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If you use GitHub, consider SourceHut or Codeberg. If you use Twitter, consider Mastodon instead. If you use YouTube, try PeerTube. If you use Facebook… don’t.
That last bit gave me a chuckle :D
Rather than trying to persuade people to use either incompatible or insufficient alternatives, we must call people to arms and actually create an alternative. Matrix/Element is getting very close and we need more people improving the ecosystem.
Element still needs a UX overhaul and voice channels and the basic building blocks are already there then.
At least Cinny is kinda close UI-wise to Discord.
it doesn’t have drop-in voice/video channels though, which is the #1 USP for Discord for gamers.
element (like discord) is using an electron wrapper, which is awful and there is no way around it. what we need is a real client. nheko is far behind in features, so if anything, we need more people involved in improving that client.
Nheko is the best alternative that I know for the desktop scene. Tbh I hate electron apps.
YES!
THANK YOU!
I have been so limited in participating to conversations about great software only because they happened on Discord and I do not use it by choice.
Let us all use Matrix, instead!
About Discord, what is actually the appeal of using it? The short time I used it was always a huge hassle, with millions of captchas on every login. Then you need to answer weird questionnaires to join communities. And in the end the content was pretty mediocre. Plus the format sucks, you cant really read old messages (like you could do in a forum or on Reddit/Lemmy). And for new messages, it goes way too fast once a few people are participating. Its like combining the worst aspects of a forum with the worst aspects of a chat.
It starts as an alternative to Mumble for gamers to communicate. I can see it is easier to setup compare to Mumble and free. It is very optimized despite using Electron. Feature wise, it is also very complete and customizable.
It eventually grew to what it is today.
mumble (which displaced ventrilo/teamspeak as the previous dominant gaming chat clients) was already displaced by curse voice, which then got displaced by discord.
discord was selling itself as “the good guys” who would never do something scummy, and targetted the market as a slack for gamers, and right before launch, they sold out. but it was already “too big” to get people to change client. and now it’s growing even more because people are looking at it as an alternative platform to facebook groups - now that facebook is fucking up groups.
Discord combines a lot of use cases in to one package. You get voice chat, modern chatrooms, video sharing/streaming, direct messages, group messages/calls etc.
But more importantly it operates on a paradigm where a user joining a “server” means you join all the channels automatically, and access to certain channels can then be revoked or gated instead of granted. This is the exact opposite of what, for example IRC had done (and what Matrix/Element still does to a large extent), and it fosters communities as one group of people can have an n amount text/voice channels dedicated to different conversational topics. This is very useful, even if it’s just for a friend group of 5 people. It is no wonder FOSS projects use Discord when it is so useful for it.
Ironically, what Discord does would work incredibly well as a decentralized system. I cannot believe it’s taking this long for the FOSS community create an alternative.
I quite like Revolt Chat, an open source alternative to Discord with a very similar UI - https://revolt.chat/