use google

parent

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] vonbaronhans@midwest.social 104 points 2 years ago (7 children)

I quite like Discord, but I really only use it for it's original purpose - a place for groups of friends to hang out, play video games with voice chat, and maybe watch shows/movies together. For these purposes, Discord is great!

I have found very little value in how Discord gets used for anything and everything else - forums for video games, support channels for businesses, 1000+ member communities, etc etc. All of those use cases feel better served through traditional websites and forums... but it's so much easier to set up a Discord server for the average person it has turned into a weird default.

In that regard, fuck Discord.

hideshow 7 child comments

parent

[–] billwashere@lemmy.world 42 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Yeah anything ephemeral is fine like chats and what not. But this idea of using it as support platform is just dumb. You end up with people asking the same question over and over and it either doesn’t get answered because no one is around to answer it or likely because they’re annoyed at the same questions over and over. There is no organization and no institutional knowledge. It’s like it ends up being set up by people who think it’s what the cool kids want. And these giant communities just exacerbate this issue. Everything ends up being noise. It’s the reason I usually ended up turning off the world or general channels in WoW. It just ended up being annoying and distracting.

When I’m trying resolve a situation that I need some sort of support I wanna be able to search if others have had the same issue and see discussion around that topic. I don’t need synchronous communication for that. I don’t care if it was 3 months ago someone had the problem if they figured out how to fix it. The way to do that is forums, Reddit (well before the enshittification), or even Lemmy.

hideshow 3 child comments

parent

[–] timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

Ie. The equivalent of sending the output of your wiki to /dev/null

parent

load more comments (1 reply)

[–] skytrim@reddthat.com 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

In my head Discord = toxicity. Not sure how it got that rep for me but it has gotten it. Thus, wont lose sleep if it dies out. Perhaps I am wrong. Reviewing rationality of this prejudice is on my ToDo List after a million other things...

parent

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 22 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I despise discord from a user interface and business practice perspective. What a piece of shit

parent

[–] joshchandra@midwest.social 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

This is exactly what I was gonna say: I'm amazed that so many millions of people can tolerate its atrocious UI. Even now, the amount of notifications I get from the constant text channels across "servers" (which is such a misnomer for merely "communities") is so ridiculous that I ignore 99.9% of it.

parent

load more comments (1 reply)

[–] tfm [S, A] 13 points 2 years ago (80 children)

How do we get them to switch to something like Element?

hideshow 80 child comments

parent

[–] riskable@programming.dev 58 points 2 years ago (36 children)

Element needs to be better. Discord is awesome with the way it auto-plays looping videos/gifs and has animated emojis.

Seriously: That's all they'd need to do. The element devs need to focus on fun.

hideshow 36 child comments

parent

[–] tfm [S, A] 15 points 2 years ago (1 child)

Fun is always great to capture the masses!

parent

[–] Dil@is.hardlywork.ing 4 points 2 years ago

thats why I want misskey the emoji reactions to anything are always more fun than just likes

parent

[–] troed@fedia.io 13 points 2 years ago (6 children)

Isn't that a client side issue though? Element is just one Matrix client. I haven't used it myself but heard from others that Fluffychat (another Matrix client) is more like Discord.

hideshow 6 child comments

parent

[–] riskable@programming.dev 14 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Yeah it's probably just a client side issue but the OP mentioned Element, specifically 🤷

I just wanted to point out that Element is no fun! No fun at all!

It works and it works great for what it does. Even voice and streaming are great with Element. It's just got a terrible, no-fun interface and pointless limitations on things like looping videos. You can't even configure it to make them play properly (as in, automatic and endlessly, the way they were meant to be played! 😤).

Looping videos and animated emojis are super fun ways to chat with people. Even in professional settings! It really breaks up the humdrum and can motivate people to chat and share more.

Element is all serious all the time and going into a chat channel there feels like a chore.

parent

load more comments (4 replies)

[–] fahfahfahfah@lemmy.billiam.net 8 points 2 years ago

It is, but Element is still the "Gold standard" Matrix client and the most popular. And if you're going to create a brand new chat protocol, you should make sure that your flagship client measures up to the competition.

parent

[–] Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 years ago (6 children)

What would likely help a lot if it was easier to get set up, particularly on a VPS or something like that. Small businesses and or larger community projects would be more likely to jump on possibly.

Another thing is ability to easily join, a lot of the above just have an easy link to join their discord server, not sure how easy matrix on boarding is currently as I still haven't gotten my instance functional yet (not even half done with synapse configuration seemingly)

hideshow 6 child comments

parent

load more comments (6 replies)

load more comments (20 replies)

[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 10 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Most of these communuties using Discord are better served by something that isn't a chatroom. So, so, so confusingly many of them use them as a store of permanent information. Like a website+forum.

Many times the benefit of Discord is the ability to paywall parts of it with Patreon integration. We need more foss and federated options that do this.

parent

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 10 points 2 years ago* (10 children)

Or Matrix?

According to history:

Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable, or…
If it reaches a critical mass… You can't. See: Facebook.

The Fediverse can adopt a few nice communities, but honestly bringing the larger population seems hopeless.

hideshow 10 child comments

parent

[–] The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world 16 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable

Discord is going public soon, so start the timer...

parent

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

Discord is scary popular though, like Facebook popular. I am really scared the enshittification will stick hard, like it has for Facebook.

parent

[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 4 points 2 years ago

they already forced ads on discord.

parent

[–] TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

RIP D&D campaign's chat service 😬

parent

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

Yeah, so many projects and companies using Discord for support seemed like such a bad idea.

parent

[–] lena@gregtech.eu 8 points 2 years ago

Or Matrix?

Element is a Matrix client

parent

[–] tfm [S, A] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

larger population seems hopeless.

But what is the barrier? We have a functioning infrastructure. We need to solve the last piece of the puzzle.

People need an easy way to join!

Mastodon has already shown that this works. Even if they aren't as big as others yet, they still make up about two-thirds of the Fediverse. Now we need to replicate this for Lemmy, Pixelfed, and so on, and share our findings along the way.

parent

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

You mean drag them from platforms that have a vested interest in keeping them locked in and squashing competitors like the Fediverse?

In platforms that spend billions on engagement optimization algorithms, with the sole purpose of keeping users addicted, basically with government and business landscape backing?

Look, I’m optimistic about the Fediverse, this is a great refuge in the hellscape that is the internet. But you can’t make people want to change. I've learned this IRL, but see it with (for example) persecuted people continuing to use Twitter even though its owner basically has a gun to their heads. There’s a big gulf between being a fantastic refuge and taking the internet from Facebook and Google. Even if every phone on the planet had an easy button to switch to Fediverse alternatives in one click… many would not take it, and that’s an utter fantasy.

parent

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 2 years ago

This pretty much. At some point one has to accept that the people who want to be saved can be saved, and those who don't, can't. We shouldn't (reasonably or not) waste ourselves for the latter in spite of the former.

parent

[–] Samskara@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 years ago

Matrix/Element has shitty usability and reliability compared to Discord.

For lots of communities, they could use modern forum software like Discourse with better results.

parent

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 2 years ago

XMPP / Jabber is better.

parent

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

Rant

I don't think you can for most people that is what is so infuriating right? In my experience people who are entrenched in Discord are completely and utterly entrenched in it, to the point that I have lost contact with a lot of these people effectively since I don't use Discord.

The important choice was with all the community leaders who decided to make the move to Discord at crucial moments where they could have NOT done that.

I think any shift off of Discord is also going to have to come from community leaders of organizations, projects, game development communities etc... deciding to move off the platform at crucial decision points.

However, and this is something people who happily pushed their entire lives onto Discord would confidently tell me we could easily do if Discord got bad, everyone isn't just going to straight up leave once they have built their entire digital communication around Discord...

Now I frequently see game developers complain that they can't accurately get a picture of their playerbase because large categories of players aren't on their discord!! and I have to keep my palm from blowing a hole through my face when the two loudly meet.

The brainworms are so bad that these developers will conclude the issue is with their playerbase not wanting to use Discord instead of it being an issue with DEVELOPERS DECIDING TO COMMUNICATE WITH THEIR PLAYERBASE WITH A SHITTY, EXCLUSIONARY TOOL THAT HAS AWFUL SEARCH.

I can't express how much this gets under my skin, it is like this assumption that if you are even slightly a gamer than you are on Discord all the damn time has become rheified and cemented into place so rigidly that developers are literally tossing away large swaths of their playerbase feedback because they refuse to use a different tool to get feedback and communicate with their community. No forum, no custom website, nothing, Discord or bust.

I have seen the effects in games like Battlebit where it is clear that the developers were catering to only a small subsection of the playerbase that was very active and prominent on Discord and it ended up torpedoing the game because changes kept happening that clearly signalled to large portions of the playerbase that they were basically invisible to the developers.

I have watched this problem, stewing in my frustration, evolve from a minor personal annoyance to being a serious systematic issue causing community organization to become dysfunctional and broken because Discord is clearly a shitty tool for that community (that clearly a lot of people refuse to use or check regularly).... and YET everybody in those communities behaves like it was always a foregone conclusion that the community would have to move to Discord, that is just the way it is.

screams into void

Gamers are so confidently stupid.

Also before anyone says "well it is a good tool for communicating with friends in a DnD group or something" ... yes I know it is good for that, you know why I know that it is good for that? Because that is the easiest usecase for any communication and organizational tool to tackle, Discord isn't good at this usecase, it is just a laughably easy usecase compared to how mindbendingly difficult it is to wrangle larger communities of... not necessarily friends.

hideshow 3 child comments

parent

[–] Glitchvid@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

Further hampered by the Steam "discussions" that are an incredibly unmoderated cesspit.

parent

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago (5 children)

You don't....you go back to forums. They're searchable. Discord and Facebook and well anything self hosted isnt via search engines

hideshow 5 child comments

parent

load more comments (5 replies)

load more comments (18 replies)

[–] simple@lemm.ee 9 points 2 years ago* (4 children)

Yeah I remember voicing this concern when all online communities seemed to be going to discord and people seemed to mainly laugh at me in response at the time.

Because there hasn't been a single proper alternative until very recently, and even then they're not as user friendly.

parent

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects, I don't know what you mean by an alternative to Discord because my argument is that Discord is shit for organizing.

Discord is great for chat, both voice and text, it is a great live space to have for a community. I don't dispute that. Sure there hasn't been good alternatives to recently for that specific usecase....

What I dispute, and what I am pointing out is that Discord ate forums, it ate all kinds of public, publically accessible formats for online communities that were much more easily searchable and collatable into useful information for everybody.

Discord is a fucking hallway of a thousand fractured silo'd conversations locked behind an account login. I hate Discord for destroying the internet before it which I could freely browse and learn so much more from.

parent

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 2 years ago

Excuse me, Jabber / XMPP is about as old as I am!