Discord unveils Discord Orbs, a new in-app currency that users can earn by completing Quests, which reward participants who interact with ads
Checkpoint 3: Leveling Up Discord Quests with Orbs and Advanced Measurement
Online software development life cycle in a nutshell:
Startup - Geeks are in charge and you're creating a cool communications platform.
Mature - Accountants are in charge and you're gamifying ad clicks.
I admittedly haven't looked very hard for an alternative. But I fully expect to be forced to move elsewhere in the next year or two due to their increasingly belligerent chasing of profits.
If you're after text, there are a number of options. If you're after group voice, there are a number of options. You could mix and match both, but "where everyone else is" will also likely be a factor in that kind of decision.
If you want both together, then there's probably just Element (Matrix + voice)? Not sure of other options that aren't centralised, where you're the product, or otherwise at obvious risk of enshittifying. (And Element has the smell of the latter to me, but that's another topic).
I've prepared for Discord's inevitable "final straw" moment by setting up a Matrix room and maintaining a self-hosted Mumble server in Docker for my gaming buddies. It's worked when Discord has been down, so I know it works. Yet to convince them to test Element...
Same. I just hope my friend group and by some extension the gaming community chooses something that won't fall into the same pitfal of closed source for profit organizations.
I hope the transition is towards matrix, or something like it.
Hopefully, I would love a discord alternative that does the same thing but is open sourced similar to the fediverse.
something that won’t fall into the same pitfal
What exists that cannot be sold to a high enough bidder? Even Lemmy isn't magically immune. If the admins of .world got handed checks for a couple million dollars in exchange for the rights to operate the servers, what would discourage them from cashing out?
The internet is fundamentally a privatized system that exists to generate profit for investors. There is no true public domain. Its all just turf up for sale, some of which hasn't gone to a notable bidder yet. If you do manage to improve a patch of digital real estate to the point where someone will pay you enormous sums to divest, you'd be a fool not to take the money.
What genuinely confuses me is who they're finding to buy this shit to begin with.
I've seen so many of these failed "Join our club to score points to get tokens to buy virtual dongles that you can use to get into our more-elite clubs with better points and color tokens" schemes over the last ten years. It's like everyone wants to be Chuck-E-Cheese, nevermind that the company went bankrupt five years ago.
Even if all you care about is profit, it seems like this is an abysmal means of generating it.
Oh it's undoubtedly going to fail, but it should milk enough money out of their users to keep them going while their investors cash out
It is a bit baffling. I think it's more ethical than the alternative though: pay gating useful functionality. Offering paid pallete swaps doesn't make a lot of sense to me, someone who would never pay for that, but it does at least mean I can just ignore it. If they were to, say, restrict voice calls to a paid subscription, suddenly I'm in a position where either I'm paying for the service or ditching it entirely.
The replacement is matrix.
Yikes, hope matrix really improves soon.
Not really. The network is currently undergoing massive attacks of spammers who flood people's servers, rooms and dms with child porn and videos of animals being tortured. Maintaining a public matrix room or homeserver is a nightmare and the Matrix foundation has only now come up with a solution. But these servers are slow to release and many people have been left with no choice but to leave Matrix all together. Discord is a shithole but we need to make sure people are aware that the alternatives have their own set of issues too
increasingly belligerent chasing of profits.
The word you're looking for is enshittification.
It feels like literally the entire open source and games communities are on discord. Will they move too? I care about that even more than my DMs.
They were on IRC before and on a number of other chats systems before that.
They will move as soon as something better will come out, for various definitions of better
You read my mind
Slack does the same thing as discord i believe
Yes, this is real.
🤢🤮
I'm waiting for the day we get the Black Mirror technology where the ad stops playing when you look away and doesn't start again until you look back at it, forcing you to watch the entire ad all the way through
And the ad is like my dead mom selling me dick pills
How in the hell has that app gone so far down? This must be a record in enshittification.
What's the exchange rate of Discord Orbs to Stanley Nickels?
It has to be one of those 'Limx as X approaches 0' Calculus things where X is the value of Discord Orbs.
The end is coming
How do I bot this so I don't see the ads and get free nitro so ads are removed?
No need, use discord canary.
They truly have zero clue how users actually use their software. Not a single person is going to use this just like every other stupid gimmick feature they've added in the past and then promptly removed.
You couldn't be more wrong.
People actually use the shop. they are spending $10-20 on a profile picture border. Now you are telling them that they can get them for "free"? You bet people will do it. Paid cosmetics have poisoned minds.
Ehhhh I see people with Nitro-included cosmetics but not a lot that have the individually-purchased cosmetics. They exist, sure, but not even close to as many.
I mod a server with 40,000 users and I'm scrolling through the member list as I type this. Majority are either unsubbed accounts or they have the cheap basic Nitro. A lot of the cosmetics I am seeing are the free ones they've given away in recent events. Not many users have full Nitro and have their profiles all decked out with additional cosmetics.
Yeah, Discord whales exist. Some people are REALLY proud of their profiles.
The thing is I’d much rather they do things like this, where the ads are opt in and the monetized features are mostly just extra for if you are enjoying the platform, than something like introducing ads you have to pay to remove or locking core features behind a paywall.
Users on reddit and lemmy always seem to think ad-based stuff is going to fail, and then it turns out people in the real world are depressingly accepting of ads. I would bet that this program is more likely to be expanded than canceled.
I told my sister she can use an adblock to block ads while she's browsing. She said "why would i want to do that, ads show me what to buy" she loves personalised ads and the idea that all her interests are being track so she can be served relevant ads.
Part of that is because ads that are enjoyable and for things people enjoy often don't even register as ads to people. When people think of ads they typically think of unwanted distractions for things they don't want. They don't necessarily think of something like a free sticker for their favorite video game given to them at s convention. They may even put it on something like a laptop or water bottle. The same people may say they "hate ads".
I'm not trying to throw shade on those people, I think pretty much everyone is going to be accepting of at least some type of hypothetical thing that's enjoyable and/or useful to them. A prime exam is having a business listed in a directory. Someone mentioned that as an alternative to advertising as if companies don't pay to put their names in those directories.
None of this is meant to be any sort of criticism against anyone based on what they do or don't view as an ad, I'm just trying to help explain why, at least some of the time, it seems "people in the real world are depressingly accepting of ads."
I swear they are soulless NPCs put on this earth by demons to torture us.
I close every popup, ad, and whatnot. Read nothing, join my voice channel and talk with friends.
Discord has no features imo but voice and text. Everything else is useless and not needed. I will never give them a dime. No point.
The bigger servers i am in always have someone "boosting" it.
Oooh yeah, dust off the hotline auto clickers.
The lesson of Pay-To-Surf will keep being taught by reality until it gets taught in business school.
What a funny coincidence that I've hear about this discord alternative in a post just a couple before this one in feed.
Fuck this shit.
how good of an alternative is matrix to discord?
Not as feature rich, quite buggy, inherently more private but also less usable.
The above compounds when trying to get the non-techies to use it, because sometimes it doesn’t just work
Started running a homeserver recently, trying to get non-techy friends to join, can confirm this is difficult (the main one right now being people using old software on their phones, one friend was running iOS 14 for crying out loud)
Once set up I find it OK as a user
Unfortunately, the official desktop app is essentially unusable.
Fractal is pretty good but less features.
Not great. It's missing discord features like screen sharing and voice rooms (only sort of has them through a third party app, Jitsi, but that experience is... not great).
It also has moderation issues, lacking tools needed to keep spam out and easily control it when it does get in.
I recently deleted my account because there was a spam wave sending out room invites to anti-trans named rooms, and there's no way to mass ignore, you have to click on every invite, click 'ignore' and wait like 15-30 seconds for the server to process.
Related to the above it has performance issues, a lot of UI actions wait for the server to respond, so just have a long delay to them making the user experience feel really crummy.
There are also a bunch of different client apps all with their own features, one will support X but not support Y and the other way around for another app, and there's no guide on what app to use so that's confusing.
Overall it feels like alpha or very early beta software, it works if you're willing to deal with a lot of headache.
I made a few friends switch earlier this year and for our use case it works
Minding we only need a text chat during the day for shitposts, cat GIFs, and the occasional "Gaming tonight ?" "Fuck yeah" "For the Emperor !"
Then we use it for voice chat during the gaming session
To be honest, I don't think we could have switch if they weren't a bit tech-savvy and willing to struggle a bit with the encryption at first (but now it's setted, it works with no issue)
I like it, personally, but I don't use voice chat.
Next thing you know the 'orbs' will be NFTs and we'll all be expected to grind away at their 'quests' (probably training AI) to earn 'real money'.
RIP Discord.
Chortle my orbs
Wanna see my orbs on discord?
You son of a bitch. I'm in!
Sure
enshittification is full force now
Jesus Christ (● ˃̶͈̀ロ˂̶͈́)੭ꠥ⁾⁾.
There is one community I’m active in on Discord, and it’s a very wholesome and positive one id hate to lose, but damn I’m hating Discord.
Is there a CLI Discord client for Linux? I could tolerate that.
You can host your own matrix instance then bridge discord (and everything else from LinkedIn messenger to WhatsApp) to matrix with double puppeting so people won’t even realise you’re not on discord.
Hmmmmmm that is an option. I am a user of matrix
discord orbs
americans LOVE enshittifications.
Is there a peer to peer equivalent to Discord? That feels like it would be the best option, since it wouldn't rely on a centralized company that could enshittify the product.
Only option available is Matrix. It has its problems, but they're being worked on.
Right now it lacks the gaming/voice chat parts of discord - so for an OSS alternative for that part of discord specifically, there's Mumble.
For everything else, Matrix is a good alternative. Just be sure to pick a discord-like client. (E.g. Commet or Cinny)
Damn, I've been thinking about checking it out, but if it doesn't do voice at all (and I would also really like streaming) it's just not worth it to me. Text chat is nice, but I spend 2-3 hours evenings hanging out in voice with friends and I don't want to lose that. Messing with two separate apps is just not worth it atm, so I'ma keep steadfastly ignoring Discord's bullshit until Matrix is where I need it to be to switch. Although then the problem will be getting everyone else to switch, of course.
I use Jitsi for my voip / screen share
That's what we've started using my friends and I, can't complain, sure it doesn't integrate all the gaming shit but we just have it running in the background so we can talk anyway
Seems like you have to keep something running for it to work. Some obscure service relied on it as a support channel and last thing I remember is that matrix server stopped working. Though it would help so much if it would be p2p.
I've never used Discord -- is it similar to Mumble? I tried Jami but found it too unreliable to recommend. What about Nextcloud Chat? I do use that though it is kind of clumsy.
It serves the key purpose of Mumble, in that it provides a reliable way to get in a voice chat with people. The other features (text chat, video calls, screen sharing, "servers" that let people aggregate for a dedicated purpose/community) come together to make a legitimately good product that's hard to replace.
Wel there goes my discord account. Bye you won’t be missed
Realistically tho, until participation becomes mandatory you can ignore quests and orbs and just keep doing what you're doing.
"please ponder your verification orb"
Nah, switching takes time. Better start now.
Hopefully Revolt (a Fediverse alternative to Discord) continues to improve and can completely take the place of Discord relatively soon.
Edit: it might only be FOSS, not federated. Still a promising project though.
I don't think Revolt is Fediverse, afaik it's entirely centralized without plans for interop or federation
Please update me if I just didn't find the right reference
As of right now, Revolt does not feature any federation and it is not in our feature roadmap.
However, this does not necessarily mean federation is off the table, possible avenues are:
- Implement our own federation protocol
- Implement a promising up and coming federation protocol, polyproto
- Implement the Matrix protocol (unlikely, obtuse and unstable)
- Implement the XMPP protocol (battle-tested and stable)
Is Revolt federated? I thought it was only FOSS
Oh maybe it is only FOSS.
Matrix via Element works great for me personally and it's available now. :-D
I'm open to using non-federated software. I think federation is cool and useful but I don't see it as necessary in any way when choosing what to use.
The biggest things are features, existing username, and/or ease of getting my friends on it. User base size is why I didn't use Mastodon for niche hobbies of mine.
I'll check it out! Even without being federated, it's good to have a discord alternative. Matrix hasn't been what I need yet, unfortunately.
Afaik it's a fork / copy of the actual Discord source code. With all its bugs
I think you might be mistaking it with Spacebar
Leave Zenyatta alone, Discord >:(
"Here little monkey, get your food pellet!"
This has been tried and tried again. The first time I remember seeing this was in the '90's where a "free" dial up ISP was trying this. NetZero maybe? Didn't work then, won't work now. They'll pay out so little it won't be worth it. Don't do it kids!
I basically had an adblocker for netzero making it a free service. Was super useful for my broke teenage ass.
Peter Sellis can take those Orbs and shove them up his Ass I don’t want this shit!
I wish I can use Matrix discord is probably the last privacy invasive app I use (for my friends mainly)
🤢
