What are we going to do about it?
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
Edit: thanks to @Xamrica@lemmy.dbzer0.com for this translation alternative: https://translate.kagi.com/translate/https://www.xataka.com/servicios/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-porque-ahora-todo-reddit-discord-eso-preocupante
Yeah I remember voicing this concern when all online communities seemed to be going to discord and people seemed to mainly laugh at me in response at the time.
Fuck Discord
Companies putting their stuff into discord is like all the businesses that ditched a dedicated website and moved to facebook however many years ago. Yay, now it is on a format that doesn’t work well for presenting static information and will inevitably require account registration!
Newest iteration of “this meeting could have been an email” has become “this Discord could have been a wiki”.
wiki + ai search = discord except ppl are the ai remembering stuff said in the chat lol, reddit + google was once good, nowadays I click on the other results since the reddit reply is its already been answered use google
And someone (on the Far-Right) is always trying to buy Wikipedia, monetise it, X-ify it, or take it down. I think Wikipedia is abusive - exploits volunteer unpaid labour - should have been created by an NGO like UN and kept safe for mankind like our Library of Alexandria. But it is what it is. Preppers download the whole site regularly in order to have that knowledge under their control in case is ever gets taken down or spoilt and they are rebuilding civilisation post-Armageddon. I keep meaning to download it myself (note to self: do that soon you lazy b. no more excuses!)
Take a look at Kiwix. Makes it super easy plus some ideas for a good Raspberry Pi project.
I quite like Discord, but I really only use it for it’s original purpose - a place for groups of friends to hang out, play video games with voice chat, and maybe watch shows/movies together. For these purposes, Discord is great!
I have found very little value in how Discord gets used for anything and everything else - forums for video games, support channels for businesses, 1000+ member communities, etc etc. All of those use cases feel better served through traditional websites and forums… but it’s so much easier to set up a Discord server for the average person it has turned into a weird default.
In that regard, fuck Discord.
Yeah anything ephemeral is fine like chats and what not. But this idea of using it as support platform is just dumb. You end up with people asking the same question over and over and it either doesn’t get answered because no one is around to answer it or likely because they’re annoyed at the same questions over and over. There is no organization and no institutional knowledge. It’s like it ends up being set up by people who think it’s what the cool kids want. And these giant communities just exacerbate this issue. Everything ends up being noise. It’s the reason I usually ended up turning off the world or general channels in WoW. It just ended up being annoying and distracting.
When I’m trying resolve a situation that I need some sort of support I wanna be able to search if others have had the same issue and see discussion around that topic. I don’t need synchronous communication for that. I don’t care if it was 3 months ago someone had the problem if they figured out how to fix it. The way to do that is forums, Reddit (well before the enshittification), or even Lemmy.
Ie. The equivalent of sending the output of your wiki to /dev/null
Yeah that’s a good analogy.
yep its horrible really should start suggesting discord servers move to lemmy, self host their own, a lot of them would be better off with a forum like structure, but lemmy isnt easily crawlable either, everyone hates being searchable
In my head Discord = toxicity. Not sure how it got that rep for me but it has gotten it. Thus, wont lose sleep if it dies out. Perhaps I am wrong. Reviewing rationality of this prejudice is on my ToDo List after a million other things…
No worries! The only reason to evaluate (or re-evaluate) a piece of software is if you have a need or desire the software might fulfill. And if you don’t have either, it literally doesn’t matter, lol.
I despise discord from a user interface and business practice perspective. What a piece of shit
This is exactly what I was gonna say: I’m amazed that so many millions of people can tolerate its atrocious UI. Even now, the amount of notifications I get from the constant text channels across “servers” (which is such a misnomer for merely “communities”) is so ridiculous that I ignore 99.9% of it.
I think that naming was fully on purpose. People argumented with me that they had their own “servers” so that was good, right?
Grrr.
Yeah I remember voicing this concern when all online communities seemed to be going to discord and people seemed to mainly laugh at me in response at the time.
Because there hasn’t been a single proper alternative until very recently, and even then they’re not as user friendly.
Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects, I don’t know what you mean by an alternative to Discord because my argument is that Discord is shit for organizing.
Discord is great for chat, both voice and text, it is a great live space to have for a community. I don’t dispute that. Sure there hasn’t been good alternatives to recently for that specific usecase…
What I dispute, and what I am pointing out is that Discord ate forums, it ate all kinds of public, publically accessible formats for online communities that were much more easily searchable and collatable into useful information for everybody.
Discord is a fucking hallway of a thousand fractured silo’d conversations locked behind an account login. I hate Discord for destroying the internet before it which I could freely browse and learn so much more from.
Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects
Terrible how, though? That’s exactly what it gets right. You have easy-to-setup roles and channel accesses, onboarding experiences for people joining a larger server, a huge ecosystem of bots for various purposes, etc.
okay, it is bad for not being indexable, but it’s good at what it does and it’s popular for a reason.
It’s searchable but information doesn’t stay pinned and available. It’s meant to be a chatroom style place for gaming and as that it’s fine but when you want to build a community for something like a video game or a product, what ends up happening is you end up making a channel for every single announcement etc. Say you have a channel for FAQ? You either lock it so only moderators and admins can use it or you end up with a constantly ballooning channel where everyone can contribute. There’s no in-between and because each post isn’t really collated the way it would be here or on a forum the information is hard to navigate without search which often only gives a truncated section that you can’t even navigate to. There’s no context more often than not when you use the search function and it’s a very poor substitute for a forum as a result.
I don’t think discord is a good substitute for a website and I don’t think it’s a good substitute for a forum but it’s being used as both fairly frequently.
Excuse me, Jabber / XMPP is about as old as I am!
How do we get them to switch to something like Element?
Element needs to be better. Discord is awesome with the way it auto-plays looping videos/gifs and has animated emojis.
Seriously: That’s all they’d need to do. The element devs need to focus on fun.
Fun is always great to capture the masses!
thats why I want misskey the emoji reactions to anything are always more fun than just likes
Isn’t that a client side issue though? Element is just one Matrix client. I haven’t used it myself but heard from others that Fluffychat (another Matrix client) is more like Discord.
Yeah it’s probably just a client side issue but the OP mentioned Element, specifically 🤷
I just wanted to point out that Element is no fun! No fun at all!
It works and it works great for what it does. Even voice and streaming are great with Element. It’s just got a terrible, no-fun interface and pointless limitations on things like looping videos. You can’t even configure it to make them play properly (as in, automatic and endlessly, the way they were meant to be played! 😤).
Looping videos and animated emojis are super fun ways to chat with people. Even in professional settings! It really breaks up the humdrum and can motivate people to chat and share more.
Element is all serious all the time and going into a chat channel there feels like a chore.
If I’m talking with people about the topical thing which is why I joined a room in the first place, the last thing I want is a looping autoloops fruityloops annoyance. Plus, not autoplaying and autolooping them saves battery.
I hate to break this to you but that means you’re not normal. If all you ever do in chat is talk about serious things that are of such earth-shattering importance that it would be incredibly rude and obnoxious for someone to post a silent looping video you’re not normal, and no fun at all.
The way Element currently works, it’s made for people like you… A strange minority that probably only thinks about “chat” in terms of communicating for an end goal and not for the pleasure of conversation.
Plus all this stuff can be disabled in discord too, if you want to be that serious. There are per-role and per-channel settings that let you disable images, link embedding, external emojis, etc.
It gives you choice. I have no choice in Element, it’s always unfun all the time.
Oh, do cry me a river while you’re at it. Pretty much every community everywhere has a
generalormemesroom, those are for the meme gifs (or wait, these are webp these days…).
It is, but Element is still the “Gold standard” Matrix client and the most popular. And if you’re going to create a brand new chat protocol, you should make sure that your flagship client measures up to the competition.
What would likely help a lot if it was easier to get set up, particularly on a VPS or something like that. Small businesses and or larger community projects would be more likely to jump on possibly.
Another thing is ability to easily join, a lot of the above just have an easy link to join their discord server, not sure how easy matrix on boarding is currently as I still haven’t gotten my instance functional yet (not even half done with synapse configuration seemingly)
I mean, there are quite a few such providers: https://etke.cc/
Fair enough, I do mean moreso for self host in a way, like I’ve seen some game hosting servers, they have a VPS they already paid for and use Pelican or Pterodactyl to host it all, being able to throw matrix into the mix easily would be great in those cases. Seems like this would be a separate situation, which is definitely fine, just not exactly what I meant.
Also, people forget that Discord’s streaming capability is, unfortunately, absolutely top-notch; no other community-screensharing platform has fewer issues, and my friends and I like to watch each other play games often.
Fun is the least of my concerns. I don’t know why people compare the 2 when they have almost nothing in common. One is a chat app and the other is a voice/streaming/community app. Matrix is slow as hell and the way “spaces” are implemented is a joke.
Honestly outside of the incessant pop-ups and upsells and the whole selling everything to AI companies, it’s pretty great for private communities.
Your view of Matrix seems a bit weird. AFAIK I can do all the voice/streaming/community in Matrix as well as it’s done in Discord.
Also, no, my server isn’t slow. matrix.org might be, I don’t know.
Matrix is notorious for its poor performance with large/numerous groups. They keep claiming to improve it, but it’s still bad.
I mean, it’s great that it works for you, but be honest: isn’t your tolerance for technological friction a bit higher than the average bear’s? People complain that Mastodon is too hard, and Matrix is ten times worse to sign up for and use.
I hate to say it, but Matrix is never going to be mainstream. Its UX is bad and it seems like it’s too bloated to fix. If I tried to get people to move from Discord to Matrix, they’d never take me seriously again. It was hard enough getting people to move from Facebook Messenger to Signal.
I run a Matrix family instance. My elderly parents use it as their main way of communicating with us.
Sure, I set up their accounts - but all that difficult to use UX seems to have passed them by completely since they’re very happy with it.
I set up their accounts
Setup is the hardest part. Syncing multiple devices and device migration are also hard. I’ll bet you’re going to act as tech support every time they get a new phone. That’s fine for your family, but it’s hardly going to scale.
The performance issues show up when dealing with large groups syncing between instances. You might just not be using it that way, but that’s what needs to work seamlessly for a viable substitute for Discord.
I have a Matrix server. I’ve also used a half a dozen others. Every one of them you have sit there and stare at it for 5-10 secs and watch the messages roll in every time you open the app.
I can’t speak to your server but I don’t have that issue. It was solved with Sliding Sync quite some time ago.
Sliding sync did nothing.
Sorry but this sounds like a skill issue.
Loading times are a skill issue? You could at least try to make sense while you’re being a dick.
Most of these communuties using Discord are better served by something that isn’t a chatroom. So, so, so confusingly many of them use them as a store of permanent information. Like a website+forum.
Many times the benefit of Discord is the ability to paywall parts of it with Patreon integration. We need more foss and federated options that do this.
Isn’t there any solution for that yet?
None of which I know…
Rant
I don’t think you can for most people that is what is so infuriating right? In my experience people who are entrenched in Discord are completely and utterly entrenched in it, to the point that I have lost contact with a lot of these people effectively since I don’t use Discord.
The important choice was with all the community leaders who decided to make the move to Discord at crucial moments where they could have NOT done that.
I think any shift off of Discord is also going to have to come from community leaders of organizations, projects, game development communities etc… deciding to move off the platform at crucial decision points.
However, and this is something people who happily pushed their entire lives onto Discord would confidently tell me we could easily do if Discord got bad, everyone isn’t just going to straight up leave once they have built their entire digital communication around Discord…
Now I frequently see game developers complain that they can’t accurately get a picture of their playerbase because large categories of players aren’t on their discord!! and I have to keep my palm from blowing a hole through my face when the two loudly meet.
The brainworms are so bad that these developers will conclude the issue is with their playerbase not wanting to use Discord instead of it being an issue with DEVELOPERS DECIDING TO COMMUNICATE WITH THEIR PLAYERBASE WITH A SHITTY, EXCLUSIONARY TOOL THAT HAS AWFUL SEARCH.
I can’t express how much this gets under my skin, it is like this assumption that if you are even slightly a gamer than you are on Discord all the damn time has become rheified and cemented into place so rigidly that developers are literally tossing away large swaths of their playerbase feedback because they refuse to use a different tool to get feedback and communicate with their community. No forum, no custom website, nothing, Discord or bust.
I have seen the effects in games like Battlebit where it is clear that the developers were catering to only a small subsection of the playerbase that was very active and prominent on Discord and it ended up torpedoing the game because changes kept happening that clearly signalled to large portions of the playerbase that they were basically invisible to the developers.
I have watched this problem, stewing in my frustration, evolve from a minor personal annoyance to being a serious systematic issue causing community organization to become dysfunctional and broken because Discord is clearly a shitty tool for that community (that clearly a lot of people refuse to use or check regularly)… and YET everybody in those communities behaves like it was always a foregone conclusion that the community would have to move to Discord, that is just the way it is.
screams into void
Gamers are so confidently stupid.
Also before anyone says “well it is a good tool for communicating with friends in a DnD group or something” … yes I know it is good for that, you know why I know that it is good for that? Because that is the easiest usecase for any communication and organizational tool to tackle, Discord isn’t good at this usecase, it is just a laughably easy usecase compared to how mindbendingly difficult it is to wrangle larger communities of… not necessarily friends.
This is so true! I always hated the Slack/Discord format and will always do. It’s just a mess.
Further hampered by the Steam “discussions” that are an incredibly unmoderated cesspit.
I think your argument relates closely to something I’ve noticed happening over and over with more than just game developers. Far too often I see people expressing frustration that the Internet doesn’t give them more accurate information about the real world. Way too many people, apparently including many of the richest and most powerful people alive, have come to see the Internet as a magical machine that will do anything they want it to do… if only people would use it differently! Like, they legitimately seem to expect the entire population to post their entire lives online, unfiltered, so they can be used as automatons by people they’ve never even met.
You don’t…you go back to forums. They’re searchable. Discord and Facebook and well anything self hosted isnt via search engines
But many people don’t want to have everything completely public, even if privacy is a illusion there.
We have to accept that and provide a solution for both.
But many people don’t want to have everything completely public
This isn’t true at all. Most people do not care about privacy; those that do are an extreme minority. You (presumably) and I are part of that minority yet even we still comment here, in a public space. The issue with forums has never been about privacy because most are content with pseudonymity. It is a big mistake to think we need to cater to the extreme minority in the privacy space when tackling big issues that involve a majority who do not care.
That’s why I specifically wrote “completely public” not “private”.
I think most people know that a discord server with a few hundred or thousand members can hardly be considered private. But I can imagine that there are people who don’t want to put it directly online for everybody to find on Google. Not that I like that.
Yeah, I don’t post private shit on forums, I discuss things publically so I can collectively have a conversation with countless other people.
If you want to have a private personal conversation sure use a private chat room, but I need that public space to discuss and learn, active publically accessible forums / lemmy / other equivalent communities are goldmines of information that benefits all.
You can lock down forums to were they’re un searchable unless you have a login. Tons of forums are like this.
XMPP / Jabber is better.
Or Matrix?
According to history:
-
Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable, or…
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If it reaches a critical mass… You can’t. See: Facebook.
The Fediverse can adopt a few nice communities, but honestly bringing the larger population seems hopeless.
Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable
Discord is going public soon, so start the timer…
Discord is scary popular though, like Facebook popular. I am really scared the enshittification will stick hard, like it has for Facebook.
they already forced ads on discord.
RIP D&D campaign’s chat service 😬
Yeah, so many projects and companies using Discord for support seemed like such a bad idea.
Or Matrix?
Element is a Matrix client
larger population seems hopeless.
But what is the barrier? We have a functioning infrastructure. We need to solve the last piece of the puzzle.
People need an easy way to join!
Mastodon has already shown that this works. Even if they aren’t as big as others yet, they still make up about two-thirds of the Fediverse. Now we need to replicate this for Lemmy, Pixelfed, and so on, and share our findings along the way.
You mean drag them from platforms that have a vested interest in keeping them locked in and squashing competitors like the Fediverse?
In platforms that spend billions on engagement optimization algorithms, with the sole purpose of keeping users addicted, basically with government and business landscape backing?
Look, I’m optimistic about the Fediverse, this is a great refuge in the hellscape that is the internet. But you can’t make people want to change. I’ve learned this IRL, but see it with (for example) persecuted people continuing to use Twitter even though its owner basically has a gun to their heads. There’s a big gulf between being a fantastic refuge and taking the internet from Facebook and Google. Even if every phone on the planet had an easy button to switch to Fediverse alternatives in one click… many would not take it, and that’s an utter fantasy.
This pretty much. At some point one has to accept that the people who want to be saved can be saved, and those who don’t, can’t. We shouldn’t (reasonably or not) waste ourselves for the latter in spite of the former.
Matrix/Element has shitty usability and reliability compared to Discord.
For lots of communities, they could use modern forum software like Discourse with better results.
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For forums: Yeah spaces are pretty great (have a look at Mozilla for example) and it can be an alternative IME.
For gaming which even if unasked about, is the majority of the users: When we can have push to talk option (client side, which can be done relatively easy) and proper 30+ FPS Screen share for gaming features, I think it’ll be much easier to convince people to try it. Everything else IMO is QOL features that I don’t mind about. We also tried to use mumble, but the lack of Screen share moved us straight back to discord eventually…
Tell me about Element. This is the first I’m hearing about it.
It’s a secure messenger
What are its pros and cons? What does it offer that telegram or similar don’t offer? Is it good for group chat? Is it available on multiple platforms?
Telegram is not a secure messenger.
Yes to multiple platforms, groups etc.
So, I’m going to say that I don’t use telegram and only know it as being presented as a secure messenger platform. As a result, I am just asking follow-on questions to further discern what makes Element preferable. And this is no different because I feel like this is exactly the problem lemmy and other platforms like it have. There are people who love them, but when people ask about them, they don’t offer any really informative data to support why they like them.
What makes Element (matrix) a secure platform, and how does that differ from telegram or signal or whatever. Like. What is matrix good at? That’s what I’m asking. Why suggest it over something else?
Matrix is a decentralized platform with the same level of security/encryption as Signal. Being decentralized you can run your own server, and chat with others on other servers.
It supports groups, voice, streams etc - similar to Discord/Slack/Teams etc.
Open source. Multiple different server and client implementations. Mobile platforms, “all” operating systems, and with bridges so you can have your IRC, Telegram, Slack, FB Messenger etc channels go to your Matrix account/server.
As a result, I am just asking follow-on questions to further discern what makes Element preferable.
If you are against a change in the first place you won’t switch, anyway.
There are people who love them, but when people ask about them, they don’t offer any really informative data to support why they like them.
Please, ask.
What makes Element (matrix) a secure platform, and how does that differ from telegram or signal or whatever. Like. What is matrix good at? That’s what I’m asking. Why suggest it over something else?
Simple. It’s fully free and open source. The server as well as the apps. Therefore, you can trust it as a privacy friendly solution a heck of a lot more, than any other solution like WhatsApp.
Signal is secure as well, but the server is centralized.
And Telegram is not considered secure because of their implementation and shady practices.
Element is the name of the official Matrix client, but there are many others.
I once had my account banned because I was a member of a server that was banned in that hugely discouraged me from using it for that purpose. I might be in the half dozen servers at the moment none of which I’ve looked at save for two in the last year and I primarily use it for offsite DMs and even then I strongly prefer signal for people I know.
online communities seemed to be going to discord
That can also be seen as “nature healing itself” in context of giant AI botnets scraping the whole internet every second. It’s only natural to go private nowadays.
No, it isn’t.
Make no mistake a primary monetization vector for Discord is to scrape the shit out of everything said on its chats.
By suggesting Discord for privacy you are effectively only giving corporations the benefit of a commons while denying that to people.
Discord is NOT private, it is a corporation and your data is valuable.
Discord may offer to sell chat histories in certain communities (after “anonymizing” the data, yeah right like they will do that effectively) directly to AI companies.
Discord is only private in the sense that you are advocating for only a private for-profit corporation being able to enjoy the benefit of scraping and collecting our conversations.
This is not healing, this is the vision of the internet as a truly open shared space that benefits all… dying because people like gamers were too foolish to see the coming catastrophe from putting EVERY community under the control of a single company struggling to make a profit.
I agree that Discord shouldn’t be trusted and might turn out to be a bad actor some day. Anyway, the more general tendency of moving away from public spaces is a right and natural thing. So it’s best to do the same as with Discord but without Discord. In the upcoming era of AI hiding knowledge is a good thing to do, and I’m personally not used to this yet.
Anyway, the more general tendency of moving away from public spaces is a right and natural thing.
Let me emphatically say that NO it isn’t.
If you need to anonymize or disguise your identity because you feel threatened, I never want to make you feel like you shouldn’t take whatever steps of protecting your privacy that you feel you need to.
That being said, no, I fundamentally consider societal progress to be roughly equatable to how open the systems are in a society both in the material and ideological realm. Public forums/the fediverse are progress because they allow anybody with an internet connection to read through conversations, learn and eventually participate and add to a general collective benefit and community. This is the power of the internet.
I think your point of view would be more relatable before AI happened. I don’t see how it addresses AI problem anyhow. “Societal progress” isn’t something that has self-worth. I see that as a tool of improving QoL, but if it’s not only stopped improving QoL but actually started making it worse, than it’s not something to pursue, and actually something to actively sabotage.
Well let me state this explicitly then, I don’t consider AI to be some kind of existential threat in terms of becoming sentient, or stealing all of our information and hoarding it away.
LLMs are powerful and have lots of use cases, but right now we are going through a really tiresome scifi novel delusion where tons of smart people are mistaking the current wave of LLM innovations as being somehow able to transport us to the singularity or whatever boring tech bros are calling it these days… instead of being a boring, lame regression into fuedalism.
yawn
longish response, no pressure to read
What scares me is the massive energy use of AI, it also doesn’t make money.
If some AI scrapes all my stuff on the fediverse, ok that sucks but honestly that LLM they train off my posts is going to be constantly complaining about corporations, going on off-topic rants about AI bullshit hype and centralization of corporate power… yeah you can sanitize the data, they can profile me… yeah I know.
I feel like that is already a threat enough and there is a tsunami like power that comes from reaching a public consensus through discussing things in public forums and putting our beliefs out there as a form of vulnerability. The more of us that do this, the more that people who disagree or agree can learn, the more we can establish conensus of shared values, the more we can build trust.
The metaphor for our current late stage capitalist society on the afterburners of surveillance capitalism/mass dragnet surveillane and censorhsip is clearly the panopitcon
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
If you suspect you are in a panopticon, or in an environment that is threatening to collapse into an authoritarian panopticon type situation, than the best defense, because lets be honest if you are in this position you don’t have much power realistically do you? is to publically have conversations, share opinions, discuss honestly with people in a way that floods whatever commons that are left, whatever equivalent of yelling chants out of the prison bars to other prisoners… however you want to map the metaphor here…
That is how we defend ourselves.
The relevant question is whether you are in a situation where you can safely do that, if you can’t than take care of yourself, hide. Adopt good digital hygeine and help others out in an unjudgemental way how to do so themselves.
If you feel at all that you can safely speak out, or honestly, if you feel like realistically you don’t have much to lose (because at the end of the day that is the position we are all existentially in, it is just a matter of who will suffer first and thus who has the right to want to delay that suffering the most) then the best defense here is to make as much as you can public through art, through any kind of discussion, because no matter how sophisticated and supercharged the methods of the oppressors are and no matter how overbearing the mazes of false-consensus become…
…they still can’t ever really win in a moment to moment interaction with any half decent artist, any half decent person who knows their worth, any person willing to be vulnerable and say it how it is, and indeed really anyone that is willing to extend solidarity to strangers not because of some emotional need or ideological sense of superiority, but because it is something they try to do out of principle (and of course are imperfect at, so what, society shouldn’t be reliant on people being ethically perfect in the same way safety regulations in society shouldn’t assume people aren’t going to behave like idiots, as frustrating as that is ).
The nice thing is, we are talking about snowball effects here. One of the best drugs in life is doing a small good thing that ripples into a slightly bigger good thing all by itself, that takes a little life of its own. I don’t claim to be any kind of altruist, or someone who constantly does selfless acts but that isn’t the point. Most people feel a basic pleasure when it is easy to help, to help so long as it is simple and direct how to do so. Some don’t, so what.
The power of computers, of software and of social media is that it allows us to help, share, educate, illimunate and reinforce one another in small, tiny ways with barely any effort, barely any energy usage, and we can reach across basically ever barrier humans can be thrust behind by the cruelty of chance to reach them and bring them into the conversation.
Hell yes, keep yelling out of those bars, keep telling it the way it is, keep being you if you can
While I agree with many of these takes, I believe there is more to this. For example, your point about defense from falling into panopticon by speaking publicly about things doesn’t actually require publicly speaking about anything other than politics. I mean, you can still hide all professional, creative or fun talk and still have the benefits you listed covered by only ever publicly talking about political issues. Another issue, is that publicity and interconnectedness of all discourses we have nowadays, increases a homogenuity of thinking patterns, in other words it hurts the diversity of the ways of thinking, that is also something that can be improved by more people going private and having closed interest groups in chats invisible to public web.
I run a forum where the first post was started 23 years ago. Although the activity has drastically gone down during recent years, people still occasionally come by. I’m very happy I kept it up, even though a lot of people switched over to a Discord server.
Recently we had an incident where the sole admin of the Discord server was banned and the whole Discord had to be abandoned and created from scratch. People still keep using this trash! I’m not arguing with them, I’ll just keep an alternative up. One day, when Discord really enshittifies itself to a point where it becomes unuseable, people will be happy for my stubborness. I hope.
(It’s a forum for an obscure space pirate game for the PC - I-War 2. Its first post is here.)
I’m sort of tired of articles describing some catastrophe that happened ten years ago and saying “it’s worrying.”
The worst is Discord. It doesn’t show up in search engines and somehow you have to know that is where you are “supposed” to go for help. Privacy issues aside, I am fine with discord for playing games with friends or big conventions/LAN parties, but I don’t understand why anyone would use it as a forum.
This is unironically on reddit right now. People lamenting a place like Lemmy doesn’t exist.
I’m less worried about Discord, honestly.
IRC is literally right there.
The protocol itself could use a little modernizing (namely around privacy concerns), but it’s still very relevant.
Discord was talking about going public, probably changing their profit incentives. My group and I were talking about setting up a Rocket Chat if that happened. But it has to have IRC compatibility, right? Can IRC provide real-time audio communications? Discord is a failover when in-game communication isn’t working for some reason.
Discord is amazing for a step beyond group messages. I have no idea how it got into a roll as a “community tool”.
It’s because of this bullshit.
Take a guess how many members this server/example community serves:
500? 2000? 10,000+?
Surely, a group of 50,000 needs a ticket system, age verification, moderation, and rules/TOS+registration?
There are twelve users in that chat/server. Three of the 12 are moderators. One is the “owner”.
Discord became a “community tool” because Discord moderators/“creators” are a special class of human being who realized their dream model train set could be upgraded with Internet connectivity.
Medium-to-large-scale-enterprise tooling is available to spin up for anyone, without having to pay for anything. In fact, Discord incentivizes donations through “boosts” where the users of a community pay for server costs rather than the hosts/maintainers themselves.
As a result, people go ham and never invest in proper training, role division or infrastructure. They cosplay at running a pseudo-corporation and Discord adds their requested features, at a price/donation premium.
P.S: I run a Discord channel of 223 users with no moderation, we have one text channel and two voice channels. We use the service like Ventrilo or TeamSpeak for a Steam Clan. I’ve literally had these busybodies from disparate communities join just to tell me I was “doing it wrong”.
P.S.S: I also hate HOAs.
Ah, the dream of having control over others alive even in a space as pathetic as a video game chat room. You definitely aren’t doing it wrong your way.
I’m reminded of forums that would have a million subforums and as a result never build up any critical mass. Have one big bucket, maybe two, and if something comes up often enough organically then, and only then, consider a separate subforum for it.
a server I was a part of a while ago had maybe 30 people, but with a ton of topic based channels. the ‘owner’ would CONSTANTLY bitch about conversations being too specific for general and reprimand people.
even in one server I’m currently in, which has ~2500 members, there’s really only 50 people active on it. one of the mods still does this all the time (“tAkE iT tO #PoLiTiCs”) and it inevitably only ends the conversation every time. nice “community”.
Whenever anyone tells me a discussion should be moved I am done. The spell is broken and the social interaction concluded because I’m no longer interested. Discord channels are fucking social poison.
I think it’s because it’s great for group messages too. SMS/MMS is kinda shit, especially when somebody has an iPhone and their iMessage interferes (seriously, enough of the ‘loved an image’ spam). IRC gets blocked on a lot of public networks because of its association with piracy, so that makes it less than reliable.
Discord is pretty full featured too, like IRC doesn’t do group calls, and getting a group phone call going is a pain. Being able to have different channels is also super nice, because you can have a channel for, idk, birthday party planning to keep it from vanishing in the general daily chitchat. I’ve used it with roommates to get everybody on board with a grocery list before, because we all had Discord accounts anyways.
It’s just useful enough as a community tool.
This is the answer.
For whatever complaints one might have about Discord (and they are legion), it does a really good job of packing a bunch of different functionality in one place and with a UI that’s super easy to grasp and understand what does what and how that requires very little foreknowledge of what the thing is or its underlying mechanisms.
If I am completely new and pretty blank of what it is, Discord’s pretty good at me being able to catch up quickly; it’s got a good UI and, following that, functionality for a bunch of things related to communication. And, if I need a quick solution that just gets me going…that’s gonna be pretty painless.
Exactly. Whats funny is facebook could have done this in like… 2010. Like I’m fairly certain I had “group pages” back then that were a very small number of people. But you’re right, the channel thing is crazy useful. Like my one group has 3 people, but we’ve got like 50 topics. It’s gotten to the point there are archives, ie: the “thanksgiving” channel moves from the “archive” group to “general” group around mid sept.
I’ve also been lucky enough to avoid having it be work related. Like I have slack for work, that notification noise is the devil, where as the discord notification noise means my buddy is posting pictures of his kid.
Yeah, but it shouldn’t replace forums.
1000% agree. Like I use it for some spread out family (one server) and college friends. There’s <5 people in each. I think eventually forums will adopt the fediverse infrastructure. I’m on an old school forum for my vehicle, and it’s great. It’s direct out of 2010, it wouldn’t suprise me if those kind of sites brought in all the code that the fediverse runs off of. As a casual observer, that’s really what lemmy seems like to me: “what if 2005 internet, where people managed their own webpages, but it ran on a common architecture that made it easier to cross-link with other sites if you wanted?”
I don’t mind using it for larger teams, it can be great for organised communication such as dev teams!
But it shouldn’t replace documentation.
(Also, Discord itself is a proprietary, censoring telemetry wasp nest, your FOSS dev team shouldn’t be organised in it but Matrix, XMPP, IRC channels or something else open.)
Last I checked you can only thread a conversation one level down from the channel and that’s it (when I last used it like 5 years ago).
To me that’s practically unusable for what it’s supposed to be. Slack even does a better job, in my opinion.
Discord is far worse in this context, though. Much of reddit is still publicly visible and is still indexed by some search engines, even if it could be better. Discussions from years ago are still visible and provide useful information to many (this is part of the reason “search term + reddit” became such a popular query template). When communities move to Discord, many of their conversations become completely private to anyone who isn’t a member. The conversations move quickly and there is no easy way for people to reference past information. I get that people on Lemmy hate reddit and it’s popular to circlejerk about it, but forums being replaced by things like Discord and Telegram that aren’t equivalents at all has been much more damaging.
You make a really good point here. However, is that same anti-indexed nature a boon in the era of Ai site scraping.
Discord was never ‘user-friendly’. It always gave me nerd, incel, neurodiverse, or weirdo vibes so not something I would miss much although I probably qualify as nerd, neurodiverse, and weirdo (but not incel, never that).
It definitely let people create insulated pockets. Is there a chat app that doesn’t do that? Telegram?
What are we going to do about it?
Do nothing, nothing about it. The great hordes of the unwashed have ruined every single place they’ve showed up starting in the early 90s. They don’t want to be saved from the commercialization that has taken over the internet, to the contrary they thrive on it and are willing to put up with nearly anything to attract and keep it.
If most of Reddit shifted over to Lemmy it would get commercialized into a smoking crater. As soon as there’s enough regular people using a thing the companies and venture capitalists will show up and at that point the game is over.
The best of the internet has always been built by and populated with people who don’t fit into a box. It’s that internet people keep trying to bring back but you can’t hold the castle once it’s being assaulted by the normies.
So the solution is to do nothing. Let the normies stay in their palaces of commercialization and corruption. It’s for the best.
Back in mid 00s I created a forum for fellow classmates to share notes, info on exams and whatever. It was active for a year or a bit more, then someone set up a Facebook page for our group and the forum died in about a month. I could not understand why people migrated so quickly, Facebook group was atrocious when it comes to search functions, any files, notes or anything you didn’t download immediatelly were lost to time never to be seen again. If the forum is still up I’m sure I’d still be able to easily download exam schedules and all notes from all the classes there, with Facebook it was a pain even a week after someone posted. There is something fundamentally wrong with society if an inferior product can sweep the board so easily. People do not care about quality or usefulness of anything, all that matters is marketing and trends.
Forums are where I learned literally everything about technology I know now. Every hack, jailbreak, method of bypassing something, building, literally anything I’ve done around my tech hobbies. Pi hole, emulation in the late 90s, how to use Photoshop, how to run Linux from a USB, everything I’ve learned from forums. I’m sad to think that me joining certain discords help deliver the death knell to the concept of forums.
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I’m not convinced at least half of those communities trust Reddit and Discord enough to leave forums, but then again I stopped using them mostly because I haven’t had time for those hobbies. My emulation groups are still active on forums, at least.
a lot of them died because they never bring in new people and people leave for a variety of reasons.
How about crossposting forum post links on Lemmy? This would help to get them exposure.
XDA forum was that for me. Great place to start and then follow links or do more research using the keywords used in the discussions. Just helpful for things like learning if a kernel is potentially fixable or not before buying a second-hand device for a custom rom project. The new look / reorganisation of stuff annoys me though as I find it harder to find stuff than it used to be but that’s because I am using it on autopilot. I guess new users might find it attractive / easy to navigate?
Every forum I used before Reddit even existed is still active (hell, PHPBB was updated as recently as November!) and new platforms, like Lemmy, pop up all the time . IDK what the fuck these articles are talking about. Maybe they just don’t know how to actually find anything on the web? 🤷🏻♂️
Ugh, Discord is an information black hole. I despise how so many of my niches have fled there.
Reddit seems to be trying to destroy that “role” of theirs as hard as they can though. A few very niche subs I follow are drying from some kind of “bug” that deprioritizes their discoverability.
It’s not a bug. It’s absolutely a feature for making Reddit more generic, farmable garbage and noise.
I for one would want a more open source system where a single guy running a server doesn’t have all the power in the forum. It would be awesome if a fedi form of forums took over and one could replicate all the info as relays.
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If anyone is looking for a pretty good list of forums-
https://aftermath.site/best-active-forums-internet-today?ueid=6310597850b065b278e2b143b21b73b5
Reddit is shadow banning people in droves for bad upvotes
This is why I’m making more effort to move to Lemmy permanently. The thing is that they’re also refusing to say what exactly will get you banned, and that they can and probably will change the criteria pretty much when they feel like it. This is the kind of shit abusive partners do. They cannot expect anyone to be able to follow a rule that they refuse to define. Personally, I don’t think that’s an accident. It feels more like they’re laying the groundwork to be able to censor whoever they like, most likely at the behest of the current US administration.
Yeah they are shit now. What can we do to move them over to Lemmy?
Pornography was a very popular draw for Reddit, but posting in general helps too.
High resolution pictures on lemmy is a bit slow still. Worse for video. That’s the second most important issue left to fix on lemmy
Isn’t that just a bandwidth issue?
still is, since many accounts are there to just spam thier OF profile.
I see this sentiment a lot but I don’t see the spam on pretty much any NSFW subreddit.
Which subreddit and user?
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Good content here will keep people off of Instagram, or shitter.
Honestly if reddit kills porn it’s over for them.
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Dicks out for Lemmy!
Let’s get more queer porn on Lemmy!
Go ahead, create some content! ^^
As a gay man I agree, to get more people seeing good content no other reason, nope.
i think there still alot of porn on reddit, all kinds, its just reddit have purging many bots/users who have hundreds or thousands of accounts for no good reason since they dont make it to front page anyways.
they already try to force porn users on mobile to use thier crappy app if you dont want to login, or use thier app. thier app makes it easier to mine your data and recognize your device for easier banning.
I only heard about lemmy a few weeks ago I bet there’s more like me. I think it’s just a question of promoting it
Lemmy is not a forum.
Forums are structured around activity bumping, not recency and voting. A years old thread can end up back on the front page if someone posts in it. It’s just a different medium.
And it’s a medium that we need to preserve.
Lemmy is just reddit under different management.
Lemmy is decentralized. So very different.
What’s a bad upvote?
I am one of those people and I wonder. Is it because I upvoted a news article about war or a nazi getting punched?
They’ve been dissapearing for a long time, if they were an animal, they’d be somewhere between Endangered, and Critically Endangered…
The eye-opener now has been that Reddit has turned into corpo/authortiarian boot licking trash, and Discord is planning on going publicly traded. (Read More Corpo bootlicking trash)
