- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
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We need to bring back the forum platforms. That is how communities looked and it was great
It was so great, people ditched it immediately the second any alternative arrived.
Discord is just objectively terrible for knowledge. It’s not search indexable or archivable. It’s more or less a memory hole.
Discord is a communications platform with tacked on features that resemble forums mostly as a means of organization. It’s not a KB or repository under any circumstances outside of misuse, so why would it have to be good at being searched/indexed?
Because not everything is a bug. People frequently want help and having a searchable place for past discussions it is helpful. Also this was in response to people complaining about forums and implying what came after is better so misuse is very much relevant here. Every modding community and a lot of other dev groups use discord for everything and it is from experience a trainwreck.
I hope you’re not implying an old forum search was any good
Most decent forums were publicly readable online and thus got indexed by actually decent search engines unlike discord. Hence “search indexable”
I’m not sure why people think that discord search is some kind of gotcha. Its shit.
Not denying that it’s shit, I don’t know anyone who’s actually happy with it. But old forums also weren’t built nicely.
You say search indexable as if it’s a panacea, but you find whatever you want to find with your search engine, click the link, and it is:- moved somewhere
- renamed, so now the link is dead
- was actually a part of badly implemented endless scroll so it now points to nothing
- was edited to remove crucial information
- was put in private and now you need to have 25 karma across three boards to open it
- someone got butthurt so it’s now defaced
- all of the above and more.
So you know that the info was there at some point, but you can’t access it.
The whole of IT is different levels of shit all the time
That’s why I also mentioned archivable. Public forums can be archived. If I hit one of those issues I look for archived pages. Deleted discord comments are just silently gone and deleted servers are lost forever
At some point, when you’re combing through archives looking for the exact version of a closed forum post that contains exact info you have, you understand that this system also sucks.
Back when Google was a decent search engine you could just search “something site:someforum.com” since the built in search was so ass
Something Reddit has in common with old forums
Google didn’t remove site:something from their search functionality. Yet.
I mean the masses are pretty fucking stupid and I don’t think following them is a good strategy for life.
Also, reddit was and somehow still is pretty popular and stack exchange is being killed by AI not discord, so that’s not really accurate anyways.
They slowly ditched better services for convenience. The account/login struggle is the barrier to entry that myspace/facebook/discord “solved”. A unique login for each forum, a different set of rules between each, some auto-deletion of supposedly inactive accounts, no photo hosting capability until death bed, yet another set of credentials for the latest photo host, and so on. Nothing was immediate because it took time to build the replacement communities and libraries. The problem is, it took years to realize how inaccessible the information became.
If the old service is less convenient that fucking Discord, it’s not better.
The information is as inaccessible now, just in different ways.
We never had a good solution. We had different bad solutions, each bad in it’s unique way.
maybe you are right. i think people just forgot about it because of all the noise and because all these new platforms force bad habits. just imagine if those platforms didn’t exist where would openai and anthropic be without all that stackexchange/stackoverflow data scraping.
Discord became big because of the seamless audio / video / screen sharing. Forums are not even in the same stratosphere.
i know, but for casual conversations and banter and a place where to store some knowledge about some topics forums were awesome.
Forums work for knowledge storage, but for casual banter real time conversations trump everything
yeah, forums are cool but I remember changing to another medium like MSN Messenger to do real time conversations
Yea… Forums were (are) great for something that Discord isn’t great at…
The old bulletins of the pre2000s. ASCII art every where.
oh yeah!
I just set up mybb board a few weeks ago for old times sake. Brought back so many memories.
Matrix is probably the most well funded and supported open source platform that might be able to compete with Discord but even then it’s not a fair fight.
Sadly most people won’t leave discord. People will forget about this next week.
They should use some of the funds for UX.
For gods sakes copy the Discord UI EXACTLY and replicate the backend with Matrix. That’s it.
Not whatever they’re doing now.
copy the Discord UI EXAXTLY
Please don’t. Please for the love of god don’t
I think that is one of the problems. People want an exact copy of discord but don’t ask if discord even has the perfect layout and if it should be copied directly. Anyway there are clients like cinny which look similar and other chat platforms like stroat(previously revolt) and spacebar which look exactly like discord and they are not doing massively well either so shrugs.
Look at Cinny if you’re looking for a Discord-like experience
Which client do you refer to regarding the bad UX, Element Web?
Matrix is just the protocol. There are a bunch of different clients though that all implement Matrix but are made by different people: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
There is a difference between funding of the Matrix foundation and the matrix.org instance vs. funding for the companies working in the ecosystem. The Matrix foundation has been struggling financially, yes. But the companies using and contributing to the Matrix standard are doing quite well from what I know - though they should probably cough up a little more money to find the overhead and the public matrix infrastructure imo
I am getting flashbacks of the mid-2000’s IM landscape. Soon we’ll be using 10 services bundled into some hackjob app that doesn’t support all of the features but keeps the chats in one place.
Hey… Trillian was awesome.
Lmao that is the exact program that came to mind.
Dont do pidgin too dirty…
Pidgin was good; it did what needed to be done and wasn’t that bad at it.
The last service I was using it for was a self-hosted XMPP server for a small group of friends that were all refugees of other defunct services. We ended up finally moving to Slack or Discord (the group bifurcated along game-playing lines).
Now I’ve got to find something new yet again!
I tried pidgin and it didn’t land with me. I always went back to Trillian.
It’s very important to call out this dude either doesn’t understand what a community is or comes from this new generation that thinks docs should be on Discord and not easily accessible.
Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?
Somehow Discord gets a 4 there. A chat server is a community of a kind but it will never rise the level of a platform’s community because it is, by definition, somewhat ephemeral and just a bunch of chat logs. There’s a big difference for example between IRC and bash.org for things like AzureDiamond.
what are the best alternatives for non-tech folks to join and use?.. because that’s who I am going to have to convince
Spacebar.chat is a really easy one to join that I found. And it’s really a straight clone of Discord but without all the crap. It’s decentralized so you can self host or join and instance and start your own “server” on there.
You don’t have to understand any of that to use. It just works and looks like Discord.
i haven’t seen anyone talking about it but i started testing out root app and i think it could easily drop in replace my friends discord. you can even import a discord server template with all your channels and roles.
Pripietary…
Matrix uses a similar end-to-end cryptography scheme to Signal. “Rooms” (chats, channels) are not encrypted by default, b
I don’t think that’s true anymore. it has been encrypted by default for quite a few years now
Trash guide to be fair.
Discord has more functionality than all of these, that’s why it’s in the position it’s in today, yet it gets ranked lower than… Rocket chat??
If we’re objectively finding alternatives then we need to be objective, this guide seems sus AF.
Discord got popular because it’s centralized and pretty
I switched initially because it was lighter on resources then Skype
What functionality are we talking about? Genuinely curious here, since I use discord like a couple of times a year.
From what I’ve noticed, matrix can do basically the same, except for the voice chats which are a pain to setup (and are better handled by jitsi anyways).
I read the article, it’s a good article but it also shows how we don’t really have any options that would match the discord’s functionality and ease of use. Which is very sad.
It’s wrong. There are more variants to check out:
- GameVox
- Fluxer
Maybe we can use this as an opportunity to use different tools for different purposes. Text chat is the easy part, evidently. The issues seem to be around voice/video/group chat on one side, and forums/wikis on the other.
What we need to recognize for one thing is how Discord makes it easy to host info repositories, but sucks at making that stuff accessible. We need a decentralized platform that makes it easy for someone to sign up and create their own forums and wikis in a user-friendly point and click manner that Discord does, but makes those same hubs optionally public and viewable for users without having to join anything.
Then for more live-oriented stuff, Matrix is already the most mature, established, closest thing to Discord we have. We just need it to be better at voice, video, screen-sharing, etc. If I understand correctly, that’s already being worked on.
Hell, maybe the former could very well be implemented on top of Matrix itself even.
I absolutely love matrixs UI, but I wish they would make the device verification configurable. aware it’s a million times easier to say then implement though.
The enshitification of the internet as a whole killed so many forums. I used to scour forums (and still regularly visit old forums) for info, but now it’s on discord or some bs facebook group. I miss old school forums and wikis and I fail to understand why everybody got away from them :c how on earth is an endless scroll of a FB page remotely conductive to finding information vs searching for the right thread on a forum?! I have no experience using discord so can’t speak for them but seeing all these articles makes me think I never will either.
Trying to find relevant information that’s supposed to be in a Discord server is one of the most hair-pulling aggravating experiences I’ve ever had on a computer. I mean seriously, any aspiring software developer of any kind should outright feel ashamed if they are relying on Discord for anything related to their project. Code repository sites are free, made for that purpose, and already offer everything necessary for collaboration. If communications are necessary, that’s what email is for - everyone has it already.
And yeah I also hate the over-dependence on Facebook. If a companies “site” is their fb page, they don’t get my business.
These things are successful not because they’re good. It’s because they’re easy and convenient. That’s the biggest thing we need to keep in mind when it comes to alternatives.
Ugh yea I have thought about trying to get away from FB, but a few years ago I moved to a more rural area than I was before and it’s incredible how many places -the regional dump among them - don’t have a website it’s just Facebook pages if you want info like if theres closures due to weather or operating hours.
I get that, I had to keep my FB when I lived in a rural area just to pay rent. Lazy.
I’m glad nobody is mentioning WhatsApp as an alternative. They released usernames a few months ago, all messages are end-to-end encrypted, will add voice and video calls to WhatsApp Web, many people and companies have an account there already… It would be an easy migration, but awful for privacy. Thankfully, the most similar suggestions I found were Telegram and Signal.
WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal aren’t Discord alternatives though? There’s no ability to have multi text and persistent voice channels in groups. WhatsApp doesn’t even support screensharing.
I’ve said this a lot in different places and the Lemmy community is so small folks might even recognize me repeating myself, but I’ll say it again here. The problem with recommending a good Discord alternative is that Discord is different things for different people. For some it’s streaming. For some it’s video calls. For some it’s voice calls. For some it’s DMs. For some it’s group servers. For some the image and video sharing is an important aspect. It’s hard to recommend a good alternative because you’ll always inevitably run into the problem of someone saying “but it doesn’t do the thing I use it for.” The reality is that folks might need to use multiple apps to meet their needs if they migrate.
If you’d skimmed the article you would’ve seen they they suggested Discourse which the author openly admits is a forum, not a chat app. But hey, that’s what some folks use Discord as.
What’s app claims E2EE but it’s not really they store everything on their servers that any one of their staff can access at any point
Your cloud backups are not encrypted either, and you have to explicitly opt out of cloud backups. That means any chats or group chats that involve someone who hasn’t opted out are sitting unencrypted on Meta servers, even if you personally have opted out. Even if everyone has opted out and assume it’s encrypted, they still know who you’re talking to, when you talk to them, how frequently, etc.
That is false.
it’s absolutely true actually… whatsapp are the key holders and there was a leak a few weeks ago that showed meta staff can access anyone’s messages: they just need to raise a ticket and they get access to an app that allows them to pull up any user they like
this is always the case unless you’re the keyholder. any app where you can “forgot password” and get your data back you aren’t the key-holder (though recovery phrases are legitimate), or login simply via phone number and an SMS MFA or similar
it’s also true for apple stuff - despite being similarly encrypted - but they’ve at least on the surface displayed a willingness to protect user data from external threats
There was no leak. It was an ex employee who claimed that others were able to access everyone’s messages.
so… whistleblower
… that’s called a leak mate
Regardless, the app is proprietary. You shouldn’t trust it.
I don’t trust it. But we should report the truth, not twisting reality to support our own cause.
I personally do not contact people on Whatsapp if I they allow another way.
They didn’t even untangle the web of half-finished and abandoned XMPP clients
i notice people not mentioning team speak 6. when our discord group were planning everything team speak 6 seemed to be the winner. it’s not free, but if i am hosting it with a license and have more control over the experience, then its not that big of a deal. from what i gather team speak 6 has better faster audio, and a better screen share for gaming. but we only just started poking around at options atm.
My friend group also jumped to that first, unless it’s federated though it’s not going to be “like discord” enough in the long run.
Part of what makes discord so good to many is that it’s one app where you can connect to various different friend groups/modding groups/artists/etc…
Matrix does allow that with its federation model, ts6 does not 🤷
i HATE when i have to connect to other discords for that purpose. finding information on discord is the worse of all possible outcomes. if i am running into trouble i much prefer a searchable forum. as for different friend groups, i think team speak has the ability to save multiple friend groups servers.
Idk what you people are smoking, forums built in search functionality was always ass.
However results showing up in search indexes were fantastic. I have a whole rant about that in another thread already. My rant: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/23704903
the rant was basically summed up as: “i think forums are archaic and i feel the ability to search them was bad
i think that discord has a much better system because the devs can answer people’s questions directly.”
except my experience with these discords results in: me asking the question, a bot or some person states that the devs no longer answers questions due to having to answer the same questions over and over and to use the search function. the search function pulls up every time the key word is mentioned but not the context or resolution, and i end up having to read the time line, including random people chiming in with their own questions and now i am tracking who is talking to which person in tandem on the same chat, and some times they cross, some times other people come in to give their 2 bits, sometimes it’s starts an argument or is wrong, it irrelevant. an absolute fucking nightmare.
with a forum, i am usually directed there via a google search, it’s a sub division of the topics forum specifically created by the person with the question, the responses of everyone are for the topics exclusive benefit, and if there is arguments or wrong info, everyone can easily point it out without missing it in real time. and when the topic is either resolved, or given up on the topic ends. it’s not used for other people’s problems at any point.
Absolutely incorrect, incredible
you are as helpful as a discord support chat, congratulations, you can sit there and be smug that it suddenly means you are right in your own head
I’m working bro, just read the first bit and saw how you completely misinterpreted my points
Edit: Have some time now, here’s my response.
*the rant was basically summed up as: “i think forums are archaic and i feel the ability to search them was bad
i think that discord has a much better system because the devs can answer people’s questions directly.”*
Completely wrong, I literally said the exact opposite in fact, what we need is a better discord wherein there is no lock in where you have to have a discord account to be able to search for things with an engine.
The search functionality literally in forums is and was bad, your point about how bad discord search is, is exactly the same thing I experienced on forums with their built in search functions, Google worked great by comparison of often getting me to the most relevant portion of a thread. Sure I still had to sometimes look forward and backwards a bit but it worked well enough.
I also never said anything about devs being able to answer peoples questions directly, I did however say it being a real-time chat made it much easier. Obviously the devs would hopefully be active whether it was async or not, but that’s not a platform feature lmao.
I do not see how you so wildly misinterpreted what I said to be the exact opposite.
except my experience with these discords results in: me asking the question, a bot or some person states that the devs no longer answers questions due to having to answer the same questions over and over and to use the search function. the search function pulls up every time the key word is mentioned but not the context or resolution, and i end up having to read the time line, including random people chiming in with their own questions and now i am tracking who is talking to which person in tandem on the same chat, and some times they cross, some times other people come in to give their 2 bits, sometimes it’s starts an argument or is wrong, it irrelevant. an absolute fucking nightmare.
This is the same experience I mentioned before with built in forum search being bad, also discord users/servers do not use functionality like the forum feature or threading hardly ever, many don’t even know those features exist, I’d like those to be an option in any discord-like replacement as they help alleviate those issues a good bit on their own.
Specifically, you can group things by topics or threads, it still has some poor ux tho that could be much better, but overall I think search engines are simply better then basically any search tooling these platforms build for themselves.
with a forum, i am usually directed there via a google search, it’s a sub division of the topics forum specifically created by the person with the question, the responses of everyone are for the topics exclusive benefit, and if there is arguments or wrong info, everyone can easily point it out without missing it in real time. and when the topic is either resolved, or given up on the topic ends. it’s not used for other people’s problems at any point.
Again, there is functionality in discord with similar features, people just don’t use them out of laziness or not being aware they exist.
I work at a major corporation as a senior tech specialist working with lower representatives actually speaking to clients, real time communication is leaps and bounds preferable to async communication in my 7 years in this role. {Edit2: We had to train the representatives to keep their discussion of their kssue in one thread, it was not inherent knowledge, used slack initially and now have to use teams which was definitely a step down but at least it has threading at all. Same with teaching them to search the channel, so often the answers are there if you search for them.}
I’ll clarify since you seem to think I’m a discord lover, I literally canceled my nitro a year ago when rumblings of IPO was coming because I knew what followed, I looked into replacements like Revolt (now stoat) and Matrix and tried to convince all my friends to move off discord.
I’m not a fan of discords direction, however I am intimately familiar with it, and can speak to its strengths and weaknesses as I have seen them, and prior to that, a lot of experience with forums, from being a user to hosting my own, my goal is to hopefully share that with others to maybe be able to steer a future FOSS/federated version that is more open and usable.
We all now the true alternative would be phpBB… /hj
Can Stoat be used as an alternative?
As an EU co, how will they navigate age verification
EU doesn’t require age verification (yet). It’s exclusively British thing for now, and we fight hard to keep it this way
Oh, good, ty. I just made an account last night and will check it out to see if it fits my needs, but this was nagging in the back of my head as others have just decided to bend the knee regardless of jurisdiction.
just decided to bend the knee regardless of jurisdiction.
yeah, I understand why companies do this tho
from their side it is cheaper to just put the same measures and requirements for every legislation and in discord’s case this is the perfect opportunity to get more data from their users
Made by the same team that did s3nd.pics (the imgur alternative. Under heavy Dev at the moment but has promise.
