Discord: Improving Our Mobile Experience
Starting today, “Discord but smol” gets a fresh set of updates for touch input on the screen that fits in your pocket. Check out everything that’s rolling out to your phone!
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Discord is an absolute piece of garbage, it’s not a good messaging app, definitely not a good place to host a community (seriously, I don’t understand why some communities saw Discord as an alternative after the Reddit API changes), and most importantly, it’s spyware. The company doesn’t have a business model and it was founded by a guy who is notorious for creating random shit that’s not economically sustainable at all. I don’t understand why anyone would use this shit. This video outlines everything that’s wrong with Discord: https://youtube.com/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU
It's a fantastic message app and no amount of posts like this will change that fact. I get that it's proprietary and therefore evil and all that, but literally nothing else compares. It's so feature-rich and provides powerful features for server admins, and has a great ecosystem of bots and communities.
Matrix isn't anywhere near as good and Revolt, let's be real, is only good because it is UNAPOLOGETICALLY a 1:1 Discord clone. Even the settings menu is exactly the same. It's also lacking a bunch of features.
Hai
revolt contributor here, might be biased so please take all of this with a grain of salt
revolt is not a clone of discord, it only has a familiar interface because new users are used to it
there is an ongoing UI redesign that you can try out on https://reholt.chat/app, feedback is really valuable right now, so it would be nice if you could point out issues with it
also, small reminder that revolt is made by a relatively small team consisting of less than 10 members, all volunteers, so the lack of features is pretty understandable from my point of view
if you don't like it, it's fine, there are other apps that are probably better than what revolt has to offer (like spacebar!)
kinda sad that there is little to no competition to discord :c
Hi there. I don't hate Revolt but I think it desperately needs to branch out from looking like Discord. The new themes in that link look nice, but even then the general theme, button design, layout looks too similar to Discord. People looking for something like Discord but open source will love it, but it'll take some changes for it to be seen as something more than fake discord. Appreciate that it's open source, though.
I agree. I am looking forward to this as well!
Okay, let me just convince all 200 of the people I'm in a server with, who all have varying levels of tech skills, to download this different app they never heard of before.
I'd love to man, but it's just not as easy as that.
It is absolutely a good messaging app. Valid place to host a community? Debatable, sure. In fact it's so good, that Revolt is almost a direct copy of it as shown above.
Whether that makes it a good app to use is another matter. Don't know about the spyware, or it's economic sustainability, but it has been around for years and years so it must be doing something right in terms of being sustainable, because it has sustained itself.
Regardless of Discord though, the biggest issue with moving platforms is getting people to move there. It's taken this long to get some of my friend group off of WhatsApp, and some still stubbornly stick to Facebook Messenger (true particularly at universities).
it must be doing something right in terms of being sustainable
They're basically living off of investor money and selling user data. The former is not an indefinite solution though. And Discord Nitro is a fucking joke, the revenue generated from it will never cover the operational costs.
Matrix is a much better solution, it uses peer-to-peer technology (https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p2p-matrix/) to reduce the burden of operational costs on the team. It's also federated, just like Lemmy, meaning anyone can host their own Matrix server and communicate with users on other servers. Running Matrix at home or on a VPS is even easier than self-hosting Lemmy. It's also completely free and open-source and allows everyone to write their own clients. Discord on the other side is a piece of proprietary garbage/spyware and bans everyone who attempts to use a custom client. I will never understand why so many people like Discord.
Right, but with Matrix it's a learning curve just to get started. That's not to mention running a server either, discord makes that whole process much easier and done in a few buttons, and you don't have to worry about uptime or any of that unlike self hosting, and it's free. That makes it even harder to get friends onto the platform who don't care about any of that, despite how good it may be considered to be.
What is known as servers on Discord also exists on Matrix. They are called spaces and you don't need to self-host a Matrix server to create a space. There's also no significant learning curve, you just download Element (the most popular Matrix client), create an account and you ready to go. You can join spaces or groups from any Matrix server or message anyone on the network. Chats also make use of end-to-end encryption by default and it can even be activated for groups (wouldn't make much sense for public groups though).
Okay, try to transition an existing community to Matrix and let us know how well it went!
I just signed up and tried to figure out how to join any remotely interesting community. There were none.
There were a bunch of public communities - not many - and I think the most interesting ones in the public room list were either Element Android, Telegram, and Rust. And Rust is one of my most hated games that I wish I'd refunded.
Why doesn't Matrix just call "spaces" servers? By calling them spaces, they have created a learning curve for no reason.
Even just saying you have to download a client called Element to access Matrix is not intuitive. To access Discord, you download a client called Discord.
They ban everyone who attempt to use a custom client?
I've been using Betterdiscord for years and have never been banned. Matrix looks good, but I don't think you're selling it well by throwing Discord under the bus without some very clear and obvious justification - nobody will be inclined to believe you.