Fuck discord.
Why?
Idk about them, but it’s a centralized, locked-down service that absorbs and holds information and data hostage like tomorrow.
As someone who’s trying to completely avoid Discord, it’s quite frustrating how many communities and projects will put important information in their Discords, and nowhere else. You have to have an account to see it, and it also isn’t searchable in a search engine. It is actually quite terrible for pretty much everyone.
Element/Matrix lets you peek into public chats and servers/spaces without an account, so it can definitely be done. They won’t do it though, because they gotta make you feel dat FOMO lol.
I mean cool, but good luck convincing the vast majority of users leaving Discord for Matrix.
This development is beneficial for the Linux gaming ecosystem, proprietary be damned.
I can acknowledge all that and still say fuck discord. I never mentioned herding everyone over, I just explained why I think it’s a parasite and why I have a strong disliking towards it.
All you have to do is bridge the two together and have the Matrix one shown more prominently.
Do you expect your average Discord user to bother going through such hoops?
Sorry. What I meant was that the project maintainers should do that, so the Discord users can use Discord but Matrix is still the main option.
Project leaders?
Don’t need the majority. The majority is not even interested in these communities. The ones that are, are likely proponents of FOSS themselves and should (in theory) switch over.
Matrix is a better platform for realtime communication, but it has the same issue with needing an account and being difficult to search. Any discussions that take place on Discord or Matrix will be fleeting, as it prioritizes only the most recent discussion in the chat. Thus making long form discussions about particular topics impossible.
All technical discussions should be archived on a searchable forum. If you are using a source forge like GitHub and GitLab, then public discussions should take place there. There’s no better place for discussions and questions about code than in the same place where the code is hosted itself. Platform integrations make it very easy to associate discussions to commits and merge requests.
While not ideal, even hosted forum platforms like Lemmy and Reddit are still better than using a chat client. If only to serve as a platform for broader public discussions and questions. People are more likely to already have a Lemmy or Reddit account than they are to have a GitHub or GitLab account.
I do agree Discord shouldn’t be used as a Gitlab issue tracker, yet development teams still insists on continuing this practice.
Based
Old electron version (meaning no screensharing on wayland), really buggy linux application, no encryption, poorly enforced rules and policies, micro transactions… Honestly, the linux version of discord is so terrible that I’ve been running it from a web browser for the last month or so, it’s genuinely much better lol
Yesterday they enabled monitoring of all messages in their servers. It was obvious before, but now they are getting even more 1984. Communities should migrate as soon as possible.
I believe it, but citation(s) please?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6AlbG2ZoKs
They were already scanning every message and DM for data tracking and whatnot to sell anyway, the only difference now is they’re using it for TOS violations.
Privacy-wise nothing has changed, but actual consequences for actually bad things like racism / transphobia / csam / etc. is good. The only real issue is what if they decide that sharing a music file is piracy and now your account is penalized? What about uploading an NES ROM to a friend via a DM? Or sharing a link to an anime piracy website?
It’s the kind of thing that has to be a balance between making sure users aren’t doing stuff that is strictly against Discord’s rules, but also about making a good-faith attempt to limit things that can get Discord themselves in trouble from companies who are becoming more and more aware that Discord has been used as a piracy-safe haven for quite some time now. (Like how they’re limiting their “using discord upload URLs like your own CDN” issue last month.)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=U6AlbG2ZoKs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
screenshare with audio when
When they decide to use Electron that’s not 5 major versions out of date, but that’s not happening
I will never not hate Javascript. I hate all web dev nonsense. What a huge mess that all is.
Javascript itself is not the issue. You can have horrible code written in any language, and this is exactly what this is. The management behind Discord are sinking the company
Here we see the average JS hater, unaware of that which they criticize. Luckily, a new framework will be released before the coming winter to provide them with sustenance.
They’re already using an Electron version that supports audio sharing iirc, they just default to their custom implementation which doesn’t work on Linux
deleted by creator
I’ll check it out. I use
discord-screenaudiomyself.
You could route your desktop audio into your mic, with the big downside thst the other party wont be able to control the volume independently.
I found
discord-screenaudioto be a better solution.
They haven’t updated their website yet. It still says to download the deb package or tar.gz package. No mention of the flatpak.
Hopefully they update it at some point.
Removed by mod
I mean it already is, Linux gamers play with their windows/mac friends. The alternatives aren’t as easy to use.
Removed by mod
Group voice is discord’s biggest feature, but also general messaging (both direct/group as well as communities), video streaming, and file sharing.
Element might be a viable alternative, I’ve used it for chat where it certainly is, I haven’t used voice but I’ve heard some people say that video has a very high delay. My friends and I will often share screens for one reason or another and I’m not sure that the experience would be comparable in Element yet.
Mumble isn’t comparable because it doesn’t implement any of the same features other than voice, it doesn’t have persistant logins, etc.
If you must use discord for some reason use the web version in librewolf
There’s a Flatpak version that’s specifically intended to be more private. I have no idea how well it does that but functionally it works fine, so that’s what I’ve used for a while.
I use the web version in Vivaldi, I’ve always had issues with video calls in Gecko.
just so people are aware:
third party clients are against Discord’s ToS. with that out of the way, looks really cool and I’ll give it a try!
Meeh, Void has it in the packages, but I don’t use it, too confusing for a messaging app if you ask me.
If you haven’t been forced into it by your friends/communities, then definitely avoid it if you can
Yeah, it was for a game, but I just said f it, too confusing for me.
Too confusing? How so?
You got servers… I mean, if I wanted something IRC like, I’d be using IRC.
And then there’s the left pane which I found totally confusing, had no idea what was going on there, notifications kept popping up, there was nothing in those chats or servers or whatever, and then there were ads, and… fuck, just too much noise for something that’s supposed to be fun…
Huh?
So, first of all, Discord doesn’t have ads. Second of all, what, since IRC had servers in 1862 then no other chat platform can ever have them?
I will say the notifications can be a bit annoying. There’s a setting to turn off the notifications, and one to turn off just the sounds, in the Notifications and Sounds categories in the settings, and I’d recommend to turn both off.
By “left pane” do you mean the channels? Basically, Discord lets you create different servers which contain groups of people and channels. Within each server, there’s a list of text and voice channels (and now forum channels) to talk about different things.
Discord can’t do much about there not being much in the servers you’re in, if nobody sends any messages then you won’t find any.
Maybe it was ads from the game, IDK… cuz I think we were on their server.
I’m just used to chat rooms being more IRC like, that’s all… this thing is supposed to be more advanced, but it was just more confusing for me.
Yeah, that part was confusing to me… like how can I create a “server” on their server 🤨… we’re all basically on the same server, just in a different “virtual server” 🤔 🤷… IDK, it never made sense to me, cuz creating a server means something completely different in my mind, not just “right click --> new server”.
Maybe I’m just old, IDK. In the end, we switched to Viber, one chat, simple, elegant, everyone had it instaled, end of story.
Within each server, there’s a list of text and voice channels (and now forum channels) to talk about different things.
Yeah, this was also confusing. I mean… come on, I’m not creating a freaking community here, we’re just discussing some shit from the game and having some fun from time to time, sharing memes and jokes, stuff like that, nothing serious, like that chat will be dead in a year (everyone migrates to another state in the end in the game), so why bother building this giant community, when everything will die down in a year or so anyway.
Just way too complex for the thing we needed. Basic chat features, image/video sharing, that was all that was needed… servers, channels, communities… just way too much noise and clutter. I can understand the appeal for people that game 24/7, but I don’t so, digging into this, just so that i can write “get to x:y coords and destroy this fucker” or share a screenshot… I mean… it just wasn’t worth my time.
Yeah, Discord servers are really meant for communities more than for being a group chat (although you can make group chats with up to ten people). Totally fair if multiple channels and stuff are more than you need.
Agreed. I keep trying to use it because that’s where Opensim’s Metaverse Alliance landed when Google Groups shut down, but it’s way too noisy. I wish they’d just settled on a proper forum site like Delphi.
Isn’t it in xbps-src? IIRC the Void guys don’t want to package things that don’t have a blanket redistributable clause in their license.
Yeah, my mistake, xbps-src… they might even have it in the repo repackaged, not sure, though it was in src only back when I installed it.
Yeah, I know that. They got permission for Vivaldi some time ago (like a year ago I think), so that’s great, I just love Vivaldi ☺️.
I was also working on some old niche wares, like Nero 10 for Linux and some other packages long out of date, but still work. They wouldn’t include them, so I might just put the templates on github or codeber.
Meanwhile neither Element nor Schildichat or Fluffychat are official.
Nice!
Now I’ve just got to work out why mine has suddenly started crashing on startup with GPU errors.
FYI There are also open source discord clients available:
- Discordo is a nice CLI to use Discord
- ArmCord: Full Open Source Discord client with themes, etc.
- gtkcord4 & gtkcord 3: Both are simple GTK Clients for Discord
Third party clients are against Discord’s terms of service, so use at your own risk.
dont know what happened to it, but today its a 404 page https://flathub.org/apps/com.discordapp.Discord
