Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.

Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?

Right now I’m on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can’t find a clear “winner”.

  • Matt@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    42 minutes ago

    Matrix is the way. It’s federated and you can have your own server.

  • slomosapien@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    Its been a while since I used Revolt, I use element everyday. But I’d prefer something more “third party” too. Revolt was servicable back in 2020, maybe it has gotten better?

  • Turnbomb@lemmy.mlEnglish
    10·
    7 hours ago

    Is there any option to stay on discord but better? Like vencord or something similar through Linux? I cannot imagine being able to get my friends off of discord ever.

    • RichardDegenne@lemm.eeEnglish
      8·
      4 hours ago

      I guess that’s the biggest hurdle, especially when it comes to social apps. One tech-savvy person wanting to migrate is usually not enough to start moving a community, even as a small as a group of friends.

      • Richard@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 hours ago

        Had to experience that first hand. I tried to get my best friends to register on my Matrix server last September and join a room for our group, and they did, but I rarely see any of them online and I only get responses days later, if at all. One even stopped using it entirely, lol. Ah well, but at least I got a Matrix server out of that that I can use to federate with other like-minded people.

    • farcaller@fstab.shEnglish
      5·
      4 hours ago

      Matrix is spectacularly cursed to the point of being unusable if you self-host it. The protocol is dumb enough to lock you out of rooms hosted on another server forever if anything goes wrong with the key rotation.

  • XiberKernel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    111·
    10 hours ago

    Honest question, but on a technical level isn’t discord basically IRC with some bells, whistles, emojis, and a some WebRTC Logic wrapped in electron with a large marketing budget? Throw in some cloud storage and a CDN for images. What am I missing? I’m not saying it’s “easy”, but I’m curious what it would take to build a solid streamlined FOSS alternative built on combining existing technologies.

    Edit: I’m not familiar with the ecosystem… is the issue with existing FOSS bad UI and complicated onboarding? Missing features? Or is it simply a critical mass issue?

    • echolalia@lemmy.mlEnglish
      7·
      7 hours ago

      In addition to the replies you got already, discord has screen sharing/streaming. An experience kind of like zoom (I don’t use it and dont see the appeal but maybe someone who does can elaborate more. My partner uses this feature sometimes).

    • dubyakay@lemmy.caEnglish
      9·
      8 hours ago

      Discord is not even necessarily Electron. I’m running it as Datcord, which is a Firefox based wrapper.

      Discord has a searchble chat history, which is what sets it apart from IRC. Everything else can be emulated by modern IRC clients, such as emoji and embedded / unfurling images and link previews.

      However imagine the chat history as if you had a bouncer that has 100% uptime and joined all possible chat channels from their creation, along with offering you search and buffer.

      If not IRC, either Matrix or XMPP should be capable of this.

      I’m fairly sure Discord’s popularity was due to aggressive marketing, likely during their venture capital funding rounds. Something which FOSS does not have.

    • Phantom_Engineer@lemmy.mlEnglish
      5·
      8 hours ago

      The main benefit I remember from jumping to Discord from IRC back in the day was the ability to easily see past messages. That said, I’m not sure if that’s a problem anymore on IRC since I haven’t used it in ages. Even then, I don’t think it would be too terribly difficult to whip up a self-hostable fediverse competitor to Discord. It would essentially be IRC++.

      It’s probably more of a critical mass issue, though not near the level of Reddit vs Lemmy or Twitter vs Bluesky vs Mastodon. Every Discord server is essentially a walled garden. A Discord server doesn’t hold much advantage over a Slack server, GroupMe, Teams, or IRC. For that reason, it would be a lot easier to move individual communities over.

  • Kuvwert@lemm.eeEnglish
    991·
    15 hours ago

    Ah this is so exciting!

    Discord ‘existing’ has held back development motivation on Foss Federated Communication alternatives.

    When they go public only good things will happen for projects like matrix :)

    I’m very excited!

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      20·
      11 hours ago

      Matrix is cool but it really suffers from complexity.

      The spec is a mess because they keep expanding it.

      • douglasg14b@lemmy.worldEnglish
        81·
        9 hours ago

        Let’s not mention the abysmal performance for servers. Making it largely infeasible to scale.

        It’s not the solution, not even remotely close, unfortunately.

    • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      9·
      12 hours ago

      I feel like matrix isn’t a one-to-one replacement. It’s a good slack replacement.

      I haven’t used matrix enough to know for sure but does it have the discord equivalent of servers?

      • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        9·
        12 hours ago

        those are called spaces there. but there’s no flexible roles system. also no hop-on voice channels yet, but that’s a client feature so maybe that’s a bit different

  • Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyzEnglish
    71·
    10 hours ago

    Element/matrix all the way

    if you want something that looks like discord there are themes for the clients, there’s even commet.chat for a discord like experience (but they haven’t added calls yet)