This is a very open ended question. I particularly like it for specific use-cases. It’s great for synchronous and slightly asynchronous chatting. It’s also great for any groups that wish to coordinate on work in specific areas or domains. I think it has a lot of features which make it stand out in the chatting/teamwork app field, in particular having the ability to color names in addition to having profile pictures can help to make it quick to identify things such as role. It has fully searchable history whereas with apps like slack you have to pay to get access to that. It has integration so you can build bots and other API-based solutions to solve automation and other design desires. It has a large user-base so many existing bots and API-based solutions already exist for common use-cases. I like that you can react to messages easily, allowing quick insight into how people feel about something or whether they’ve read or agree/disagree. A single profile can be used across multiple servers, which makes getting set up a one-time entry barrier whereas other server based chat/work apps like teams require individual accounts. It’s always had both voice and video functionality which work quite well and easily out of the box - it’s not super great for sharing your screen like WebEx or zoom might be.
I fracking hate discord. People use it for everything now, not just gaming, for the convenience of an easy to use cross-platform application. Almost every message board on the internet has been deserted and moved to discord. And it makes it so difficult to find anything useful. Every time I want to find something there I feel as if no matter how much time I spend using the search I’m never going to find it. And when I ask I feel as if the same question has probably been asked hundreds of times before and makes me feel dumb for not being able to find the answer. If you read the messages as they arrive, with just a couple of servers that you follow, your day is gone and you can’t do anything else. Of course it makes it convenient not having to create an account for each website like before, but so does the fediverse.
Yeah, I would love something like the fediverse that is analogous of Discord as I would absolutely move to it in a heartbeat. But alas
While I don’t think message boards should move to it, Discord has a pretty good search feature, have you tried it?
- It is Discord specific. Web crawlers can’t access messages. This means that instead of just using a search engine I now need to use a search engine and Discord. If we get a couple more of these services it is now a disaster.
- IIRC it is “server” specific. So you still need to know which “server” would have the answer to start even searching.
Moves too fast with a lot of people. Lot of pedophiles
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In addition to this, all sorts of group chats, message boards, forums, etc, have now been locked behind this wall. Projects and communities that used to have an IRC or a forum are now almost exclusively located on Discord. It’s like Facebook in this way.
I agree. Even though Discord’s privacy policy is nowhere near as bad as Facebook. But the fact that everything has moved to Discord thus creating a monopoly for business communication is very bad. I hope there are some viable and ethical competitions.
Oh definitely.
It’s also just a shitty electron wrapper around a webpage, which I have FeelingsTM about.
I also dislike this as well from OP. I mean there is Matrix but it definitely doesn’t have the widespread popularity and ubiquitous nature of Discord. Then also I remember seeing a post somewhere wondering if Matrix is E2EE (which I remember it saying mostly but I don’t remember exactly where it was or possibly wasn’t).
I would be open to moving my own Discord server off of Discord and onto something like Matrix but the problem is that so many people use Discord that they’re going to look at my link collection and when they don’t see Discord next to Twitter, Instagram, etc. they’re not going to be able to connect with me. It goes back to that ubiquitous nature of Discord; a ton of people use it and know about it now, way beyond the gaming circles that you would expect to use Discord.
I don’t know if there is an answer to this issue at the moment.
I find myself comparing Discord to Element/Matrix. In terms of features and in some cases usability Discord is light years ahead. However is lack of federation and it’s closed source nature make it an unappealing option.
The way it handles screen sharing and video chat is really nice. I hope that’s something that element or even Jitsi could eventually replicate.
https://stallman.org/discord.html
Discord is bad because it’s a proprietary centralized silo platform that is hostile to third party clients. I also don’t like how they redefine terms (e.g. referring to communities/groups as “servers” and emotes as “emoji” which is an annoying thing that has spread even to the fediverse). I don’t like the culture of Discord and Discord-related memes/jokes.
The worst thing about Discord, however, is how so many communities more or less force it on users. I don’t like Discord and would be a happier person if Discord disappeared off the face of the world tomorrow but I feel I am required to use it (with a libre third-party client) to participate in some communities and stay in touch with friends.
From a privacy perspective it sucks . The locking of basic features behind a paywall also sucks. The lack of federation sucks. It being closed source sucks.
From a UI perspective and Funktions it is awesome.
I agree. Discord is buggy, inconsistent across platforms and the company is pretty terrible. But what most people care about is the UI and features, and that Discord nails.
I like it in terms of engineering. It is a very complicated piece of software that works so well that they have been able to build a very large user base in no time. It
The downside is of course that it is close source and nightmare.
Yeah, I would love for Discord to be more open sourced. Unfortunately there really isn’t an open-sourced alternative out there for Discord like how Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit and Mastodon to Twitter and Pixelfed to Instagram.
There are literally dozen of open-source alternatives…
Excuse me for not knowing, I’m quite new to the Fediverse and FOSS, but what alternatives are there?
Well, I don’t know about “dozens” of alternatives, but I can certainly think of a few. Off the top of my head there’s the many clients supporting the Matrix protocol and Revolt. One of the web-based clients for Matrix, Cinny seems to be trying to emulate Discord’s look and feel.
That said, I haven’t used Revolt and I’ve only used Matrix to send text messages. It does have voice chat, but I have no idea how well it works. As I understand it, Revolt seems to be further along on that front.
I’ll definitely have to check out Cinny especially I very much dislike the UI of Element after my roughly 30 minutes of trying to use it last night.
I’ll also take a bigger look at Revolt as well. I’ve heard that there are Bridge bits for Discord and Matrix that offer puppeting, is there something like that for Revolt?
Looks like it. You can find the list of bots for Revolt here.
Oooo! I’ll definitely have to look into this tomorrow as it is already past midnight and I need sleep.
Their internal parts are nice, but their public API is a bit meh imo, specially considering their attitude towards devs. b1nzy, night and the others are not very welcoming, which has lead to some serious issues like Danny (author of the huge discord.py library and admin in the huge unofficial DAPI server) quitting.
Discord feels like a necessary evil in my life since so many communities are on it. Trying Element was worse UX in my experience, which is awful if you’re trying to get people to switch.
Discord is relatively fine right now and the worst part of the privacy policy is the risk of being acquired. That said, Facebook seemed pretty nice and cool before it became what we know it is today.
I feel like its WAY to invasive in my privacy. I have to use it for so many things, but I try to get folks to use Telegram instead. Telegram is much nicer UI. Discord is over bloated with crap and keeps asking me to spend money.
A pretty well-written villain. Good redemption arc too. Honestly, a lot better than the newer villains like Starlight Glimmer.
I don’t like Discord, but it solves an issue for people that no one has solved as good as Discord has.
Discord is just a great all in one solution for everything a gamer would want and then just for communities in general. I don’t think Discord is gonna go anywhere until someone actually matches them in features and does it good.
Edit: and they have to make it where you can do all of those things without having to self host or pay for hosting.
Guilded matches them in features and adds more gaming niched stuff like actual forums into your “server”.
matching Discord, or even improving on it, doesn’t matter. Discord is already king. To dethrone the king, non-Discord users need to be the main target so Discord users are forced to use both, until all their contacts merge and slowly migrate to the second software over time due to more features and ease of use.
Awful.
They’ve somehow managed to consolidate the communications of so many groups outside of its original gaming focus with a “slick” UI and apparent ease of access. They’re under the guise of being cool despite being closed-source software with zero regard for security and use outside of their Electron wrapper.
The sooner it collapses the better, and I really hope Matrix rises in popularity. Even though the Discord bridge exists it isn’t 1:1 and you need to be a mod on the Discord end in order to even allow it, and nobody does.
Matrix has its own share of problems too, but yeah, it would be neat if it gained more popularity. Discord has some merit though, their UI, feature set and extreme ease of use is veeeery nice for common users.
Matrix is far from achieving that, but good work is being done for sure.
My main thought about discord is that the UX doesn’t work well for me. It is primarily focused on “communities” which I’ve never had the desire to organize my life into. I have a “server” that we use for chat during games because everyone knows it but then I have to do a couple clicks to switch to my friends “server” to see a new message, then a couple clicks back. Having two conversions in different communities is incredibly painful. There is also just as much awkwardness if you want to swap between DMs as well.
For me I much prefer the Element, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp… approach where I just have rooms in a big long list (or sorted in a way that works for me). I don’t like this Discord, Slack forced 2-level hierarchy. I actually think Matrix+Element is killing it here with Spaces. Spaces provide a lot of the good parts of the Discord Server or Slack Workspace while still allowing you to get a big long list of rooms so that switching between a DM, room in one community and a room in a different one. You can even just link all of the rooms you are interested in to a private space to organize them however you want. I can’t wait for them to have a bit more time to polish the UX here.
I also don’t see the draw of separated voice and text channels. You always end up needing to share links or images anyways and have to awkwardly explain what channel you dumped it in. Eventually this leads to the
#voice-spamchannel which is effectively creating a voice+text channel with an awkward UX because the software doesn’t actually know that they are linked.I also don’t get why people like doing a lot of communication in chat over things like websites and forms. Especially for communities like speedrunning where it is actually nice to have documentation on strategies. They end up getting asked the same question every day then get mad that people didn’t read the 8th pinned entry in the 3rd FAQ room (which of course isn’t visible to Google). I guess it does create a “friendlier” atmosphere in theory since everyone is constantly helping everyone, but again, not my preference.
But these are all UX arguments that don’t work for me. They appear to resonate well with a wide group of people so I guess it is me who is “wrong” here. Of course that doesn’t mean that I won’t continue to avoid it.
UX aside I don’t like that it is centralized. I definitely try to stick to decentralized services where possible so that I am not beholden to the whim of a single operator.
Most of the other complains I see don’t bother me:
- phone number requirement: IIUC this is up to the mods of a particular community. I’m 99% sure that Discord doesn’t have my number. I don’t blame Discord for providing the option. It is also hard to blame mods for using it when it clearly solves real problems that they have. (It significantly reduces spam)
- Pedos, MAPs, groomers, razor sharp edgy kids, cyberbullying etc: Meh, I’m a fan of free speech. These people are going to chat somewhere so I don’t see why it can’t be the same software that I use. It isn’t like discord is a single chat room where you need to see all of this stuff. Just don’t hang out in communities that allow this stuff.
I think the main upside is that it is easy enough to use that most people can’t figure it out quickly without any help. That is an important point for any popular service. Unfortunately Element Android is still about 50% unguided success rate from my experience. I hope they keep streamlining it.
As much as I have tried to use it constantly for a few days (I joined a few communities from Twitch streamers), I feel it is complicated, specially when there are servers with a bunch of channels where everyone interacts and there are too many notifications. It’s too much for me.
I see its benefits of how easy is to enter a voice channel and such, but that’s it. There is nothing that makes me feel attached to it (not even the FOMO for not interacting helps).
And being a closed-source tool, makes things even worse.
