this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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Everything here is basically text and maybe images if your lucky. In order to make it into a Discord or Zoom competitor you would need to solve far higher bandwidth things like HD video and low latency audio, and both of thouse are fundamentally very different things for a server to handle as compared to high latency short text messages.
You could probably link account sign in, but any real-time stuff would likely be limited to within that single instance unless you create a whole alternative method of federation that would still only be available between thouse certain supported instances.
It’s also a whole lot more expensive to host, unless you go peer to peer in which case good luck, and vulnerable to bad actors massively running up hosting bills even if you can protect against denial of service attacks.
It would be nice to see, but there is a reason why Matrix is the closest anyone’s come and it’s still more a proof of concept then an actual platform you could direct family or random strangers to.
A large number of Discord servers just use text.
For video, maybe integrate into something that already exists, like Jitsi? Instead of trying to build one single app that handles everything, maybe it would be nice to have a suite of apps that all work together and can all use the same login.
A lot of video conferencing systems are already mostly peer-to-peer, at least for enterprise apps. Skype was originally peer-to-peer too. NAT traversal is usually provided by STUN servers. There's some issues like that (for example it reveals the user's IP addresses) but you could proxy everything through a TURN server to solve that.
Peer to peer is the best way to implement end-to-end encrypted communication.
Having said that, very large groups can benefit from a client-server model, like what Zoom does.
One of the main reasons why I use Discord nowadays aside from the fact that my gaming community is there is for its extremely low latency video streaming.
I tried to use other meet softwares but the latency was 10+ seconds. Not useful when I need immediate feedback. Discord offers the quickest and most reliable way for me to get someone else looking at my stream in real-time.
I’ll be looking for alternatives because they’re, of course, not doing anything impossible for others to replicate, they just made it the default.
That falls into the same two fallacies as the ones of complainers against Youtube alternatives:
Like, really, you don't need to replace all of Discord, only the parts that matter. The alternative to build not to Discord but to "Discord is being used for documentation" already exists, it's called web forums. Ditto, the alternative to "Discord is being used for communities" also exists, it's called XMPP or IRC or Matrix depending on who you ask. The alternative to "Discord tracks user data" is simply called "you don't do it", etc.
Like, we are literally on Lemmy. Just about the first thing that we Get It from the internet is that centralization is bad, be it Products or Services.
Forgive me, but I fail to see how expecting video/voice conferencing software to actually be capable of carrying video/voice could be described as a fallacy. It seems to me like that is kind of a core functionality to any software trying to fulfill that role.
IRC has nothing to do with the subject, and while XMPP/Matrix are promising they are still a long way from being able to talk someone without significant tech expertise and who has never seen them before into jumping onto a call in five minutes or so without touching a single setting. That is the fundamental part of Discord, Teams, Skype, or Zoom that matters.
Lemmy isn’t exactly voice conferencing software, so I don’t know why you would want to collaborate on software development work with it as a forum. As for documentation, a static site is probably the best place for that, although in this case keeping it off the clearnet was presumably a core consideration.
See, it's the entire premise that voice conferencing is needed to have a replacement for "Discord is used for documentation". It's not. Almost by definition. If anyone wants videoconferencing there's Jitsi. That's the thing I'm aiming to: you won't ever to get anyone to "replace" Discord if they have to replace all of it. Capitalism doesn't allow for that. We are trying to do better here. Splitting problems into their component and significative parts makes them much easier to solve.
The closest use case that in the case of these kinds of communities would even need videoconferencing would be something like "Discord is being used for live tech support for modchipping Switches" and for that case there's also already established alternatives... and it would be wise to not implement for that anyway.
Except this preticular discussion thread isn’t about Discord used as documentation, but Discord use in general as a videoconferencing tool. I also imagine the project started using Discord for conferencing, and documentation grew up around it because everyone was already there, emulation is very finicky, and it wasn’t out in the open for Nintendo to find indexed by Google. They could have used Jitsi, and the same thing would have happened.
A video conferencing program like Discord is hardly the first or best place to put software documentation, but in this case it being hard to find was presumably the point.
It also seems odd to insist that Capitalism doesn’t allow Jitsi, Matrix, or XMPP to exist, when they and many other open source projects do. Jitsi is owned by a major cooperation, but Matrix and XMPP arn’t to my knowledge. Rough around the edges and in need of significant work, yes, but not prevented from ever exsisting.
Video, voice, and text messaging are together the signifiant part of Discord as you put it, it doesn’t make sense in order to split them apart any further.