PJB

Hey, you’re not gonna get me to disagree the new app is terrible. Ain’t some sort of wild gotcha here.

The fact of the matter is that even with the frog partially boiled it’s still better than the alternative.

See my other comments. There is still no suitable alternative to Discord that is as good at it for making communities people can easily access. The loss is not solely in the messages that get locked away (sure that sucks too). It’s the loss of the communities that can’t exist on platforms like Matrix or IRC.

When the OP article was posted in 2021, Zulip didn’t even have public access as an option. This basically would make it a non-starter for what the article author suggests it for, as that’s worse (having to make an account everywhere) than Discord, Matrix or IRC.

To be honest I don’t have too much experience with Zulip or Rocket or all of these other new platforms, but my current default assumption is that they will always be designed foremost for organizations rather than the “I am in 20 communities I am somewhat active in[1]” like Discord. Matrix always seems like the better choice here… but it’s got its own issues.

I also don’t put much regard into the author’s word here because unironically suggesting IRC in 2021 means they’re off their rocker.

[1] I know you can only join like 100 servers without nitro ok.

I am fully aware why people go “Discord bad”. But weak arguments like “you miss out on all the contributors that have too bad of a PC to run Discord” do not outweigh the fact that Discord is a million times better for building a community. You’re suggesting to make the experience worse for 90% of people interested in a project to appease the <1%.

I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but it is.

I’ve evaluated Matrix multiple times, even tried to set up a homeserver once, and I can confidently say it’s an unusable mess compared to Discord.

If I wanted to set up a community like on Discord the experience would be worse than Discord 8-7 years ago. Is there a nice, GUI based system for managing permissions, administration and members in a group across 50 channels yet? No? Alright.

Also every time I try to set up Element on another device it takes like 5 attempts to get it to stop spouting errors about E2E stuff, and then still fails to decrypt messages.

Ahhh, yet another “Discord bad” post. Let’s see what alternatives they propose. After all, just telling me I made the wrong choice isn’t productive right?

There are great FOSS alternatives to Discord or Slack. SourceHut has been investing in IRC by building more accessible services like chat.sr.ht. Other great options include Matrix and Zulip. Please consider these services before you reach for their proprietary competitors.

Hahaha hahaha. Good fucking joke.

There’s a reason Discord is a million times more usable than all of those, and it’s not just network effect.

…

I’m well aware discord is going to enshittify itself eventually. It’s inevitable. However quite frankly as long as that hasn’t happened yet, it will remain by far the best option. I am not going to knee-cap my project by using a Discord “alternative” that barely works.

The day Discord dies will be a massive loss for the internet. That hasn’t happened yet. But it will. And it’s not going to be a loss just because of all the communities locked in on it. It’s going to be a loss because it’s the best damn community chat software and there’s no replacement.

The GPL has an exception for “system libraries” on this regard, but it’s as handwavy as the rest of the license.

The GPL isn’t meant to be a real license, it’s supposed to be a toxic waste bucket that companies don’t want to interact with. This it succeeds at.

IANAL but since they used the word “threatened” instead of “I’m getting sued”, no case is being filed.

Pretty sure that if they were actually getting sued they’d already be radio silent.