this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Technology

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I'm personally crossing my fingers for Discord.

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[–] [email protected] 102 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Agreed. Live chat has its place for certain things, but for other things a forum type interface is better suited.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Ab. So. Fucking. Lutely.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I just hope this is the start of an internet renaissance with less corporate control.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

I honestly don't think the fediverse will become nearly as popular as many seem to.think. It's still complicated to use/understand for many non-tech enthusiasts, and in the case of Reddit, while people are angry, I doubt most of their users are going anywhere any time soon. Some will leave, but it's not going to be a small number.

We keep going on about how Reddit relies on it's "creators", without whom they'll die. Frankly, a lot of the highest rated content is just repost of old videos or tiktok videos. A lot of that stuff isn't original, and the deep conversations are, in my opinion, few and far between. Sure there are some communities whi h have this, but they're not exactly over represented.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

I don't have statistics to back this up, but I'd be willing to bet an entire doughnut that most reddit users have never posted even a single comment. People with that level (dis)engagement aren't the type to seek out alternatives. They just kind of drift away.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I honestly don’t think the fediverse will become nearly as popular as many seem to.think.

Probably not gonna get Twitter/Reddit-sized, no, as those platforms have userbases the size of a large country. It's mostly a question of "can we attract enough users for the ecosystem to be workable" and I think the answer is "yes." Hell, for me it already is.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

We may be few, but I’m proud to count myself among those who quit Reddit because of this. (Not that I wasn’t looking for a good reason for a long time).

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Discord is a likely contender, but I think it's likely to be Instagram. It's got a very dissatisfied userbase, and there's already a few reasonably active pixelfed servers

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Github, but Gitea's not yet federated, though they're working on it.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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...

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (25 children)

For Discord we have Revolt (almost a 1:1 clone) and obviously Matrix and XMPP.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Discord is doing a lot of stupid things lately i must say

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

YouTube. It will be a real loss because I doubt even Archiveteam could backup all the useful YT videos.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (15 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

What about YouTube?

I looked online and there seems to be PeerTube at least.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year 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.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I hear that YouTube and Twitch are in the process of enshittifying, so probably them. Would also like to see Discord get replaced by something like Matrix, but I think the UX isn't ready for that yet. On the plus side, the Matrix protocol supports bridging to other chat platforms, so that's cool.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Matrix's client UX is improving a lot, there is the Cinny client that mirrors Discord's layout perfectly. The issue with Matrix is its protocol, which faces scaling issues because each instance joining the network is supposed to replicate the entire Matrix network, which will make it difficult for small hobbyists to add instances without crumbling under the load when the network gets too big. There is another Discord-like alternative, Revolt which is self-hostable and uses its own protocol but doesn't have federation yet.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This is not true. Data will only be sent to your homeserver if a user on your homeserver joins a room on another server. And only the data for that room is sent, not the whole network. The room data only contains all state changes, and a small amount of recent messages. The amount of state changes is the biggest problem.

Matrix protocol does have a giant problem regarding spam joins though, which make a complete instance basically unusable. Last time I talked with people related to the protocol they didn't want to or know how to fix it, because the need to verify all room state changes.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I still like IRC and I’m surprised that it got almost completely murdered by Discord.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Well some Discord channels are already synchronising their content with Matrix, using the room feature to mimic the channel structure. OpenStreetMaps does this for example. I wouldn't mind that normalising as at least, it stops me from needing to use Discord myself. But the fact it still synchronises back to Discord is, of course, not ideal. Small steps to the right direction I guess.

Replacement would be nice, but I mainly use it for some local communities which I expect will be the last to migrate. They barely got a start on Discord...

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Twitch tried to implode a few days ago. I'm hoping for YouTube, it's too much of a monopoly.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes please Discord, it is so worrying how everyone has all their private messages and content in an unencrypted app owned by a corporation who gives 0 shit about privacy. They won't even delete your messages if you delete your account/leave servers / get banned. In fact there is no way to delete all your messages

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Personal Knowledge Management Apps / Note-Taking Apps.

After EverNote and Co. many people got angry / fustrated.

Since I found https://obsidian.md I'm actually happy with everything - as the plugin's are open-source, it's flexible and there is no lock-in as it's all simply markdown format. ObsidianMD is just a markdown viewer - but with superious UX. There are also alternatives to that like Logseq though.

After seeing this, I cannot imagine anymore to use something like Google Notes, OneNote, etc.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm 90/10 on it being YouTube. I mean, they've already shit the bed plenty in the past. But with all the fediverse stuff picking up steam, Peertube is just sitting there waiting to enter the discourse.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That would be awesome.
But video traffic and storage is so much higher than text and images (like Lemmy or mastadon).
The cost of running it would be pretty huge

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