Illustrious_Virus300
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 5, 2024
Given all the recent happenings with Groomercord, including Ro-Cleaner getting nuked and their CEO stepping down and being replaced by an Indian from Activision-Blizzard amid IPO rumours, along with general enshittification over the years, I thought it might be interesting to start a discussion thread about the alternatives that are out there and why they are/are not compelling.
I would divide the different programs into three categories - Closed, Open-Source and Federated. Closed chat applications include Discord itself but also Teams, Slack, Skype (RIP) etc. Federated services allow multiple instances of the application to exist together in a network e.g. Matrix, IRC, XMPP. Open-source applications include things like Mattermost, Revolt, etc. and do not allow for federated identities. You could use multiple programs to achieve the desired result, like IRC + Mumble for text chat and voice chat respectively like in the good-ol' days.
The unfortune thing if you are ever looking to move off of Discord is that there's is no true replacement. Discord offers features that are either implemented poorly or not at all in other applications. Furthermore, it offers the easiest onboarding even a retard could follow, both in terms of making accounts and joining Guilds. (not 'servers')
Discord has two features that set it apart from other programs - forum-like discussion organization, and screensharing. While Discord's forum features are gay and retarded, they are undoubtably contributing to the lock-in of the platform as communities and forums move into the walled garden. Where the alternatives really fail though is in their ability to provide robust screensharing features. While most of them will have some sort of feature to share what you're doing on your display or application, none do it as effectively as Discord. They will either be low quality, low framerate or have no ability to share the application's audio in the stream.
Teamspeak released the beta of TS6 with similar screensharing features, but with the very big catch that there are no server binaries available currently. The social media person on the the official Xitter account gets people complaining about it whenever they tweet.
The technology exists to do it, there even being open-source implementations of WebRTC which would allow for these features, but it seems that since most of these developers see these projects more like science experiments, (What Matrix feels like currently) the urgency to do it and grab user share from the current giant just doesn't exist.
You might not use these features often if ever, but it contributes to the network effect as people find the idea of leaving very unpalatable.
Hope my first thread wasn't too terrible.
I would divide the different programs into three categories - Closed, Open-Source and Federated. Closed chat applications include Discord itself but also Teams, Slack, Skype (RIP) etc. Federated services allow multiple instances of the application to exist together in a network e.g. Matrix, IRC, XMPP. Open-source applications include things like Mattermost, Revolt, etc. and do not allow for federated identities. You could use multiple programs to achieve the desired result, like IRC + Mumble for text chat and voice chat respectively like in the good-ol' days.
The unfortune thing if you are ever looking to move off of Discord is that there's is no true replacement. Discord offers features that are either implemented poorly or not at all in other applications. Furthermore, it offers the easiest onboarding even a retard could follow, both in terms of making accounts and joining Guilds. (not 'servers')
Discord has two features that set it apart from other programs - forum-like discussion organization, and screensharing. While Discord's forum features are gay and retarded, they are undoubtably contributing to the lock-in of the platform as communities and forums move into the walled garden. Where the alternatives really fail though is in their ability to provide robust screensharing features. While most of them will have some sort of feature to share what you're doing on your display or application, none do it as effectively as Discord. They will either be low quality, low framerate or have no ability to share the application's audio in the stream.
Teamspeak released the beta of TS6 with similar screensharing features, but with the very big catch that there are no server binaries available currently. The social media person on the the official Xitter account gets people complaining about it whenever they tweet.
The technology exists to do it, there even being open-source implementations of WebRTC which would allow for these features, but it seems that since most of these developers see these projects more like science experiments, (What Matrix feels like currently) the urgency to do it and grab user share from the current giant just doesn't exist.
You might not use these features often if ever, but it contributes to the network effect as people find the idea of leaving very unpalatable.
Hope my first thread wasn't too terrible.
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