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The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects. There are servers for libraries/frameworks, languages, ai/ml, math, whatever you can think of. And a lot of the adjacent ones will cross-link scheduled events and messages from other servers.
I'm really hoping for an alternative. I'm always weary of en-shitification whenever a single platform wins all the users.. like what has happened to Reddit.
The deceptive nature of Discord's "servers" has always made me wary. You're trusting one service with everything, it's Reddit all over again.
I thought the main value of discord was quick and solid voice / game stream integration.
I rarely feel any connection between servers, but that might just be me.
It was a little bit of everything, really. Discord exploded in popularity because:
1. Its free functionality was more generous than many comparable services. Nobody wants to pay for a Mumble server.
2. Its UI and audio quality and noise cancellation settings put much of the competition to shame.
3. Only needing one account for every Discord server in existance gave it the same kind of appeal that let Reddit/Facebook kill off most individual forums.
4. Good marketing, which gave it the critical mass of users and hobby groups that it needed to succeed initially and now make it harder to move away from.
Speaking from being very early on the train for Discord, it also had an extremely solid userbase right from the start because much of the early pre-marketing pull into it was for raid groups in the then-new Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. People really needed a chat client to coordinate a big number of players and it was totally free, functional, and new on the scene. It spread a ton in the community and the people working on it were players as well from what I remember, though it's been a long time. So as the game grew in popularity, and everyone who was in a large group was starting to use Discord more, it cemented friend groups that formed in the increasingly popular game along with the Heavensward release and helped solidify a foundation in the gaming community imo.
Completely depends on the niche. The VRChat party scene is comprised of hundreds of clubs as well as a meta-club for people who like to join as many as possible, which imports events channels from dozens of other servers. Some of them even collaborate on scheduling data and can put together a complete calendar/schedule of all events from various clubs each day.
For the average user, absolutely it's voice and game streaming. But I've found the more I've used discord, is that a lot of online communities, that typically would exist on Reddit or a forum, also have discord servers for communicating and community management.
I have noticed it’s frequently the only outlet for communication with developers and communities, which I find worryingly closed off and hostile to users.
As opposed to... no way to communicate? You're making a problem out of an easy and healthy solution to the literal problem that you're arguing. Stop contradicting yourself. You look like an absolute fool.
Users are worryingly hostile to developers.
If you've been on a game dev discord, it's usually the opposite.
I'm sorry, I didn't understand, are you claiming that gamers (perhaps one of the most notoriously toxic communities) are not hostile towards game developers?
Ahhh context was missing. I meant in actual game development discords for game developers, not games that have discords from the developers.
My anecdotal data is based on observations from my partner who has boughten several asset packs from itch.io, got on the discord for support, and the artists/game devs have been extremely unwelcoming to the point of just banning users for simple game dev questions and/or mentions of AI.
Of course, gamers (competitive) are generally a toxic bunch.
> extremely unwelcoming to the point of just banning users for simple game dev questions and/or mentions of AI.
This is understandable when you realize that artist are being accused of using AI for every single imperfection in art now. You messed up on perspective? You must be using AI. Anatomy is slightly off? You must be using AI. At a certain point they just get tired of the accusations and choose to ban people.
I can believe that scenario, but I believe in the cases I've seen regarding game dev, It's more pearl clutching from the artists (rightly so) rather than accusations from the asset users.
Not in my experience, either on Discord or any other platform where devs interact with users. Most users are polite enough, but many are toxic as hell; whereas most devs are maybe, at best, brusque - but you would be too if you had to constantly point users to the FAQ or answer the same obvious questions that Google can answer in 5 seconds.
I don’t spend much time on Discord servers (mostly just use it for DM with specific people) but certainly spent a lot of time on IRC in the 90s / early 00s; are channel bots not a thing? Especially now with LLM APIs and all that, you’d imagine a lot of the FAQ-level questioning would have automated answers in busy project-based servers
Bots are still a thing, certainly, but much like in IRC, they're still usually triggered by devs (of course some users will use them, but then, those aren't the users who need to be pointed to the FAQ)
There's also stuff like server intro guides and onboarding steps that should deal with most of the low-hanging questions... Should, but don't always :P
As for use of LLMs... probably an interesting use-case, but I'm not aware of any solutions using that quite yet.
oh yeah through a reddit bounce that is true, it's their live chat platform in a way :)
Comment was deleted :(
Am I the only person who sees this as a negative? I don't want everything I do to be in the same place.
This isn't a stance driven primarily by privacy/security requirements, although making e.g. compartmentalisation possible is generally a positive thing. Rather, my issue is with mixing business and pleasure, or even business A with business B, so to speak.
It's common for users to have multiple accounts and use the built-in account switcher.
While useful, I don't think that addresses much of anything in this context.
The biggest flaw of Discord is the federated nature and how disconnected each discord is from any others. As a casual game enjoyer, I found myself somehow juggling over 50 discords in ca 2021, each with their own server rules and conventions for how to use @all tags, alerting thresholds, etc.
It's too much burden on the user to manage the incoming information and resulted in a kind of anxiety about reading red marked messages and frustration at realizing how I didn't care for 95% of them, but I was unwilling to completely separate myself from that community (e.g. quitting or muting the discord)
It becomes a question of which friends you want to implicitly abandon and I ultimately decided to just abandon them all.
If the competitor even has a slightly more unified product it could easily displace discord.
Transferring a bot from one chat format to another chat format isn't some kind of insurmountable moat, and I think it's likely this project could make a few changes to support them with no modification required.
discord needs to abandon the notion that every message in every channel deserves to be read by every user. it’s absurd in servers with >50 users
I don't think that's an inherent notion of Discord at all, although it is a case of poor defaults. I turn on most of the muting settings immediately when I join a new server (notify for: nothing, suppress @everyone and all role @mentions, etc). Throughout the day, I'll mainly click between the 2-3 servers I actually care about, and every few days I'll go through some of the others. New messages are still marked once I click in so I know where I left off, pings are still highlighted so they catch my eye as I'm scrolling through, but if I don't care about a conversation in a channel, I can just scroll to the bottom and it's all immediately marked as "read."
There's also the shady components of discord. All manner of illegal activity thrives behind custom access control.
The most notable instance in media is the leaking of classified materials, the creation of swatting/ddos communities which gave us the 'BigBalls' hacker employed by doge,
But more sickeneningly recently it allowed this doctor to successfully target countless children, including convincing a 13 year old girl to hang herself in a live discord call. [0]
There is a problem with too much protection of freedom and secrecy.
I guess my point is, do we as a society want our children's Roblox communities to share a platform with virtually every cyber criminal, behind security and secrecy measures completely at the will of arbitrary discord owners?
Telegram is the undisputed king of shady shit, at least insofar as centralized services go.
Yea but how many children's games use telegram to manage their community?
I hate discord, it is where enthusiasm is met with "bad girls" energy. Plus, it's an information black hole.
> it is where enthusiasm is met with "bad girls" energy.
What does that mean?
Group mentality that picks and chooses who is "cool" and then bullies everyone else.
But I assume that is because of the people on that specific server, not because of the software? Or is there something about discord that enables it, that IRC etc. does not have?
I hang out with friends that predate discord, on discord and can't see it. Same with new servers.
happens on irc constantly too
chat rooms are cliques, almost always
choose any sufficiently populated room on libera chat, join, and start talking a lot without lurking first for awhile and see how the inhabitants react
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I've never been in a Discord server and thought "Wow this server doesn't do the moderator LARP-ing thing".
My dream is to be invited into a mildly popular server (more than 15 users), than doesn't have 50 channels, 8 separate roles and T&C to agree to. It hasn't happened yet.
An entire generation of bureaucrats and bean counters is learning the ropes on Discord.
This shows Discord is a genuine successor to Web 1.0 forums. :-)
Unnecessary channels are unnecessary subforums. User roles are user ranks (https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3.1/kb/article/everyth...), indicating both software permissions and social status. T&C—well, forum engines like phpBB, MyBB, and SMF come with a standard user agreement they show before registration. There is more concern with it now because the Internet is real life.
As for training an entire generation of bureaucrats and bean-counters, I leave it to the reader to judge.
I'd consider beancounter to be best case. At least a beancounter works for the company and gets paid. It's like they know they're Koolaid drinkers but every server is riced up with Discord's product pipeline like an aftermarket Honda.
I started and mod a server of about 6k users for a community around a niche software used by professionals, students, and hobbyists. We keep it really simple and focused primarily on people getting questions answered. Recently a small but vocal cadre of hobbyists have been demanding more Discord-y features oriented towards socializing with other users of the software, and our reticence to complicate the server and add features just because Discord offers them has been a point of contention. They seem to think we mods don’t understand Discord. We are having trouble getting them to understand that we are aware of what other servers are like and that we’re deliberately choosing not go that route.
Are you a partnered server? Are they even still doing those?
I've never been a mod. I'm just an adult who understands Discord's general operations.
I'll bite. What's the moderator LARP-ing thing?
I've tried looking it up but among irrelevant results (general LARP info) I just found this comment again as the third result...
Discord is shifting focus back to gaming [1].
What was it before?
A moderation simulator, of course.
You wouldn't stick a kid in the pilot seat of a real Boeing 747, would you?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167147/discord-gaming-f... (2024)
i'm on a number of discord servers. yes, some have that 'mean girls' vibe but considering the content, i expect that. the more tech oriented ones i'm on...that's not an issue at all.
to me, in general the vibe of a given discord is similar to the general vibe of that topic (i.e some games have terrible, vitriolic cesspools for communities and those discords reflect that. other things, such as one of the rust ones i'm on, reflects that community's vibe which is a lot more wholesome imo).
Sounds to me like you're hanging out with the wrong people.
I think they might've meant "mean girls" energy... :)
I started a channel with some friends last year for game servers we started running. It's been so much fun. We were worried about what you're describing, but we've had the exact opposite experience. People are friendly, they go out of their ways to help others especially new joins or people asking questions, and they try to protect the channel from the few people who break the rules.
> The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects.
Ease of use is also up there. (Compared to IRC)
The combo of ease of use and rich feature set makes services like Discord hard to resist for users and hard to compete with for FOSS software/services which prefer to take more focused, more technologically-inclined approaches.
It’s a major factor in what made Reddit big, too. Spinning up a subreddit is effortless and takes practically no knowledge and similarly easy for users.
IRC doesn’t seem terribly complicated to me, but I came of age when using computers seriously required a higher level of knowledge. I don’t find it restrictive either, but when I started communicating with others online, being able to send “just” plain text was amazing. Things have changed since then… the communication styles popular with young people haven’t been strictly text in many years and the overarching expectation is to be able to start using services in seconds after discovering them with as few clicks and as little research as possible.
that's like selling email with gpg as easy to use compared with newgroup.
anything win when compared to the ultimate underdog. but that's hardly a valid comparisons.
discord only win from other opensource forums because you don't have to own a domain, i guess.
Like reddit or Facebook groups? Discord being realtime chat is an important part as well. I don't think it was necessarily competing with traditional forums that are post and thread based.
I mostly use Discord for real time chat. And around that time Discord got big it was IRC that filled that roll. Or skype for some.
Yes but compared to things like Zulip it loads pretty slow.
"Weary" or "wary"? Or both?
> The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects
True. As it also hits a local minimum in terms of user experience (to the point that the average user does not care), I don't think it is possible to make a new centralized (even self-hosted) alternative on technical merits alone, since you necessarily incur a cost in the form of signing up to every server.
The only hope is a decentralized alternative like Matrix which is enshittification-resistant. I actually think the server part of matrix is more or less ready for a good Discord-like client, but the client side is lacking.
Cinny exists as a discord-like client, thing is, Matrix is mostly the text chat part, it doesn't implement voice chats or anything. Also, the space/room system works differently to discord server/channel
I've never used it but Matrix does seem to support conference calls, if not natively then via Jitsi. I'm sure a good app can paper over the differences to get a voice-chanel out of it if this is what people are after, though I've never really used this much on Discord.
The same can be said of space-room vs server-channel. Of course a space has different semantics, the space doesn't own the rooms, etc. But they can be made to be nearly the same for an end user. In general organization of resources is much looser and less opinionated on Matrix. But an opinionated app can also paper over this to force a stricter hierarchy, while offering advanced users the ability to make their own spaces, etc.
> Matrix is mostly the text chat part, it doesn't implement voice chats or anything.
It's in progress. Keywords: MatrixRTC, Element Call
https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/#3-nat...
fwiw, Matrix has had video rooms since 2022: https://element.io/blog/drop-in-drop-out-chats-with-video-ro... - and VoIP calling since day one in 2014.
I mean from what I can tell a lot of its recent success is simply because Slack is terrible. Most of the discord "servers" I use which aren't actually gaming related would be almost the same on slack, but slack has a less generous free tier.
I don't think discord has much of a real network effect, it's just a good value proposition. When the screws tighten that may change.
I think the biggest selling point is clearly the community.
Without the community revolt.chat is just another Mattermost or Matrix.
Discord is popular for one reason and one reason only, all the young people are there. The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook.
I've been trying to explain this to a friend recently. You're only on Discord because they took a huge loss for many years with the hopes of building up a massive database of users.
Yeah, it is the chat program treadmill. Spend investor money to host a completely commoditized program. Of course it is better than the version that costs money by virtue of being free. Eventually run out of investor money and do something unpopular to raise revenue, leaving the opportunity for the next iteration to come in for free and take your spot.
The only thing I don’t really understand is why investors keep falling for this? The only real business model is giving their money away. Maybe they get some good ad network profile data in the time between the heel turn and the point where everybody ditches the service.
Investors aren't falling for it. Users are falling for it.
Leaking millions for years pays off in the end, or even half way through. Some investors would exit at some stage. Taking profit due to valuation going up, despite no revenue/profit.
At the end of the tunnel is acquisition by a major player who is basically buying the users.
Typical examples: Skype, whatsapp.
But also LinkedIn. GitHub.
Businesses that offered some (basically) free offering for over a decade until reaching critical user base, then sold off for billions. Reason being precious data along with millions of daily active eyeballs.
It's shocking really that Microsoft didn't buy Slack and drive that into the ground too.
I'm glad to see WhatsApp is proceeding relatively slowly down the Shit-en-slide, since it's completely entrenched in some countries. I've had companies who just assume that I have WhatsApp and it's cool to message me on it instead of sending a text or email.
Skype is ending this year. Some founders and investors won but only thanks to greater fools.
(notable that three of the four greater fools in your post are Microsoft)
> they took
They are more than likely still taking, based on the 17% layoff a few months ago
As is Snapchat, miraculously (Snapchat is the most wildly mismanaged social media company from a fiscal perspective it’s wild)
> The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook.
In 2015, when they first got started, they marketed towards gamers (i.e. boys and men in their teens and early 20's). Even though the company's tagline at the time was that it offered a better Skype, Discord was more inclined to be a better replacement for a moribund Xfire and an aging Teamspeak. Word of mouth marketing on Reddit didn't hurt either.
Skype was also still popular among gamers when Discord was first available. That's what my friends and I switched to Discord from.
These days I refuse to use Discord for political reasons though.
What political reasons? I googled for discord political controversies but didn't find anything too shocking.
I don't like depending on a proprietary commercial product to facilitate my personal relationships. I don't like the fact that they can (and are likely to) ban / block me from talking to my friends for choosing to run a client other than their proprietary web browser wrapper on my computer. I don't like that it's a single point of failure (that often does) for something as easy to host as chat. These reasons probably fall under the "not too shocking" label, but they're important to me.
They also have ties to Universities with their student hubs. This part is great if you're a student, as you can find clubs and people with similar interests. There is immense power in what an older sibling does, and soon the younger siblings are using it to chat with them. They can chat with their friends from any mobile device or a desktop without the dreaded green bubble or restrictions of SMS / iMessage. In groups, they can hide their identity.
It gives the server "owners" the ability to enforce rules, ban those who are disruptive, and has an impressive bot API. I can see why it is immensely popular.
Curse was becoming more popular than TS at the time, but Discord offered a better quality of audio and stable connection. That's why my group of friends migrated to Discord around 2016.
TeamSpeak was usually the default option at the time (with some on Mumble). Skype had some presence, but was usually grumbled about beyond 1:1 calls. RaidCall was starting to gain some presence because it was free but otherwise followed TeamSpeak's UX, but was still pretty niche.
Curse Voice was absolutely nowhere to be seen.
The selling point to me was it's sophistication in handling moderation issues. But they enshittified it to be like Facebook moderation. Maybe that's why they're going public.
I couldn't agree more
Looking at https://rvlt.gg/discover/servers it seems that all reasonably active servers are either turkish[0] or anime related.
[0]: Turkey banned Discord in 2024: https://www.reuters.com/technology/turkey-blocks-instant-mes...
So like Mastadon then.
Every time I’ve looked into it, every server I’ve checked has been filled with furries and anime-avatars.
I mean, I’m glad they’ve found a community where they feel at home, but it kinda makes it a hard pass for the rest of us ;)
I'm on fosstodon.org. Never noticed anything like that, but I also can't say I spent much time checkout out the avatars.
I've accidentally typed https://revolut.chat/ instead https://revolt.chat/. Apparently I wasn't the first one...
Revolut (the banking service) and Revolt are both British I believe...
Seeing as Revolut has been around for a number of years, as a British person I wouldn't have chosen a name so close to Revolut (for any product).
The github https://github.com/revoltchat
This is sorely lacking on the homepage! All FLOSS is expected to link to the source from the homepage.
May even be required, if you have a license that requires sharing the code along with the product (AGPL). Still not sure why that license isn't more popular, isn't it in the open source spirit that you can get the code whenever you use the product? Same as when you get the binary with GPL license, that you have a right to see what code you're running?
Yeah, I had to click around a bit to find the link. Oddly it was only on the discover page for servers I found it. Bottom left corner https://rvlt.gg/discover/servers
But now I also know where to go if I'm in need of a femboy community.
front page, scroll down, there's Developers - Source Code
Agreed - I usually scroll to the bottom of landing pages to see the Github link - which Revolt did not have. Perhaps a suggestion to the developers?
It's an unwritten rule :)
Not at all when the software is not developer focused.
> All FLOSS is expected to link to the source from the homepage.
Says who? I don’t see that in the OSI definition
Nobody but I don't believe any company saying their product is open source if they aren't willing to point me to where to find the code right away.
Go to ten FLOSS project and check. Some want to be able to quickly assess some tings (is this JS/PHP/Python, or is this Rust/Go -- my interest).
Someone posted the github link here on HN: why would that be?
I'm also building a FOSS Discord alternative, but this one's based on nostr: https://flotilla.social
Flotilla.social and Chachi.chat are both amazing, yet early, Nostr alternatives.
Importat is funding for these projects. Plenty of them start as open source with donations which can led to frustration and burnout of developers.
I am surprised that it is written in Rust. Bi-directional long live connections don't require Rust's raw horsepower. Maybe it's needed for audio/video streaming?
Is the API discord compatible? That's basically necessary for adoption.
what do you think it should be written in? golang?
So you have the chance to redesign Discord and you decide to stick with the unicorn-puking emoji-littered eye-scorching UX/UI garbage that Discord is? Interesting.
I prefer IRC over Discord any day but it's very hard to convince other people not familiar with it to make a move away from Discord to it.
When people get used to certain features they generally don't want to give them up.
> When people get used to certain features they generally don't want to give them up.
Yeah, I would find it hard going back to not having a offline history and drag 'n drop file upload.
Having to host your own bot for pagetitle preview and user management was also not fun.
You can selfhost your IRC client, which eliminates som of the drawbacks but that also only works for a small portion of people.
> Yeah, I would find it hard going back to not having a offline history
It's funny but I personally prefer that the IRC server isn't required to store every chat log indefinitely. You're right though, these are solvable problems, BNC for example but we're getting a little off topic.
I think Discord, especially when it was new, had amazing UX and UI. Nowadays it definitely became bloated and new features don't integrate that well into the existing UI, but it is still on a perfectly useable level, currently.
I mean, if you are looking for a Discord alternative, isn't the design/UX part of what you're looking for? If you want something that is the opposite of what you describe, IRC still exists and works well, but not sure many end-users would call it an alternative to Discord.
That and I assume if its open-source you can make clients that look like whatever you'd want.
> isn't the design/UX part of what you're looking for?
I think this applies to the original target audience, namely gamers, but as a general purpose chat application, e.g. as a support channel for software projects, the UI design of Discord is indeed atrocious.
Of course, this begs the question why these projects adopted Discord in the first place. I guess the lack of a better alternative (that is not self-hosted)?
> as a support channel for software projects, the UI design of Discord is indeed atrocious.
Why is that?
Is this still centralized? Or can you self-host without needing a separate client instance for each host?
https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
As for clients I don't know.
8 GB RAM minimum for a non-graphical server software?! This thing must have more components and services than my desktop OS while having a few website open in Firefox and Chromium each
9 services, 5 theirs, 4 other OSS
The compose file specified a service for the web app
[flagged]
edit- shit, it was rocket.chat, i'm so sorry.
Ignore the below, it is for a different "FOSS" discord replacement.
i did self-host it for a week to test it out - and honestly i was put off immediately.
What happens when you set it up according to the docs, is that it automatically "registers" for a license - the free license being limited to 5 users, even if you self host. Ridiculous, and just right out the gate shows me that whoever makes this does not have the user's best interest in mind.
the UI is also full of stuff that requires an expensive license, and i did not see an easy way to remove that stuff when self hosting.
License? Isn't revolt open-source, so you could have as many users as your server can handle? https://github.com/revoltchat/backend uses the AGPL, I assume whatever other things a revolt server requires have similar licenses.
sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss" discord replacement.
I read the FAQ, searched google and the documentation and could not find a single ting about any license.
sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss" discord replacement.
What are you talking about. Revolt is a donation funded FOSS project
A benevolent assumption would be that GP tries out a lot of stuff (according to their other comments) and therefore mixed something up, unwittingly spreading FUD about Revolt
sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss" discord replacement.
maybe you're talking about mattermost?
sorry, i mixed it up with rocket.chat, another "foss" discord replacement.
A British company making a chat app. What’s the privacy policy? 5 eyes first then you?
It's open source and you can self host it.
You know it includes a backdoor for the government.
The self hosting instructions aren't that friendly imo.
The backend seems to be a fairly standard Rust project, you basically run `cargo build --release` and then deploy the binary. For the frontend, it seems like a pretty standard frontend project, you install dependencies, then run build command and you have a bunch of website assets you deploy to your server.
Overall, seems pretty standard and easy to deploy. Most complicated would be to also run the various services that are supporting the backend, but again, not overly complicated.
Is there something specific that is missing to be able to self-host this?
I think it's pointless to selfhost if you have to recompile an app in order to connect to your server. The team should have a field box to add a server URL.
I couldn't even find them. Do you have a link?
I'm sorry, but what??
The self-hosting guide even walks you through setting up the VPS on a specific platform. What more do you want? One could even argue that if you need your hand held through setting up a VPS, you probably shouldn't be self-hosting anything, so from that viewpoint, these instructions are a lot more friendly than they had to be.
There's a massive shady component of discord inherent to how access and security are at the whim of ar arbitrary discord mods. All manner of illegal activity thrives behind custom access control.
The most notable instance in media is the leaking of classified materials, the creation of swatting/ddos communities which gave us the 'BigBalls' hacker employed by doge,
But more sickeningly, recently it allowed this doctor to successfully target countless children, including convincing a 13 year old girl to hang herself in a live discord call. [0]
There is a problem with too much protection of freedom and secrecy.
[0] https://youtu.be/GgfGhzkq8FE?si=nFahQlTUTsY5WEuI
I guess my point is, do we as a society want our children's Roblox communities to share a platform with virtually every cyber criminal, behind security and secrecy measures completely at the will of arbitrary discord owners?
EDIT: moved this to a global comment as it was too tangential to where I originally replied
Note that there have been rumours about Discord preparing to go public, I reckon this might be made in preparation for it. I think it is a wise move to offer an alternative.
The design is very similar to Discord, could this possibly even go to a copyright breach or is the bar for that set too high?
> I reckon this might be made in preparation for it
Revolt has been in development for many years
> could this possibly even go to a copyright breach
Ianl but I’d imagine this would require discord to prove they own the “multiple groups, with subchannels” paradigm, which would be difficult when slack exists
even then it would be a potential patent infringement, not copyright.
but there's prior art for literally every feature Discord has so as long as they aren't copy-pasting Discord's source code I think they're just fine
I'm not a lawyer either but I am an SWE and I've had to read and been expected to understand so many goddamned licenses that at this point I feel like I'm expected to be one just to be able to navigate this field
I remember a gitea update where they said in the release text something like "new github-like ui" and they basically copied all of it (check some screenshot of the latest version)
I would lie if I said I did not ever do something similar, and I am not really aware of any court cases or litigations based on copying a design. Core functionalities, sure.
There is many an open source software that could actually use a little bit of copying from the thing they are trying to emulate. GIMP is still one of the ugliest programs I have installed on my computer.
> I am not really aware of any court cases or litigations based on copying a design
Apple tried it in the 90's with the infamous "look and feel" lawsuits against Microsoft. They lost.
They've had more success suing Samsung over phone design and UI (which was about more than "rounded corners" to be sure, but a lot of the patents are still questionable).
When I first saw Discord (est. 2015), my first thought was that it looked exactly like Slack (est. 2013) except was in dark mode.
And with good audio chat
Lol, the design of discord is identical to about 9000 chat apps no?
There really is no other app in this space on the same quality as Discord. Discord was born out of Skype, Teamspeak and similar being so awful to use. Discord took the complaints from these and made a product which was the best version of them all.
Quality? I see it as extremely bloated, very sluggish and clunky (on M3 macbook pro), search sucks bad and I can not figure out how I should keep track of multiple chained replies (like threads in slack). It's not as bad as teams, but talking about quality seems out of place.
Discord also has threads, if the server has enabled it.
I personally haven't really encountered performance issues running discord
They must have been super crappy them because Discord is terrible to see and terrible to use.
All clans' voice chats that I've been in were via Mumble, hosted on the server of whoever was the Linux nerd of the clan (nowadays that's me). No complaints about that software, but I heard lots about Skype and Teamspeak indeed. Mumble also uses TLS for encryption and authentication so it was more secure than anything else at the time as well, and more secure than Discord because the admin could maybe listen in but that's another team member and not a stranger working for a commercial entity
I hate the Discord UI/UX as well (e.g.: sluggish add hell; need to press a few specific pixels on mobile to show the mute button and other controls that automatically fade out if you don't touch them for 2 seconds) but apparently what they do well is filtering out super loud eating noises, or that's what a friend said when I asked them to mute when they were eating crisps with the mic pointed directly at it as well as blowing on the mic with every breath. Apparently they never got complaints doing that on Discord
I feel like an old person when muttering something about mute button etiquette to myself while writing this comment. If machine learning can fix that (if it doesn't require proprietary datasets from storing millions of peoples' conversations), I should let it ^^'
Discord has always seemed like a Slack clone with better voice chat to me.
With an emphasis on the gaming space and open communities, whereas Slack focused on corporate and closed communities.
I've been in the Go community for a while and they had to write a bot to get access to it (as Slack works invite only) and iirc had to work with Slack engineers to work with the scale they had. Meanwhile Discord's success is down to it being open, anyone can create a new channel and get instant access to things like voice chat.
Of course, this has its downside, and I'm sure Slack deals with a lot of abuse, ranging from porn to doxxing to it being used as a C&C server.
I think it’s a good product. The problem with all these chat apps (as companies to invest in) is there’s no moat; as soon as a more convenient or better option comes along, people will switch. There’s not a big integrated community or advantage to sticking to one app. Which doesn’t mean they can’t and won’t make plenty of money, just that I don’t buy into any hype around them.
I feel like Discord was born out of Slack. Slack was actually once popular for gaming groups but they decided they didn't want to capture that space and focused on business only. Teamspeak and Ventrilo were the alternatives and while they are still solid and arguably still popular with certain groups, they were a bit behind the times.
> Note that there have been rumours about Discord preparing to go public
That’s disappointing, but even now it’s hard to imagine they’re particularly profitable. The core functionality of Discord is entirely free and I doubt that Nitro / other paid features earn that much.
I would like to know this, too. What makes it profitable, then, considering it has little to no ads?
i wish they picked a more unique name. to me, it just seems like they're a copycat by picking a name that's a synonym - or at least of the same nature - of the word "Discord"
same with the streaming platforms Twitch and Kick
looking at their UI, it's the exact same UI as Discord. no improvements while also inheriting the same flaws that make using Discord neurotic
Revolut OTOH is a bank https://www.revolut.com/
Discords performance is unmatched. I hope that’s one of their goals as well
It's been in development for five years. https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/tags?after=0.2.6
Are they using exiting protocols and networks? Or is it entirely bespoke protocols?
The last release was 3 weeks ago (https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/releases), and it looks like they changed their tag formats to YYYYMMDD-X. https://github.com/revoltchat/backend/tags?before=0.2.6
It's unclear if voice/video are supported or not?
Yeah, this is the part I care about.
I'm not a big Discord user, but the one thing I do use it for is voice chat and game streaming with friends.
The homepage has no explanation of where the server is in all this? Github page doesnt help either?! Where is my data stored?
According to another comment itt it is federated.
I didn't see federation mentioned anywhere, just self hosting. The difference:
- Self hosted means everyone has their own server, people need to register for the server they're interested in using. Websites are an example of this: you host your own system independently of anything else going on (though there are hyperlinks to cross-link content, which aren't necessarily present in other self-hosted software). Git servers are another example, like Gitea or Forgejo or Gitlab or gitweb
- Federated usually lets you connect servers, so that if I'm on HN and want to post a comment on a Reddit thread, if they were federating, I could just do that without logging into reddit specifically (let alone registering a completely separate account for the other server). The best example may be email, where I don't need to register with Google (yet) to send a Google user an email but I specify @gmail.com after the user's name. A more recent popular example is Mastodon
Each has upsides and downsides, like having to moderate content from other servers and having a much more complex protocol (federated) versus being independent and simple but also being another walled garden (self hosted)
Edit: confirmed by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43278375
> > As of right now, Revolt does not feature any federation and it is not in our feature roadmap
It's tough to compete in a market like social networks, you need mass adoption for high value. Although this looks cool, I'm interested to see how it differs specifically to provide more value than Discord already does (ton of people, various servers, great integrations, etc.)
I think it doesn't necessarily have to be dominant to be considered a success. It's good for people to have the option to choose a free alternative if they want to, where they can be in control of their own data rather than it being centralized and at the mercy of some company, much like with software forges. Of course mass adoption would be cool but I don't think it's necessary to justify these types of projects
Similarly I'd wonder how this compares to e.g. XMPP or matrix for messaging. Those are the big names in open source and have been for some time now.
I would move to Revolt in a heartbeat, if it had a PluralKit equivalent. Currently the only thing keeping me trapped on Discord.
Interestingly (and sadly) the largest deployment of this was probably on Andrew Tate's grift course website thing, see the dev's blog: https://insrt.uk/post/andrew-tate-stealing-software-revolt
The largest Mastodon deployment is truth social.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2021/10/trumps-new-social-medi...
Why even build an app? This app should've been a website. Better pester browser developers to implement "Add to desktop" feature.
I don't see anything about funding/pricing, how is this going to stick around for the long term?
Just a bit of critical feedback: the landing page isn’t responsive to a horizontally rotated iPad. Otherwise, awesome project!
So, how does it compares to matrix/element?
I was wondering whether this was just a matrix client the entire front page. I dont see why you wouldn't utilize the matrix ecosystem with an already usable userbase when trying to recreate discord. If i would want something opensource i would also want something decentralized.
> I was wondering whether this was just a matrix client the entire front page. I dont see why you wouldn't utilize the matrix ecosystem with an already usable userbase when trying to recreate discord.
Judging by the FAQ, they see Matrix as a protocol as "obtuse and unstable":
> Does Revolt have federation?
> 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 the Matrix protocol (unlikely, obtuse and unstable)
It is hard to get E2E (device 2 device) right. I get matrix is not perfect, but I have jet seen an open source alternative with both server/client implementation that get it right.
One thing about matrix is that every device has a key in addition to the password, that key in in addition encrypted with another password, it makes it very difficult for average user, but then just use matrix in unencrypted mode to get the slack/discord effect.
If Revolt is a Discord alternative, then they may have chosen not to implement E2E because their intended audience generally doesn't care for it and the UX is too confusing for a marginal perceived benefit
Because matrix isn’t the savior everyone makes it out to be it’s rather the opposite.
Matrix definitely has problems. I'm not sure if Revolt solves them (and it likely has problems of its own) but I'd say there's room for multiple approaches.
Why don't you allow OAuth / social login via Google, GitHub and yes, even Discord? Seems like it would make adoption much easier.
We started a contribution towards that end: https://github.com/authifier/authifier/pull/63
How does it compare to Element ?
Is it built on Matrix?
I used Riot (now Element) back in the day, but like others have said in this thread, without a network effect these things don't really take off. I haven't heard of anyone using Element for years now.
I have over a dozen people I regularly talk to on Matrix, though I prefer to not use browser/electron apps, so I only use Element on my phone (separate codebase from other Element), and Nheko on my PC. FluffyChat on Android also seems decent and recently added multi-account support.
Not being built on Matrix is a plus, at this point, given the historically poor moderation of that platform.
I've recently heard it said that there's a better alternative to Discord called Gilded, but no reasons were provided. Anyone has insights?
3'000+ lines of code <- this seems pretty low
Friendly UI. Looking good!
The offering in its current form (https://i.imgur.com/zcmEOhr.png) does not feel truly communal.
What's not communal about it? Should they allow anyone to participate without limits?
Discord scale “communities” have tens-or even hundreds of thousands of members
Can you elaborate?
This is as centralized as Discord right? No running your own server, should you choose to.
They publish instructions for self-hosting a server:
Oh nice. It wasn't clear at all from the front page that there is a server available for self hosting.
Pretty cool. I just wish it had its own identity and didn't look like Walmart Discord.
I'm all for good UI/UX spreading as much as possible for the benefit of users.
That said, I've barely used discord and thus can't rightly say if it has good UI/UX.
Do you have other opinions about the UI/UX of apps you haven't used?
Mom: "We have Discord at home"
I cannot find anything on the website about Revolt's end to end encryption story.
This doesn't give me much confidence.
They will have a better stack than Discord once they migrate to Tauri.
It seems the progress for that stalled. (Last commit 5 months ago https://github.com/revoltchat/frontend/tree/main/packages/de... )
At first glance it's hard to even tell them apart, did they copy literally all of the CSS and layout?
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Discord alternatives have a hard time because of network effects. Does revolt has a bridge to Discord?
Putting your data in a centralized instance may eventually just lead to enshittification and/or data loss.
Why not use a federated group discussion such as Lemmy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)
I use Discord for three things: text chat, voice chat, and screen sharing. Looks like screen sharing isn't supported yet, but it's on the roadmap at least[1].
[1] https://github.com/orgs/revoltchat/projects/6/views/4?pane=i...
Every time I see one of these projects, I wince because 2/3 of the time the backend is in PHP (no offense). The backend is in a typesafe, memory safe language!
I like a good ejabberd fork!
edit: oh, this isn't an ejabberd fork. Why didn't they just fork ejabberd like normal people? Seriously, _rust_?
Love to see this! Worried about Discord's future, with its monopole position greater enshittification is definitely a real risk.
Would also love to see some solution to Discord's problem of being an information black hole here as well.
[edit] seems like it's federated
Their FAQ makes it seem like it's not:
Reminder that discord is an app for kids. Is your open source code and volunteer run project going to keep kids safe? Is it an advantage that the comms protocols are open and everyone can build bots? Or a disadvantage for this usecase?
Also, how is it an alternative for Discord if it's in a whole different jurisdiction?
Not sure about that one. There's a ton of minor edating/esex/grooming going on. You have massive community servers that essentially work like gaiaonline back in the day and tons of servers of 18+ communities. Horny, curious kids will always find a way so I can't blame Discord for not having a magic wand but I would be monitoring its usage if I were a parent. Only 1 of the servers I'm in is what I'd consider kid safe and it's a company's community server.
Yeah I get that it would have problems. But I'm saying that being a closed source product with staff is what allows it to fight against that.
Foss on the other hand just clones an app offers a download and calls it a day, "self host", sometimes they encrypt stuff so that not even devs or admins can see the content, they would think of this as respecting privacy, but then when they get a subpoena for a sex offender case, they can't turn up anything.
> Reminder that discord is an app for kids.
Why is that?
Because it's a video game accesory.
They market to kids, and have kid safety features.
Have you seen the UI? Nothing fit for adults, who value their attention and time.
Sorry, I don't see it. I can quickly jump around channels and server with shortcuts, the UI looks similar to other chat apps. Auto-Embed can be disabled, if that steals your attention. Or what do you mean?
>To ensure users stay safe on the platform, we explicitly disallow:
>Misinformation & Conspiracy Theories
>Spreading false or misleading information that can cause harm to individuals or society is prohibited. This includes conspiracy theories that have been debunked or lack credible evidence.
Why? That sounds so dumb to waste resources policing it.
This sounds like a violation of freedom 0, if this extend to the software you run (self hosted).
They did not say they are policing it.
What is the point of disallowing without policing?
Probably same as most other social platforms. Selective enforcement, virtue signaling, a tool to use when they get bad press for a server.
I mean, bad press will chastise you even if you actually enforce stuff
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This is for content on Revolt.chat itself. You can download and host your own servers and allow people to lie all you want. But on the servers they control, they can decide what they allow.
Why are you opposed to running your servers the way you want?
Who determines what’s credible or not? This sounds like “if we don’t like what you have to say, you’re gone”.
And why is that a bad thing ? That's the free market. The business owns the platform and you don't have an innate 'right' to be there.
Why is it a good thing? What's the motivation behind it? It just seems like a really unnecessary restriction to have when you're trying to launch a FOSS alternative existing software.
It’s a good thing because it gives companies autonomy to do what they want (within the law). It’s your responsabilità to take it or leave it.
The alternative is an oligarchy type model where you are bound to the whims of some external party.
Why are you opposed to running your servers the way you want? Why do you support people that don't run your servers controlling what you can and cannot say?
It’s really fucking boring how every platform that hosts speech tries to nudge you in their direction these days.
I don't know why everyone think's they have a right to say and behave however they want using someone else's services.
If the platform or provider don't want to associate with you, that's their prerogative.
The hubris to assume otherwise is ridiculous.
No platform can allow you to 100% say whatever you want, just how it has limit to what it can enforce. Every platforms has to balance this fact. It is impossible to enforce clear borders on this as well, as human interaction is endlessly complex.
They can allow you to 100% say whatever you want as long as the law allows them to host your speech. If they try to limit you beyond that, they are censoring you, which is what is occurring here.
Anyone that feels this type of moderation is censorship can use/host an instance with different rules.
Why are you opposed to running your servers the way you want? Why do you support people that don't run your servers controlling what you can and cannot say?
Donation page to Revolt before Discord succumbs to platform decay or (enshittification) after being owned by Wall Street soon.
Really nice. Perfectly timed for enshitification, and love that it's open source. Now just need some sort of federation and it's good to go. And choosing to go with an established UI will make adoption that much easier when TSHTF.
[just had a longer look around. Is this a Russian project?]
hmmm
haha i had to laugh at the language selectors:
{flag:uk} English (traditional)
{flag:us} English (simplified)I also spot "That’s the website, you can’t scroll further." in large, helpful letters. These people seem to have a pretty solid sense of humour. Mild enough it is difficult to take offence to, playful enough to add character.
Hope they do well; I dislike closed source chat programs.
Rather than open or closed source programs, let's have interoperability. Then everyone can choose. I believe Facebook was aiming for something like that with Threads, and was playing to have WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger be open to a specific standard as well?
I fondly remember the days of Pidgin and Adium..
Proprietary services are interoperable in the beginning and then stop.
Both facebook and google supported XMPP but that's no longer the case. Slack supported XMPP and IRC, but that's no longer the case.
It's completely pointless to expect proprietary stuff to be interoperable. It requires constant reverse engineering and remember that they have money to throw away to hire developers to make breaking changes to the protocol constantly.
One of the highest confidence outcomes I predict from LLM use in software dev is more use of open protocols. It is going to become difficult to maintain a network if you don't use them.
XMPP isn't dead either. Here's an open source project of an XMPP based Slack - https://prose.org/ (I have no association to this, was amazed how much digging it took me looking for Slack/Discord alternatives to find it.)
The most damage to open communications software probably came from the closed mobile app stores. The barrier to maintaining a working app simultaneously on iOS and Android is high. Almost every iOS game I bought 10 years ago is inaccessible and no longer downloadable. Those barriers are in the process of being torn down too, with or without AI's help.
Facebook never federated so their implementation was just an API they couldn't control to them:
> Facebook Messages are evolving to allow people to share rich content beyond text: photos, videos, audio and even stickers. We want to ensure the best possible send and receive experience where all these rich forms of content are reliably and consistently available on every platform. XMPP doesn't support all these (and future) content types, and it's difficult to ensure an XMPP client is rendering them appropriately. As such we've decided to sunset the XMPP Chat API.
> XMPP doesn't support all these (and future) content types, and it's difficult to ensure an XMPP client is rendering them appropriately. As such we've decided to sunset the XMPP Chat API.
This is such a lame excuse, and reveals how much they're control freaks. One of the main points of an open, federated protocol is that people can choose clients that behave the way they want and render things the way they want. "Oooohhh, we can't guarantee with an iron fist that our stupid 'stickers' render correctly on all clients, therefore we can't deal with it!"
This same mentality infests the web, and is why companies insist on slathering JavaScript into everything to force browsers to render their pages exactly as designed, rather than just letting the user agent serve the user's needs.
> let's have interoperability.
Should be mandatory. Things like facebook took off because of network effects not because of the quality of the platform. Being able to migrate all your contacts/ chat/ tweets/ etc somewhere else seemlessly should be enforced by the gov to allow for actual competition. else you end up with first player advantage and network effects being unsurmountable and creating de facto monopolies with 0 benefit for the customer, in an environment that has low set up costs and you should see fierce competition.
The push for messenger interoperability is a reaction to the EUs Digital Markets Act (DMA), which requires certain gatekeeper services to allow interoperability with smaller platforms.
Threads is working on implementing ActivityPub for interoperability with other platforms that already use it. ActivityPub is an open standard for implementing the Fediverse, a group of federated social platforms heavily based in the open source community.
Nope, Matrix has been pushing interop for years (since the late teens).
Not like it's new, though? The Internet is literally interoperating networks, emails hop from server to server until they reach the user-specified destination server, DNS delegates zones to other servers. These are protocols older than I am, and I've had a driver's license for longer than Matrix exists. Their push is amazing but not by any means unique
> I fondly remember the days of Pidgin and Adium..
You may like https://www.beeper.com/
And if you are nerd/privacy conscious enough, though their app and cloud service is proprietary, it’s based on Matrix and open source bridges which you can have a full list here : https://github.com/beeper
This is literally the old Microsoft playbook for destroying open source software. “Embrace, extend, extinguish”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
They did it with XMPP and Windows live messenger in the 2000s.
At the end of the day these companies have no incentive to be responsible stewards of open protocols. The moment they have a tough quarter they’ll eviscerate it if it means they’ll make a buck.
MS Comic Chat was built on top of IRC.
I’m happy IRC is still around in spite of that.
I feel like that was Discord's style also, being playful, fun, childish. Maybe they're just imitating that appeal?
Since US English retains more historical features of English and has fewer of the newer ones (especially in light of Received Pronunciation, rhoticity, and random u insertion), one could argue that US English is the more traditional one.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-p...
I live in a region of the UK where rhoticity is alive and well. It actually means I've an easier time understanding some words when Americans speak them, compared to the English.
On the broader point I'd agree up until I notice that you'd write 'defense' yet also 'fence', and ponder why the verb 'got' is so overused.
I'll just say that I sometimes use defense because the Firefox spellchecker seems to prefer UK spellings even when US English is set in the language settings and the red squiggly lines bother me.
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The article you linked says it's a myth.
Isn't that a myth?
Wonder where that idea even came from, the BBC article even says as such "“It is a delightful and attractive myth that Shakespeare’s language got fossilised” in parts of the US, [the dialect anthropologist] says."
I mean; we have old runic languages that match northern English pronunciation really well- along with "olde english" spelling which is clearly a rote writing of a southern English accent (likely from somewhere like Gloucestershire).
An attractive myth, perhaps, but I'm not sure how much truth there really is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/bofu3g/how_did_ame...
> even if Americans do speak more like the Elizabethan English than today’s Brits themselves
I get the sense that the article very much believes Americans speak more traditional English.
You know it's way more traditional because they democratically pushed themselves into an oligarchy ;)
Sounds pretty European to me, honestly.
An old joke, but a good one.
Shoutouts to Noah Webster for "opinionatedly curating" British English from an inconsistent crufty unspellable mess to a randomly tweaked version of the same thing.
Yep, simplified by removing all those silly extraneous ‘u’s
Other way around. The British wanted to differentiate themselves from colonial hillbillies so they tried to assume the appearance of culture by making the words look more French.
they might have to update their translation to (limited) soon based on how the current admin is blitzkriegeering
u wot mate
u havin a laff?
ight m8 shank u bruv
you taking the piss innit?
Comment was deleted :(
How to quickly lose a few potential users.
Other people might say it's a great way to self-moderate its network.
How to quickly show you have no sense of humor.
Can't handle "locker-room banter"?
You won't be missed.
It's not a loss.
With emphasis on few. I'd wager less than 0.01% of potential users would be butthurt enough by that joke to avoid the platform as a whole. And the ones who got butthurt, probably better off not having them on the platform in the first place.
It's open source.
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Fragile egos that can't take such a innocuous joke are not really a loss in the overall scheme of things though.
It seems strange that someone would be offended by the US variant being called "simplified" spelling — wasn't that the whole point?
I’m an American and not offended in the least. It is simplified (color vs the obviously incorrect UK variant colour). Gray va grey. y’all is a great addition to the Simplified English.
Despite being told long ago by a drunk English visiting student that “the language is English not American” I’ll stand by our American simplification! Lamentably this simplification seems to be backtracking our political system…but hey we’re going from Discord to Revolt!
Maybe they meant people who don't want to be considered traditional...
lol, or how to easily filter out a few users who can't take a joke.
Ones that are offended by a lighthearted joke. Sounds like a plus
Seeing as this is closely related to [1], which I also commented on, and in the hopes that someone finds this useful regarding Discord's ownership of your data (where your messages remain even if you delete your account):
If you'd like to delete your Discord messages en masse, I made an open-source tool for that [2]. It leverages a fairly undocumented process using your Discord data package, providing a UI to explore it and choose what to export. The tool gives you step-by-step instructions and a CSV file that Discord expects when you contact their privacy team. It works across all channels in both servers and DMs, even those you no longer have access to.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276504
[2]: https://discorch.org
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At first I thought you were being brutal but...a GitHub page with a screenshot would be better. The aesthetic of the website is...unique
How is open-source supposed to compete without access to Apple's certificates? If you are constantly forced to override the warnings about unsigned software, assuming your system even allows you in the first place, how much friction before less technical users give up?
Code signing is good, I like it, I approve, but it is a big obstacle for me personally and others who cannot afford Apple Developer Credentials.
> How is open-source supposed to compete without access to Apple's certificates?
Does the license of your application somehow prevent you from following whatever Apple wants to do regarding signing? I think there are plenty of apps/games out there built on FOSS technology yet they're still signed and run like anything else signed on macOS, but maybe I remember incorrectly?
It might be nothing technical.
Some developers avoid paying for the Apple dev program on principle. Joining it could be seen as supporting Apple's attempt at building walled gardens.
There's also the operational challenges for open source like who will sign-up and how to secure or maintain the signing keys etc. It brings in lot of friction.
It’s the 99 bucks argument every time…
The problem is that with exception of single person projects it's not as simple as paying 99$.
Using individual developer account means exposing private information of one of the developers (which not everyone wants) and is a major buss factor.
Doing it properly with organization account means nontrivial amount of paper work to establish either a commercial company or an officially registered non profit. There are very few open source projects big enough for this.
I'm pretty sure I use many open-source projects that have Apple's certificates.
So the only question is communities desire. There is no technical problem here.
> There is no technical problem here.
Just financial and organizational one. Not every open-source project is going to do that.
Not sure why Apple had to change how Gatekeeper works. I will have to look for an alternative once my mbp dies. It gets tiresome to fight with the OS for every other app after every update now. Especially when it worked perfectly OK before.
> Revolt is the chat app that’s truly built with you in mind.
Is this meant to be a unique selling point? All of the features also exist in discord.
Also, "Bots some for extra spice". Might need a text review
I think the implication is that discord is designed for profit, not you.
What do people find upsetting about Discord? It's free, there's no ads, it's reliable, it has many established communities, it's cross-platform and even works in the browser, supports voice chat and screen sharing.
What more could you ask for? Or, are you asking for too much?
What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?
> there's no ads
This is a patently ignorant and ridiculous statement. They absolutely shove their own store garbage every release and upsell Nitro at every opportunity. Here's an article from last year about them explicitly introducing third party ads.
https://techbriefly.com/2024/04/01/discord-introduces-ads-to...
I would define ads as promoting other businesses' products, as you would see on YouTube etc.
Upselling is basically just unlocking additional features. If you object to that, then you're objecting to the freemium model, not to "ads".
> I would define ads as promoting other businesses' products, as you would see on YouTube etc.
They do that, they call them "quests". Companies pay them to promote their product/service and users get rewards for doing a task (like playing a game, watching a video, etc.) https://discord.com/ads/quests
The article that parent linked even says it.
A freemium service advertizing it's premium offering hardly seems surprizing or objectional. They're not a charity
"It has no ads" and "it's not surprising that it has ads" are basically opposites.
Is this apropos anything? I was pushing back on the claim that there were no ads, though your username suggests the reason.
Why are you belligerent?
Well, concernedc1tizen, I don't like it when people spout of misinformation. Especially when it comes to deep societal issues like pervasive advertising. Making thoughtless and inaccurate blanket statements hurts the overall discussion.
"Belligerence" as you call it is direct, unambiguous, and will probably be remembered.
> What do people find upsetting about Discord? It's free, there's no ads, it's reliable, it has many established communities, it's cross-platform and even works in the browser, supports voice chat and screen sharing.
It's an information black hole, as someone else mentioned in this comment section. Otherwise, it's a nifty communication tool.
I personally come from running and using {TeamSpeak,Ventrilo,Mumble} servers. Started using Discord in winter 2015, it was just trivial to open a browser tab and join a group session with your friends. The audio experience was an order of magnitude worse when compared to other solutions, but the overall UX and ease of use made up for it.
> What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?
If you'd allow me to, I'm going to address this question from a different perspective, as this post is about Revolt: What could Revolt do that would make me, at least, start using it alongside Discord?
I'd love it if I could self-host a server, place it online and let people find it and join seamlessly, similar to how Fediverse works for other social networks. They don't seem to be interested in adding this: https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html#admonition-does-revo...
Other than that, I'd see myself using it to run a workspace. Having used Discord as a work-related communication platform in the past, I've come to find voice-based channels very useful, these seem to transmit a better feeling of productivity somehow. Other tools (e.g Slack, Teams) make me feel kind of "alone" when working. Even if it's just for body doubling, I'd argue voice channels are underrated and actually quite helpful for remote workers.
That's exactly the question - how does a free communication app achieve a multi-billion dollar valuation despite not having ads or directly selling user data?
Discord's business model relies on attracting a massive user base to secure substantial investments and potentially a lucrative acquisition. We've seen again and again and again what happens once acquisition takes place.
Also a big existing investor in Discord is Tecent which, under Chinese law, could grant the government access to Discord's extensive user data.
So yeah.. it's not about features it's about freedom.
And there's no way to delete your chat history basically. You can delete your account, but that doesn't destroy your messages.
And as for privacy: Your username is anonymous, but your email isn't (to Discord), so the % of users that didn't create a separate fake email, or ever connected with a trackable IP, basically aren't anonymous at all. They also record your voice. Every user's voice is recorded in isolation and can be used as training data for identification algorithms. Including unusual characteristics like breathiness, diction, accent, and so on. Probably it can estimate your age as well.
Data on Discord has never been safe really. I don't know how it is nowadays since my memes have gotten less edgy/dank but you could get banned for private messages for a long time.
They want my phone number and email address just to look at a forum I don't plan to participate in yet which information I would like to access is siloed in.
They use your messages for AI training, even if you disable the AI summaries "feature". I kept seeing events related to AI summaries on a custom client, even with them turned off in the only server I was in.
They'll hold your account hostage until you give them a phone number if you happen to trigger their "anti-spam" detection. And sending a message with a number below 13 might be all it takes for Discord to withhold your account for age verification as well.
They basically track every click, every action you take on their client. You can see that if you request a data package.
Abuse is rampant. There's no way to report servers, channels, or individual users. Things that were all possible in the past, through the Support form, until they made in-app reporting the only option, which relies on reporting individual messages and has a very low rate limit.
> What more could you ask for? Or, are you asking for too much?
Let's see...blocking that actually prevents you from seeing messages from the person you blocked. A native client. Better reporting tools. Better message deletion tools - you still can't delete every message along with your account. The ability to opt out of having messages fed into AI. None of these are unfeasible.
> What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?
The network effect is the reason why technologically inferior solutions like Discord are still thriving.
Many platforms have followed the trend of first offering a legitimately good product to build up a userbase, then squeezing out profit with increasingly anti-user changes, exploiting the fact it's difficult to switch (network effect and intentional lock-in).
It's not impossible that Discord stays more or less as it currently is, with a few features locked behind its paid subscription but generally a good experience, but it seems prudent to have a backup option for if/when things go further downhill.
> What do people find upsetting about Discord?
These are the most common complaints I see from people
- They don't allow third party clients and some people have various complaints about theirs (e.g resource usage)
- Some people think discord is too popular, to the point some things that "don't belong there" have moved to discord. This is usually about being search indexable and requiring an account.
- Fear of monopolostic behaviour ( "enshittification" )
- Some people are mad that they killed public urls for files uploaded to discord. Mostly this is people running into links to images online and being unable to see them, usually not the uploaders
- Discord is centralized and you cannot host your own server
- The only client they allow you to use (See above) is propietary, and some people would rather run something open source
As for me personally, their search functionality drives me insane. I feel like the exact same query gets completely different results depending on the time of day and phase of the moon, making it super unreliable.
It's very, very badly performing. And yet every time I want to start it, it requires another 15 updates.
An example of the worst-of-both-worlds 'always needs updates' like a website but 'takes over your screen (while strobing your taskbar) so you can't multitask' like a desktop program.
The web client is fairly well behaved and does away with the need for constantly installing updates: https://discord.com/app
Sounds like your average web development project though; frequent releases are a good thing, although I suppose for each individual they'll want to slow it down a bit.
I just wish there were more native applications instead of all the web desktop stuff. But, visual design options and developer availability is a huge factor there. Native iOS designs come the closest to what I'd like to see on the desktop.
I agree about the updates, but I'm in a shit ton of servers and performance is fine for me. Can you talk to the issues you've had a bit?
There are ads in discord now. They just call them Quests and the notifications for them can't be turned off.
Not open source.
Discord is American. For many in Europe this is a downside now.
indeed... Made in Europe, motherland of GDPR.
"Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/discord-ipo.ht...
Enshittification is inevitable, indeed mandatory.
They have been trying to get to IPO for a while. 2 years ago they deleted a huge swathe of accounts to cause those people to create new ones to boost their growth stats and frankly having been caught up in it that was the push I needed to get off Discord. It caused a huge discontentment at the time as it wasn't clear if it was a bug or intentional but Discord didn't fix it.
They will do anything to get to a successful IPO including cooking the stats but they aren't there yet.
Closed-source, dumb stuff hidden behind premum,and premium ads and popups almost every time you launch.
Let me preface this by saying I use Discord daily to keep in touch with friends. It's a great digital campfire where you can relax with people, talk with them over voice and video or just post random stuff.
The issue is that Discord has replaced things which it shouldn't have, the internet forums. Discord is the epitome of a golden cage. It is a prison for information, a black hole.
I'm not even talking about the absolutely atrocious search functionality, but the fact that information inside the Discord walls is impossible to find from the outside. You can't search across discord communities, none of the content there is indexed by web search engines. Entire communities have FAQs and knowledge as pins inside threads inside Discord servers. Things which used to be on the web.
15 years ago, these discussions would've taken place on forums and on IRC to a lesser extent. IRC itself was a really bad information black hole, but at least the forums were great. They supported long running discussions and were easy to search.
Now everything disappeared into effectively hidden Discord chats and youtube videos where you need to watch 8 different idiots bramble on for 10 minutes before you find the 30 second segment of information that you were actually looking for and could've been a single paragraph.
Even IRC was better for data archiving and searching. We usually had local logs we could grep and web-indexed/searchable logs from bots.
It's really insane how much information is on Discord that is both impossible to discover and will silently disappear at some point.
> We usually had local logs we could grep and web-indexed/searchable logs from bots.
But only IF you are good at regex.
On discord you can easily filter by date or date range, if it has media, if it contains an URL or what user/roll got mentioned.
I still use IRC, irssi in particular. My go-to for searching local logs is `less` rather than grep. I have the date on every line in the log file. I can jump to a specific date easily, then search a different term up/down from that spot, and I see context of surrounding lines easily. No regex needed.
Discord search thinks it knows better than you and won't let you search verbatim.
Only if it's in the discord search index, which sometimes doesn't include all history, and it does some fuzzy elasticsearch query that works ok for most cases and awful for anything that isn't most cases.
The metadata filters are nice but they're also what keep it usable at all.
Discord search still sucks a lot because by nature discussions are largely unstructured. It's not really suitable for discussing specific topics - only perhaps types of topics. Discord threads could ostensibly fulfil the forum topic role, but their implementations is so utterly incompetent that it is genuinely puzzling. You can't search specific Discord threads, they often disappear from the left hand nav bar even if you subscribed to the thread. Whoever implemented the Threads in Discord should be kept away from computer systems because they are a danger to any application.
But even if Discord search was good, it still doesn't matter because it is not only a walled garden, it is a hermetically sealed chamber from which no information can escape.
I hope the communities/servers arent self-hosted because that would be shot in the knee, cuz this is security issue
TeamSpeak and Ventrilo were like that
Is it beyond to you seek out that information before commenting?
I didnt manage to find it on their page, so I guess it is centralized like dc
how tf can something be a server if its not selfhosted
Discord servers arent self hosted
Discord seems to be going the way of Skype: deprecating their support for Windows 7, in favor of a newer OS offering from Microsoft which harvests data in the background under the feeble guise of telemetry. Granted there is telelmetry in Windows 7, but you can disable it in Windows 7 and not worry obout it being over-ridden the next day, or even the same day, with some forced update.
If you're worried about Windows 10's/11's telemetry, you should read Discord's TOS.
I'm not sure what to take from this.
Are you worried there is some sort of anti-Windows 7 conspiracy, where software vendors stop supporting a 15 year old years out of support OS so that an unrelated software vendor receives more data?
Or is it simply more likely that nobody wants to test their software on a 15 year old OS? When XP came out that would have been Windows 95, and the same thing happened.
Windows 7 is a 15 year old OS that's been out of support for 5 years. It is utterly ridiculous to paint Discord as unreasonable for not supporting it?
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