Signal has a fun dark pattern where it unrevocably grants permissions for anyone you allow to contact you to see everything in your profile for the rest of time. It has only a single trust level with contacts effectively: full trust. This is unacceptable in any tool you use for online community, unless you exclusively use it for online community and can decline to provide any info in this full-trust level. Unfortunately Signal also makes very sure you can't have a second account, by tying your account to a phone number, and only allowing one Signal instance per mobile device.
Is Signal good? Yes, but only exclusively for communication with people you already trust.
EDIT: typos
It's a terrible anti-feature and the only reason they're not being punished for it is because there aren't many alternatives to pick from.
Can you elaborate on what default zero-effort privacy for the ignorant WhatsApp offers, that Signal does not?
And it ranks near Discord in terms of removing the single point of failure.
It already has quite big communities https://simplex.chat/directory/
Discord is text chat (with history) + voice chat in one place. If you want an alternative it needs to do this both first and foremost.
People saying IRC are trolling or never used Discord.
For some a Discord alternative needs to be a voicecall, for others it‘s game streaming, and for others it‘s just a chat, a bulletinboard or newsgroup, while they never used the Voice features.
Doesn't Matrix essentially satisfy all of them?
Although the bulletinboard/newsgroup feature is something that I don't know but I feel as if that can be on matrix as well.
Yes, I know Matrix is hard to host but I don't imagine discord if they release their source code to be easy either.
So for a discord-like experience, I really prefer matrix.
Apart from that, I would have been interested in more details about the author's experience with ~Revolt~ Stoat. To my naive eyes it looks pretty nice. I really like the nuanced takes about the other platforms in this article, so I'd guess the author has some good reasons to dismiss Stoat like that.
Discord's key value proposition is that it's a trusted zero friction voice chat with a lot of features.
The workflow that made it huge: organizer creates a server for a game, creates a short link for a voice channel. The organizer then goes to play their game, shares the short link with their group.
The members click the link, write whatever they want as the name, click join and are in the voice chat. Say hi and go into the dungeon to have fun.
Need more? Just share your screen with one click. Streamer mode kicks in and hides all pii in the discord interface. Easy global bindings for push to talk.
If the outing is fun some of them will create profiles and stay in the server and play together again.
It's all very organic and easy, while being trusted as a brand so people don't have to hesitate to click your jitsi.weirdgamer.tk link.
Most alternatives suck for that purpose. There is search for server members and the "blinking things" keep you up to date with where the new stuff is and I presume give you dopamine hits. It's simply not old school forum software and considerations that'd make sites like that good don't enter the equation at all - which also makes attempts at turning Discord into a support forum for any "organized" group or project misguided at best, but also great for the more casual gaming/interest oriented communities.
> Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?
Feels like these are two different things.
What I expect from a Discord alternative is text messaging, voice and video call with screensharing, both possible on community spaces and with personal contacts in a way that is extremely easy to setup.
I'm quite active on multiple discord server and yet never use voice / video. But I get why people use it.
If OP is looking for a platform not to replace Discord 1 to 1, but overall to have a community why not do a broader comparison. Then everyone can for themself see what fits their personal needs.
> I expect from a Discord alternative is text messaging, voice and video call with screensharing, both possible on community spaces and with personal contacts in a way that is extremely easy to setup.
Same. I'm somewhat sad that a lot of the FOSS community got stuck with IRC level of technology and ease of use :( I whish for more projects would subscribe to a low barrier of entry mantra.
Learning reg-ex to ban a member is .. ughh
Signal → private but bad for communities
Matrix → flexible but rough UX
XMPP → powerful but fragmented
Discord → centralized but frictionless
Users pick frictionless every time. We probably don’t need new apps or protocols we need a client that works well.
Matrix's UI/UX is actually really flexible with multiple clients.
You aren't struck with Element, you can even use TUI clients or any clients.
For the web, the one which I really love is cinny.
Cinny is really awesome, its UI/UX is better than discord imo.
I recommend people to check out the matrix ecosystem of clients to see what they like, because I also liked the fractal gnu app & it has tons of clients.
I remember messing with bouncers and reading the backlog from a 3rd party page. Bots that would ping other members when they come online. It was cumbersome.
That all the minute garbage everyone posts is preserved forever in an unfiltered state I think is a root cause of the mental degradation that results from using Discord: kids don't have anywhere to 'post into the void' anymore. Preserving past events and relationships through oral history as opposed to a big monolithic search engine entails a far more human element to IRC.
It's a muddy middle ground where neither you are I are satisfied. Far from perfect.
I'm not sure if any client has solve this, but what about image / video / file hosting? You can't just drag 'n drop a image into a chat. You have to host it on a 3rd party site and link it.
I do wonder how server management is now adays. In Discord you can host your own server with a few clicks and make it easy to adjust permissions and controls invites. I would assume IRC is also lacking behind. But would love to hear more about the current state.
Discord has invite links, where people without the app or account can quickly join. In IRC you have the IRC:// link, but that does not work for people who don't have a client installed. Then you can do a web client link, but that is not optimal for people who already have their favorite client set up :)
Otherwise it's not really an alternative. It does not matter if it's technically a protocol. Users don't care about if it's a protocol, IRC clients had over 10 years to catch up.
I love IRC, I even wrote my own IRC client in the 90s, but it’s clearly not going to be suitable for gaming in this context.
Curious what prompted this verdict. My only experience with Revolt/Stoat has been with the Handmade Cities instance, but said experience hasn't been anywhere near as bad as this writeup seems to suggest.
IMO XMPP is technically superior to Matrix. It "only" needs a cross-platform high-quality, branded app àla Element. There's underlying protocol support for all the features: video/audio calls, group calls, threads and reactions. Maybe missing are custom emoji (I think?) and channel grouping (which is still in the works). And of course all these protocol features work fine with federation.
Generally an XMPP issue :/
The protocol is amazing and selfhostable servers (I use prosody) are great. But The only client I enjoy is conversations, and that’s mobile while my main usage is always desktop. There are decent clients, but none I’d say are great.
It's like describing DNS, which is a conglomerate of RFCs so complex that it's unlikely to be implemented correctly and completely.
XMPP is a design fail in that regard, because if you have to tell your chat contacts to download a different client that fulfills OMEMO or XEP-whatever specs, then yeah, ain't gonna happen for most people.
(I am still a proponent of XMPP, but the working groups need to get their shit together to unify protocol support across clients)
The main site https://xmpp.org/software/ lists lots of different options but I have no idea what core/advanced means and comparing all of these would take ages.
https://joinjabber.org/ is/was an attempt at something more user-focused. It is not linked to the XMPP Software Foundation. BTW, joining the XSF and participating in discussion around protocol evolution, communication strategy and these sort of things is free, and only requires asking for write permission on the XSF wiki to add an application page. Everything happens in the open (mailing lists, chat rooms). We value democratic processes.
That software list, how it's done and how it's ranked is literally confirming my initial point of critique :D
Last time I tried out several chat clients, most of them were alpha software, had lots of bugs appearing in normal conversation flows, well, or were so broken that they broke compatibility in subminor version updates to their very same client apps.
I just wish there was some kind of ACID test suite for XMPP or something else to reproducibly validate spec compliance. Maybe a test server or similar as a reference implementation. This way client or server maintainers would have to run their programs against the official test server to increase their compliance stats.
If the answer to "it's confusing" is "there are apparently standardised sets", it sounds like it is, indeed, confusing :-).
Predators, racism, gore, pedophilia, harassment, stalking and so on..
No matter how high you value security, these are matters that hurt real people today. If you attract the mainstream, you must deal with it.
Then you won't have to make the decisions that most people suffer from.
Sadly Matrix has never had a good UX for me. IMO they spent too many complexity tokens on e2ee and there are simply not enough left.
The only thing TeamSpeak has on it is multi level voice for complex command chains. But you pay for that with enormous sign up friction.
There's no viable frictionless chat alternative. Maybe jitsi. And if you try to make one? You'll get regulated and have to do the same thing.
You could join a discord server with a single link.
Account creation could come later.
Considering the competition at its heyday was Teamspeak or Skype, the mere fact you could just actually see the hell you were getting into without some stupid ass "Hol' Up!" instantly made it popular with basically everyone who didn't even know what it was.
My account is dated June 2015 which is apparently a month after it launched, and both me and every single one of the early adopters in that channel that is still up to this day have this same story to tell. We used it because we didn't even have to login at all in the first place when we first got it.
This is what happens when we reach for convenience over openness.
Times have changed and people have different expectations. Nobody (except very few) is going to use multiple services and set up a bouncer just to get the basics working. It's better to spend time building a good replacement that keeps up with current needs than trying to push these old systems onto people, especially younger ones.
Here is a quick promo video as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekOxAg7leXM
> Tools do not make a culture; the people engaging on it do
Absolutely, but it's also important to keep in mind that the tool has a big impact on culture by virtue of what behaviors it encourages and what limitations it has. "The medium is the message" is very true here, so think carefully about which tool you hop onto.
Steam group chats are still janky and by no means a Discord replacement. It feels like an MVP that they lost interest in shortly after adding the feature.
It's fine for a couple people with no real need for moderation but beyond that I don't think it's currently viable.
Discord getting used as a knowledge base or download source for some areas is already seen as a convenience for those involved or a single point of failure by many 'outside', I wouldn't want to see more of PC gaming moving to one place.
I recently set up a Mumble server on my home server and it seems great so far, was able to get my friends connected pretty easily. We'll see how the voice quality and latency compare to Discord.
Huh. I’d have said majority. It was always my impression that a) gamers make up the vast majority of discord users (with all their gamification and gaming features), and b) that gamers mainly care about voice chat (which is what people almost always talk about when it comes to discord and gaming).
That makes you an even smaller minority unfortunately. Most people are not going to set up a home server.
They do need to fund development, but SSO is almost always in the top two level pricings :(
It does. https://zulip.com/help/general-chat-channels
But even without that, in a normal threaded channel, you can see all messages in all topics chronologically. IIRC that's the default view when you click a channel in the sidebar.
Here's an example: https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/138-user-questions the messages are grouped into runs of the same topic, but it's the whole channel.
getDeviceMedia and getUserMedia are very powerful these days. I haven't actually tested it but I believe a chromium browser would have no issue capturing the hw accelerated output from a game. You can pipe these media streams directly to WebRTC peers for playback on the other side. A server with a simple selective forwarding unit could enable larger scale meetings (100s of participants). All of this can happen in <1000 lines of JS and server code. Most of the heavy lifting happens in the browser engine. Concerns like automating browser permissions, global hot keys, etc. can be handled via electron or platform specific options like WebView2.
Mobile clients are a bit cursed right now. The best solution is to maintain a standard client in the app stores. Forcing everyone to sign their own mobile apps is way too much friction. And you do need native for this on mobile. Browser only / PWA has no chance in hell of providing a smooth UX on iOS or Android.
Discord has a financially and politically vulnerable posture that is downstream of having to operate a very large team, raise funding, be exposed to investor market pressure. However, it is also one of the rare instances of successful consumer freemium subscription monetization. A clone does not have to pay the tuition of "what makes this specific space compelling, and want-to-pay-for"; it just have to _exists_, passively soaking up migrants from each platform shift.
ITT WTB 3rd place for my frens.
That's how discord started, too. And then they scaled up. You probably need 10 people to handle infrastructure alone.
https://wiki.bitmessage.org/index.php/Main_Page
https://vituperative.github.io/i2pchat/
Bring this back!, for sentimental reasons:
https://dcplusplus.sourceforge.io/webhelp/chat_commands.html
Client dependent, but channel overview per server is also not that good.
https://hlwiki.com/index.php/Clients
https://hlwiki.com/index.php/Servers
But the number of users on any particular server these days is extremely small.
Then, Discord is not uncomplicated. From „Servers“ not being servers, multiple account onboarding levels, to what happens when Discord believes you are a bot or are using a blacklisted IP.
I believe you underestimate the average age.
What kind of secret system uses a phone number tied to your ID as a user name?
I've really had a hard time finding a Discord alternative that has the same kind of first-class voice and video chat support that Discord does. Back to Ventrilo and Mumble I guess /s
https://github.com/adhamsalama/webrtc
I didn't bother adding much styling to the website because I was only interested in the network side of things.
I also can't figure out a way to access them outside of the Steam client and in DOTA where I believe they're tied to the in-game guild system.
Seems to me you're just re-building discord.