I’m personally crossing my fingers for Discord.

  • Deestan ( Deestan@beehaw.org ) 
    115·
    3 years ago

    The day I don’t see “join our Discord” where I would earlier expect to find “visit our forums” will be a good day.

    A bloated live chat monolith is not what I want to use to discuss game bugs or podcast episodes.

      • FaceDeer ( FaceDeer@kbin.social ) 
        14·
        3 years ago

        Yeah, several groups of friends of mine are using Discord to chat and arrange roleplaying nights and such. I use those regularly. But I’ve got several “project” Discords that are forum replacements and I find I almost never go there. Certainly never when I don’t have some specific goal I’m trying to fulfill.

        • sailsperson ( sailsperson@beehaw.org ) 
          13·
          3 years ago

          I don’t know when they introduced it, but at some point, in some servers, I noticed a new channel type: forum. The fact that this is a thing is the greatest proof that Discord is not the end all, be all solution to communication.

          Nothing is, really. One thing I really enjoyed about the 00s web was its diversity, because different things had different places and different formats, and the ever-lasting stakeholder grasp wasn’t as successful at trying to put people in one place to show them ads and drive engagement to please the statistics gazers.

    • noodlejetski ( noodlejetski@kbin.social ) OP
      29·
      3 years ago

      that’s my biggest pet peeve, too.

      GloriousEggroll, the mastermind behind modified version of Valve’s Proton, posts his code on GitHub, and then links to his Discord as a place for reporting bugs.

      • RoboRay ( RoboRay@kbin.social ) 
        18·
        3 years ago

        I actually quit using his Linux distro in large part because the communications were so terrible with Discord being the only way he disseminates information (so so poorly).

        There were issues and the necessary information couldn’t flow effectively in either direction.

        • crank ( crank@beehaw.org ) 
          1·
          3 years ago

          Omg that sounds so obnoxious.

          And doesnt it get exhausting for the devs? I tried using a gittr chat once to get help on an issue and i felt bad for pestering them with something that was totally non urgent. But its not like i can just post something and check back in a few days; it is sort of demanding immediate attention.

    • Kaldo ( Kaldo@beehaw.org ) 
      13·
      3 years ago

      Revolt seems to be to Discord what Lemmy/Kbin are to reddit, but I dont see most people bothering with it unless discord makes some reeaaallly huge mistakes to piss the community off.

        • Kaldo ( Kaldo@beehaw.org ) 
          8·
          3 years ago

          Tbh that whole change has been kinda blown out of proportion, it doesn’t really affect people in any meaningful way IMHO. Discord will have to do much worse to get people to actually stop using it, it is way too convenient as it is, unfortunately.

        • Lucien ( lucien@beehaw.org ) 
          7·
          3 years ago

          Hah, yeah I don’t see people going from “I gotta change my username” to “I gotta change my username and find all my communities in matrix etc.”

          I see this as falling under painful but kinda necessary admin, which is nowhere near the level of friction required for a platform switch with massive disruption to communities.

          That said, the barrier is lower for chat servers than it is for social media - history matters less in discord than it does for reddit, for example. If the server owners decide to migrate to another platform, they can probably convince people to migrate given a good enough reason and alternative. The people online at any given moment matter more than the last couple months of chat history.

    • Acetamide ( Acetamide@lemmy.world ) 
      6·
      3 years ago

      Completely agree! Especially if it some kind of product support. I hate having to scroll through thousands of chronically ordered chat messages to find the solution to the problem I’m having.

    • crank ( crank@beehaw.org ) 
      2·
      3 years ago

      Discord HATER here. Im happy for gamers to have their stuff; makes sense in that context i guess. As im not a gamer it is not an appropriate tool for anything i want to do.

    • h14h ( h14h@lemmy.world ) 
      26·
      3 years ago

      That’s certainly what it’s feeling like to me.

      I remember when I was a kid and the Web 1.0 stuff was popular, things like IRC chat and forums were too intimidating/confusing for me to get into. My introduction to being an internet “citizen” was Web 2.0 and the MySpaces/Facebooks/Reddits of the world, where I had a UX approachable enough not to intimidate my teenage self.

      The shift towards the Fediverse feels like a blend of many of the best aspects of Webs 1.0 and 2.0 – I have a UX that feels familiar, but one that comes with a bottom-up, decentralized grassroots feel that is reminiscent of the early internet.

      I’m bullish for sure.

      • orsetto ( orsetto@beehaw.org ) 
        19·
        3 years ago

        I always like to hear about when internet was at its early stages. I’m born in 2001 so never got the chance to live through that era, but to me it always feels so much better than what it is right now.

        Hearing you say that we are experiencing a moment similar to those is making me so happy.

        • naeap ( naeap@sopuli.xyz ) 
          9·
          3 years ago

          I was absolutely amazing!
          complete wild west. only limit was your mind/imagination.

          at least it felt like that, when I was young ;⁠-⁠)

        • Pigeon ( Lowbird@beehaw.org ) 
          2·
          3 years ago

          People do remember it with rose colored glasses - there were fewer niche communities, fewer lgtbq+ communities, slower connections, 240p video at best (so much anime I somehow watched like that… Sorry anime), sexism and racism in a more general way vs now as like society and particularly techie culture at the time in general, not being able to use the internet when someone needed to use the phone, and so on - but while we gained a lot with time that we take for granted now, we did lose stuff, too.

          I hope we can bring back something of the good that was lost, now and in the future, as well as find new good things.

          At least, surely, there will always be cat pics.

    • mbryson ( mbryson@lemmy.ca ) 
      20·
      3 years ago

      It’ll be hard to get people to not only detach from something they’re accustomed to, but also then attach to something unfamiliar.

      I tried and am trying again with Mastodon, but a lack of users I wish to follow, a more confusing premise at times, and just overall more enjoyment overall (if that) with twitter as a platform makes it a challenge.

      Lemmy however has checked all the boxes. It literally feels exactly like Reddit, and honestly like a fresh start to avoid the various decisions both Reddit admins and the community itself made along the way. I’m hoping more for the latter experience than forming when diving into the fediverse, but my above statement is most likely applicable for a wide sample of people out there.

      • Pigeon ( Lowbird@beehaw.org ) 
        4·
        3 years ago

        I had the same issue with Mastodon when I tried to get into that, although perhaps worse because I was never into twitter either (thank goodness, honestly).

        Lemmy though feels like old reddit from before the Digg exodus, if anything, or like other old forums that reddit drove either out of business or at least out of sight. It feels familiar and nostalgic and fresh at the same time, and there’s an element of hope to it to because it’s not just another corporate monster.

    • amki ( amki@feddit.de ) 
      1·
      3 years ago

      I doubt it, things cost money, that’s how we got in the corporate trap originally. If you invest a ton of time and money into something sooner or later you need to get something back.

  • honk ( honk@feddit.de ) 
    46·
    3 years ago

    Discord:

    They started the software as a light weight voip solution for gamers. And imo they kinda lost focus a long time ago. It is now a sluggish, bloated, messy piece of electron software that has privacy issues and runs very poorly. They keep adding new features that are all paywalled and the pricing is just unreasonable. I’m not against paying for a service at all especially if it is free of ads but i feel like 10$ a month is just way too much for a chat app.

    • jon ( jon@lemmy.tf ) 
      24·
      3 years ago

      Gitlab’s a great alternative too, it’s definitely more resource intensive than Gitea but their community edition is packed with features. A federated Git platform sounds intriguing…

      • crank ( crank@beehaw.org ) 
        3·
        3 years ago

        I have been on/off gitlab for a few years but they do sometimes weird things that drive me nuts. For example last time i check you cant search a repo issues without logging in.

        One of main things i use repo sites for is to troubleshoot and searching issues is a great way. Why put a barrier to that? I cant imagine it is a big server load. Just dickish.

        • jon ( jon@lemmy.tf ) 
          2·
          3 years ago

          You can search issues without being logged in, but that setting has to be enabled in a repo or group’s permissions (Settings > General > Visibility, project features, permissions). Project visibility has to be Public, and issues should be set to Everyone with Access. I think tissues are defaulted to private or internal by default.

    • lemillionsocks ( lemillionsocks@beehaw.org ) 
      37·
      3 years ago

      God I hope so. Discord works fine as a voice chat and groupchat for games. But it’s insane to me that people use it as a replacement for message boards or websites and hosting files. It isnt indexed so you cant google it and a groupchat is a terrible format for this. Even as reddit dies you have some people acting like a glorified group chat is a good alternative. As an addition and supplement to a message board or website community sure this is how it’s always been even in the old days there were boards with an active IRC chat. As the replacement? Awful.

        • Laser ( Laser@feddit.de ) 
          2·
          3 years ago

          The whole current fiasco stems from services being free and then trying to cash in later hoping that users won’t switch, there’s no guarantee that Discord won’t pull similar stuff to Reddit. In fact they already are hostile to third party clients.

          • amki ( amki@feddit.de ) 
            2·
            3 years ago

            Discord has to pull this sometime becuase venture capital isn’t going to sustain it for eternity and “Nitro” makes next to nothing compared to cost. I just hope Matrix has the tech to save me when it hits.

      • vodnik ( vodnik@lemmy.world ) 
        2·
        3 years ago

        Wow, I had no idea. Thanks for letting me know!

        I tried to research more about it, but other than a few screenshots it’s very hard to find info on what’s actually new in.

  • Spellblade ( Spellblade@kbin.social ) 
    30·
    3 years ago

    I’m thinking Twitch. Discord, imo, is just starting down the bad path but it still does what it’s supposed to do very well. Twitch, however, wants to enforce rules on content creators that might lead to them leaving entirely.

    • liontigerwings ( liontigerwings@sh.itjust.works ) 
      45·
      3 years ago

      They’re the safest. It has the highest cost to run of any other site pretty much. The amount of data uploaded is staggering.

      They may deserve to be replaced, but a competitor has the highest hurdles to overcome. You pretty much need to be another tech giant or the public needs to have a new perspective on how to pay for content rather than ads.

            • naeap ( naeap@sopuli.xyz ) 
              1·
              3 years ago

              I recently stumbled over Odysee and am not exactly sure where to put them category wise. they are a federated service as well, aren’t they?

            • Pigeon ( Lowbird@beehaw.org ) 
              1·
              3 years ago

              Does the seeding work in a personally easily controllable way, e.g. you only see the videos you watch and allow it to seed? I’m not super familiar with torrenting beyond the very basics, let alone however this might differ.

              I’m thinking here mainly of making sure people aren’t just generally seeding everything in a way that would potentially make people unknowingly/unintentionally seed / party to any distribution of child abuse materials, snuff, revenge porn, or so on.

          • teawrecks ( teawrecks@sopuli.xyz ) 
            7·
            3 years ago

            And then you run into the challenge of moderation.

            If it’s possible to be handed random videos to seed that you’ve never watched, criminals would take advantage of that to upload illicit content that no one wants hosted…

            It may only work to seed videos that you’ve explicitly whitelisted. Ex. Maybe “liking” the video also automatically volunteers some of your bandwidth to seed it. But then you will still open yourself up to legal disputes from copyright trolls. Just like YT, they would still be able to go around spamming C&Ds at everyone, and who is going to have time or money to fight it? Most would just take the video down immediately.

            And that’s all assuming that exposing your IP directly to the public doesn’t leave you vulnerable.

            On top of all of that, one of YT’s biggest values is that you can view most content in a browser while not logged in. Which I’m guessing is where a huge number of views come from. The core users would just be footing the bill for a bunch of freeloaders. But assuming everything else is solved, maybe it’s worth the tradeoff…?

            • Pigeon ( Lowbird@beehaw.org ) 
              1·
              3 years ago

              I think it might still just have to allow advertizing. Maybe not individually targeted advertizing, but like a general banner ad in a sidebar for the server host’s benefit, or a video creator’s midroll sponsor ad. Or a a small server subscription fee for reasonably large servers, like apps do.

              Even if the hosts make some money off it and it’s not entirely free and ad free for all instances, it could still be better than one single, centralized corporation that’s in control of everything and can monetize however it wants without consequence.

              But regardless, the issue with potentially unintentionally seeding child abuse materials, revenge porn, and so on is my main concern. I personally won’t touch the platform until and unless I’m sure I will have control over what I do or don’t seed and that I will never end up unknowingly doing this just by using the service.

        • amki ( amki@feddit.de ) 
          4·
          3 years ago

          I internetted in a time where sharing an audio file was a real undertaking, maybe with better infrastructure the size of video won’t be a problem.

          Maybe it’s me being short-sighted but I don’t see video going far beyond 8k for almost all applications.

  • lhx ( lhx@lemmy.world ) 
    28·
    3 years ago

    Well, I don’t think it will STB, but YouTube needs a FOSS equivalent that has the same capabilities sans ads. But, that’s $$$$ infrastructure so I don’t know if that will ever come.

    BUT, I really hope that by the time Discord pisses off its users, that matrix or another federated equivalent will have figured out the UI/UX to capture a large chunk of those users. I used to live in IRC, but discord finally killed it. And I hate using proprietary software for so much chat.

    • nodiet ( nodiet@feddit.de ) 
      17·
      3 years ago

      Peertube is a thing. The problem with a platform like YouTube is that it’s so dependent on its creators, which peertube just doesn’t have. Although not FOSS, I am quite a fan of nebula since it is kind of a community owned project and many of the channels I was already subscribed to are on nebula too. I don’t mind paying a few bucks a month to access ad free content while also supporting the creators.

      • lhx ( lhx@lemmy.world ) 
        2·
        3 years ago

        Oh I agree it’s hard. AV1 helps, but until we get even better compression codecs, it’s just not going to happen. Eventually, though, you’d think storage and bandwith costs will get down to such a level that we think of 1080p videos the same as text messages now.

  • croobat ( croobat@lemm.ee ) 
    27·
    3 years ago

    Discord already kinda sucks, I find the app not nearly as smooth as before, and it tries so hard to choke nitro into you, it also has so many bloaty extra features.

    Maybe it’s just the use I try to get from it. Discord has evolved more towards community channels, and for that (at least the bit I tried to use them) it seems fairly decent. Most of the time I just wanna use it to play with 2 or 3 friends, I could definitely use a minimalistic app that does just that.

    • honk ( honk@feddit.de ) 
      11·
      3 years ago

      If you really only want group calls for a handful of people I can only recommend Signal for that. Just create a group chat in there. You can start a call and select it to not ring on the other peoples end and then you can just hop in and out just like a discord vc. It has a desktop app for Mac/Linux/Windows too so you could use it while gaming too. The app is not pretty but it’s minimalistic and it works. Everything is end to end enrypted even the calls and video calls.

      You could even screenshare with it but i never tested how well that works. It’s free and open source. It is not federated however. But still the most easy to use and best secure and private messenger out there.

    • Pigeon ( Lowbird@beehaw.org ) 
      6·
      3 years ago

      I want lightweight-as-possible app that just does voice chat for games AND facecam chat for games, now that so many people have those. With little overlay boxes for your friends, similar to what streamers do. Partly because this would also enable deaf people to play with sign language chat.

  • Nankeru ( Nankeru@feddit.de ) 
    27·
    3 years ago

    There isn’t much left.

    First Facebook with their whole meta thing, then Imgur deleting all NSFW content and images uploaded by non-registered members, afterwards Twitter and now Reddit.

    Twitch made a big mistake with their new sponsoring rules, but seems like they are reverting / changing it again due to bad community feedback.

    Discord had a few changes the community didn’t like, but nothing ground breaking yet. But they get more and more greedy and their platform is filled with scams, hackers, bots and sadly many bad people like child predators and content which Discord support does nothing against. They seem not to care.

    YouTube, well, I think they might be next actually. More and longer unskipable ads, restricting or demonetizing many videos, bad communication with their creators and less rewards for smaller creators. In addition, they might put high quality resolutions behind their already existing expensive subscription paywall. There isn’t any competition which is urgently needed.

    UPDATE: Bad news about YouTube continues. Just now, YouTube Ordered ‘Invidious’ Privacy Software to Shut Down in 7 Days.

    Which other big social media platforms are left?

    • kalleboo ( kalleboo@lemmy.world ) English
      21·
      3 years ago

      The problem with anything video is still that it costs way too much to host, unless you’re a giant who already has their own data centers and massive data pipes. You can’t just throw it on a cheap VPS like text-based services

      • duncesplayed ( duncesplayed@lemmy.one ) English
        11·
        3 years ago

        Are you thinking of it as a centralized replacement to YouTube? If you’re centralized, yeah, you probably need a data centre the size of Malta. There are decentralized alternatives (like PeerTube) where the cost is also distributed. If you’re using PeerTube, you literally can “just throw it on a cheap VPS”, and lots of people do, with no problems.

        I think the real reason decentralized video isn’t going to catch on is because video (and YouTube in particular) has not been a community thing for many years now. There are very few YouTubers who make videos to build a community or connect to a community. YouTubers are on there for money, and there’s really no alternative that can both host the videos and pay out big cheques to content creators.

            • Pēteris Krišjānis ( peteriskrisjanis@toot.lv ) 
              3·
              3 years ago

              @duncesplayed imho making PeerTube or other Fediverse video service very good at UX and easy to use will allow these communities migrate when they feel like it.
              I think biggest issue might be running video service like this and having running costs for video storage, etc. As always, communities might be willing to factor those costs in their pledges.
              I think PeerTube needs easy to use setup / reliable network of hosters, and good UX to manage community, live streams, chats, etc.

              • Pigeon ( Lowbird@beehaw.org ) 
                1·
                3 years ago

                I think it needs to be made very, very easy (for people who understand Zero about the tech behind it) to set up and host their own peertube “channel” off their home computer. It needs to be just as easy and straightforward as setting up a youtube channel.

                Anything that requires people to understand even a bare minimum of tech jargon, or even that exposes them to too much such jargon too quickly, will be too much of a barrier to entry for most people, vs youtube or similar corporate platforms.

    • hampter ( hampter@kbin.social ) 
      21·
      3 years ago

      I don’t really see YouTube failing anytime soon. They have such a massive userbase, it’s hard to imagine any other platform taking over anytime soon, regardless of shitty UX decisions. Creating a successful video platform like they have is an enormous challenge, the only reason they succeeded is because they were early.

      • Pēteris Krišjānis ( peteriskrisjanis@toot.lv ) 
        5·
        3 years ago

        @hampter @noodlejetski @Nankeru *cough* TikTok *cough*
        In all seriousness, Google does not know what to do with YT. It is very hard to monetize. They tried to do whole TV thing, which fell flat on it’s face. it keeps being huge money sink, and moderation is nightmare and algorithms seems to fucking up constantly.
        They can’t get rid of it, because it is huge, but it is not fire sure profit.

        • hampter ( hampter@kbin.social ) 
          11·
          3 years ago

          I don’t know about YouTube not being profitable, but even if they aren’t, you’d be hard pressed to find a company better equipped to handle a money sink that Google. In 2022, they had a gross profit of 156 billion… I don’t think they are panicking, scrambling to monetize YT at Alphabet HQ.

          • Pigeon ( Lowbird@beehaw.org ) 
            1·
            3 years ago

            Tbh I’m 99% youtube has been very profitable for a long time. Google said it wasn’t, once, like… A decade ago? And I think people just internalized that and didn’t realize it changed.

            As far as I know, there’s a lot of info they don’t share, and a company can very easily appear “unprofitable” if the profit is immediately reinvested into the company, or by other tricks. People also say amazon is unprofitable, sometimes, and, yeah, no.

        • Pigeon ( Lowbird@beehaw.org ) 
          1·
          3 years ago

          Even though Tiktok isn’t a one-to-one equivalent of youtube, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a closer youtube equivalent come out of China, Russia, or even North Korea (the people are poor mainly because the country puts all its wealth in the military, and it already has extensive foreign espionage and media manipulation arms - if it wanted to, it could pour a lot into controlling a major video platform to get ahold off all that data).

          In a more hopeful world, maybe a different small country might invest in it on a governmental level, similarly.

          Saudi Arabia is already heavily investing in the gaming industry, in an attempt to diversify their economic reliance away from just their oil.

          Qatar already has a lot invested in, and profit from, aljazeera (state-owned news) poking at all its neighbors’ human rights abuses, too.

          Saudi Arabia - or another, unexpected country - could absolutely do the same with English-language social media, especially given the current lack of competition for youtube. Government funding could scale that barrier and snag a source of income and an espionage advantage for the host country.

          Especially since Saudi Arabia, though rife with human rights abuses, is allied with the U.S. and thus less likely to become the target of a “ban tiktok specifically” push.

          (sidenote: the “ban tiktok” bills would ban a lot more than tiktok, including VPNs - that subject’s a whole can of worms too).

          Edit: especially now they’ve seen Tiktok as a template for this.

    • sj_zero ( sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net ) 
      3·
      3 years ago

      Matrix synapse and dendrite aren’t great implementations of the protocol so people probably won’t host them, but conduit is 90% of the way there. Another 5% and I bet discords start to drop like flies.

      • Danacus ( daan@lemmy.vanoverloop.xyz ) 
        1·
        3 years ago

        Conduit looks very interesting. Synapse is way too bloated to run and dendrite is way too buggy in my experience. Maybe conduit will become a better home server? I feel like the matrix devs just keep adding more and more features to their protocol, but they fail to implement usable servers and clients. IMO they should’ve kept things more simple.

        • sj_zero ( sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net ) 
          3·
          3 years ago

          It isn’t perfect. It doesn’t support spaces well, and sometimes it’s chasing the latest standard, and there’s still a lot of missing stuff with respect to admin features. OTOH, it is incredibly light. I run it on an Atom D2550 alongside ejabbered and lotide, and that box basically idles.

          There’s only a few projects I personally donate to.

          • Danacus ( daan@lemmy.vanoverloop.xyz ) 
            3·
            3 years ago

            I was already able to deploy it on my Raspberry PI 4 without any issues. It was using a lot of CPU when joining large rooms, but now it seems to have calmed down and it’s using 1-2% CPU, which is very reasonable. In comparison, home assistant runs at around 2-3% idle, and lemmy fluctuates between 4% and 10%.

            Thanks for bringing this up, this is great! It’s also written in Rust, and I love Rust, so I might contribute this summer. I’ll add it to my list of potential project to contribute to, along with Lemmy.

    • PolDelta ( PolDelta@sh.itjust.works ) 
      42·
      3 years ago

      I would love for something to replace YouTube, especially something in the Fediverse, but video unfortunately has much higher storage and bandwidth requirements, so it’s hard to imagine that not being totally cost prohibitive at high levels of traffic, even if it’s split across so many different servers. I’d love to be wrong on that, though.

      • Menachem ( Menachem@midwest.social ) 
        19·
        3 years ago

        The other problem with YouTube/twitch alts as opposed to reddit/twitter is that a lot of the creators people like the most actually rely on those platforms to serve ads in order to make a living. That content can’t exist on FOSS systems unless they somehow manage to attract advertisers, which seems next to impossible

        • amki ( amki@feddit.de ) 
          7·
          3 years ago

          I feel like the trend is going towards serving ads in stream anyways, the twitch ad/ad blocking war is/(was?) ongoing last I checked.

          I don’t see why that would be impossible in a federated setting.

          • Menachem ( Menachem@midwest.social ) 
            7·
            3 years ago

            While some streamers could get direct sponsors, that option is really only available to a select few of the most popular ones, and would still deprive them of the extra income they currently get from ads served by the platform. You’d have to convince advertisers to trust that each instance is going to serve their ads fairly and not additionally host content they don’t like. A system to distribute ads between instances would be complicated enough to write in the first place; these sites have a lot of QoL updates to push before they even think about doing something like that.

      • fruitywelsh ( fruitywelsh@lemmy.ml ) 
        9·
        3 years ago

        Yeah, thats why strata like peertube reducing costs with p2p sharing helps, or lbry (rip, I think) attempt to put in donations and tipping directly in was key for those to gain any traction.

        Going further in cost reduction is what I am hopeful for. Better AV1 support and IPFS support are two develops I am following. A more radical approach may be using latent space generation from AI models like stable diffusion to generate frames locally instead of storing and transmitting perfect copies.

      • croobat ( croobat@lemm.ee ) 
        8·
        3 years ago

        Yeah, video is just that much more expensive to store. I am sure a lot of current Lemmy instances are still lighter that some “cat meowing for 3 hours” video. And let’s not talk about all of those channels that upload dozens of gigabytes of data on a daily basis. I fear we may never have a suitable replacement to YouTube (that it’s not just another asshole mega corporation).

    • nodsocket ( nodsocket@lemmy.world ) 
      13·
      3 years ago

      YouTube has been upsetting its users for over a decade now and also needs to make more money. The only thing stopping it from being overtaken is the sheer amount of infrastructure required to host videos on that scale.