this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Do you think that the fediverse has something to gain with the enshitfication of discord? Are there voice chat programs in the fediverse that can benefit from it?

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[–] [email protected] 89 points 5 months ago (10 children)

Why not promote matrix as a substitute?

[–] [email protected] 46 points 5 months ago (2 children)

It's unfortunately barely usable, the responsiveness and features of discord are unmatched, in my opinion

[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 months ago (2 children)

It is not perfect, but it has been usable for quite a while. It's clocking already at tens of millions of active users per month, so it's not like all these people are just suffering around and not chatting and talking with their groups.

Also, unlike Reddit, it does not need to have a strong migration from all the long tail of niche communities. There are bridges already, so even if just, e.g, 5% of the discord base moves to it, it will be already enough to jumpstart a significant shift.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

How do the bridges work? Do they need to be set up by the community, or do they just work?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

They need to be setup by the homeserver, i.e by the admin of the "instance".

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I would love an alternative that works just as seemlessly yeah!

The strength of Discord is its numerous partnerships with YouTube, Twitch, Patreon etc, making it trivial to gather paying supporters around a streamer or a video creator, attributing roles and perks automatically. I manage the patron community of a Minecraft gamer on YouTube and automatically sync the access to a community Minecraft server for people with a certain pledge on third part platforms, this would never work in the open source world, unfortunately

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Do you mean exclusive/tiered access to certain rooms only for subscribers?

If you are telling me that such a thing doesn't exist for Matrix already, you just gave me a perfect thing to offer on communick

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

That's very cool I'll check it out :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I don’t know about other platforms, but YouTube membership is totally implementable on any other platform.

The workflow anyone need to implement is the same flow Discord has implemented:

  1. Perform OAuth to get the user’s own channel using the mine filter on channels.list end point. This way the service can know SomeOneWatching is owner of channel UC1234ABCD
  2. Perform OAuth to get the host’s members on a fixed interval to get a list of all members, and match it against all known users’ channel IDs or target individual user like SomeOneWatching’s UC1234ABCD channel ID as part of filterByMemberChannelId on the same members.list end point.
  3. Upgrade users’ groups on the service to reflect membership accordingly, no direct YouTube partnership required.
  4. Revisit the same flow in 2 regularly to downgrade when memberships are not renewed; beyond the pubsubhubbub which notifies subscription content updates (new uploads/deletions) on a subscribed channel, YouTube does not have a push notification for automatic updates. This is why there’s always a slight delay when membership status changes.

Source: I’ve worked in YouTube adjacent company using all of their public and several proprietary APIs for around 10 years now. I’m fairly familiar with their API offerings.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

I wouldn't say barely usable, but it does have a long way to go before it could be a replacement for discord, that's true

[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago

No screen sharing or even video calls iirc. Soo many people use Discord to watch stuff with their friends or to play games with their friends. Matrix is more of a irc replacement imo it doesnt have any gaming focused features and the Forums on discord are nice too

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Matrix video call support is still in beta IIRC? https://call.element.io/

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Works with Jitsi just fine...

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (3 children)

I haven't tried matrix yet. What's a good instance I can create my community on and bridge with my discord? For gaming communities.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 5 months ago

IMHO, the best thing people can do to help mass migrations is to build out Lemmy’s moderation and administration tools as fast as possible.

They’re not great right now, and it’s really hard for Lemmy to keep up with the noise, spam, and trolls that come with a bigger community.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I fear it is like with WhatsApp : "But all my friends are on Discord so I have no choice!".

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

right, I forgot about this factor

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Social pressure is a real thing. I wonder just how many people in the US have iphones because of that dumb blue-green bubble stuff.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

The reality is there isn't an alternative that would be easy enough for non-tech people.

I am never getting my friends off of Discord because there is nothing else that is easy for them and has same features - texting, calling and desktop sharing with sound.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago

Revolt.chat is quite similar to discord and open source. They do run a centralized server to make it easy for everyone to get onboard, but it can be self hosted as well.

That being said, I still don't use it because nobody else does, and that's the problem with all chat and social media apps.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Matrix is easy unless you try to do something complicated with it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Fr I finally started using it and it's the simplest fuggin thing

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The recent headlines saying "discord will be showing ads" is just intentionally misleading. No one even bothered to read the articles. They just saw the headline that agreed "discord bad" and didn't even question it.

Discord already has "ads" in different forms that are even more like ads than what those articles were talking about. They promote games and services as a "perk" for nitro. They also advertise all over for their paid stuff, like Nitro and profile decorations.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I opened Discord yesterday, seems like now they even have lootboxes, what the heck

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I’m not sure if you’re doing a bit, but that was an April Fools’ joke.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You know what, they just seem so pushy lately about Nitro and stuff that I didn't even get the joke

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

That’s fair, I also fell for it originally. It was a pretty convincing prank, I really should be more suspicious on April 1st.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

If anybody wants to build a federated Discord alternative, my suggestions:

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Revolt is so promising, except it's not federated. I tried spinning it up today and then realized it's local only...

Which then even on their main page they have a pleading asking us to not host instances because the base will become fractured. Which, is solved by federation.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

Reddit was an easy switch for me because there wasn't a social cost to leaving. There's no way the discord communities I'm part of are switching, way too much hassle.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don't use Discord much, but apparently it works a lot more like IRC (real time discussion) than like Lemmy/SubLinks/PieFed (asynchronous discussion) or Mbin (asynchronous disc + microblogging).

If that's correct, perhaps it would be simply better to code a Fediverse alternative to Discord, and make sure that it's well integrated with Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (3 children)

How would a Discord-like application integrate with Lemmy? Are chat logs federated to posts in Lemmy? Do posts in Lemmy get federated to this other chat thing? Can you just sign into chat with your Lemmy username and that's it? Is it just a chatroom that's associated with a community?

I feel like people here are like "everything should be federated" but sometimes I don't really follow the thought process. I get it with Lemmy and Mastodon, but maybe someone could explain what a Federated Discord looks like.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

I don't know where you've been, but Discord has been showing ads for a while now. If not for their own garbage they can barely deliver on, it's in app sponsored merch and discounts. usually for video games and such

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

mostly matrix (mabye xmpp) will benefit

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I still like guilded more then discord to start. So I wont have to move. But I wouldnt mind trying Matrix.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Bro guilded is moderated by roblox admins

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I'm not convinced Lemmy-style Federation lends itself well to the Discord model.

Like, you could have individual servers running (or maybe a server that hosts many communities), and a client that connects to all your subscribed ones, but I don't think there's a lot of value in sharing that data out across many servers, or somehow mangling real-time voice into that model.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Same account different servers would mimic discord. So you have one app, but the communities or 'discord server' can be their own instance. If it's mimicking discord it will keep all the message boards private to users like discord, but it could still benefit from Lemmy/Mastodon integration. Many communities have a discord and a sub Reddit having the same account on both may be valuable to some people.

I don't know the state of voice and video calls in the fediverse, it seems to be the main benefit of discord. Otherwise discord is just a terrible closed version of forums/subreddit/communities.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Discord isn't really applicable to the fediverse but that doesn't means that FOSS can't benefit. Are there good alternatives.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Open source projects will alvause be better than closed sorce ones. If tou are giving money for closed source program, better give that money to open source project and everything will be better..

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Instead of the fediverse, it would be good if users switched to Revolt instead. Or maybe we can make a federated discord alternative, though Revolt was talking about federation a while ago.

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