> Neither the client nor the server are what makes discord however... What makes discord is the community around it... Gamers aren't going to leave what they already have
Just on this, most Discord mentions I've come across on HN describe how the user experience is what separates it from the competition and I'd agree.
The networking effect across communities doesn't seem anywhere near as strong as traditional social media where one might argue it's what keeps users retained. Few I've observed in the years I've been on Discord seem to care or recognize who someone is across 'servers' (Discord meaning), which is made less obvious by the encouraged feature of changing handles/avatars across communities to maintain quasi-distinct identities (even across related gaming chat). It's also not uncommon for some users block all PMs and friend requests from communities merely due to spam issues.
The communities using it that I've experienced are often doing so since it's the most convenient service for their purposes. Users can join with invites without signing up (a la IRC, traditionally), supports inline attachments (acting as an all-in-one image/video/file host), includes persistent, easily searchable message logs and just as importantly is all free.
A decent number of the communities I've encountered (ranging from software, subreddit/forum chat, game modding, media creation) could migrate elsewhere if there was an alternative suitable for their own needs. A number of them have migrated from other platforms before and one of the gaming-related ones even discussed potential future alternatives. If anything the self-hosted aspect would be the main drawback to a Discord-equivalent alternative (ie: the costs, maintenance).
I'll second this. I started using Discord solely because all of the alternatives (Skype, teamspeak, mumble, google, ...) were so bad at the time. And when I say "bad" I specifically mean the UX and the quality/stability of service. Discord had good quality service and it was extremely easy for non-technical people to use, and so for me and my friends who talked online a lot, we naturally just tried it out and then stayed because it continued to be good.
When I've been after old comments of mine or others and know some text from it filtering been straightforward. Results can be sorted in chronologically ascending order and date ranges can be set in addition to the standard filter options.
It's not perfect though. There's no exclusion filter option, some queries are automatically broadened without a way to enforce strict string matching (eg: searching enemies will also include results for enemy but wrapping in double quotes like "enemies" doesn't prevent this), the pagination when there are too many results for a query maxes out at ~200 pages even if more pages are shown/should be accessible via the navigation (seems like a bug), the pagination is also only at the bottom which adds a little extra time navigating and attachment filenames can't be searched.
That said, even with the above caveats I manage to find what I'm after reasonably quickly the vast majority of the time, even things years old.
My friends and I have had a server since ~2016 that we use and I've been able to find whatever I've needed even back that far. It might be harder in a higher volume server (we have about 20 actives and another 20 semi-active chatters).
But the search will let you specify time periods, channels, who sent the message, etc. It also gives a line of context around the result, which takes up some space, but I find is quite useful for, well, getting the context of the statement and figuring out what it meant.
I think the most important facet for (very) old content searching, though, is that you can almost immediately go back in the chat history to any result. Whereas other chat apps make that slow or difficult.
> What makes discord is the community around it, and the fact that 3rd party sites have decided to support it.
For FOSS projects, that really isn't a factor. The main thing is that Discord is a freely available channel that supports modern things like link previews, image uploads, voice chat, and persistent history. Slack does all these things but makes it a royal pain to join a new Slack.
Why does it matter if gamers come or go? They're a totally different audience. This isn't about building the next social platform, it's about escaping control of the existing ones.
Gaming is an interesting bellwether, having birthed both Slack and Discord. I used a variety of tools for gaming communities over the years: dial-in BBS, AOL chatrooms, IRC, ICQ, AIM, forums, XMPP, and Skype. Ultimately it had to be easy to get in and coordinate effectively and often.
> Gamers aren't going to leave what they already have -why would they?
This is incorrect on very clear, unambiguous history. quakenet was fine but all the kids were on discord so left we did. I still hate discord because where it fails is specifically because it isn't FOSS (or at least, with a public protocol), for example, lack of ability to save chats like you could with IRC.
The point is that they will not leave discord for „a FOSS discord“ because they‘d gain nothing. For the average user, discord won because it had a lot of features and properties that where better than what was there before (voice & chat combined, not server management, etc).
You and me might care about software being FOSS all day long, but the masses don’t. For them it’s just not a thing. I‘d guess „selfhosted servers“ actually is a step backward for the majority of discord users.
And how! Every time I login (have multiple accounts), I have to repeatedly tell Discord that I’m not a student and not interested in their scholastic channels. The UI is really in-your-face constantly. Has my account already viewed this tutorial? Yes. Save that info forever and stop bugging me.
on windows, if you change the USERPROFILE variable before running the software, you can operate it from different locations. Instead of using the preset folder in your user's appdata, it can be run from any other folder with entirely different saved data.
As application running checks are from the path, you can essentially run multiple instances of the same application simultaneously (at the cost of having a complete second copy of the entire program).
It's a pain to setup and maintain though, the software is clearly not designed with this in mind. The other issue is that when calls to open child programs (like clicking links in chat), this program maintains the changed variable, so apps like firefox run in a completely different directory
I use about 15 servers and run my own server that's 1,500 strong. Never have I experienced the issues you're facing. I use the desktop and mobile clients daily. Literally all day.
You have a local problem there and need to reach out to support.
Or I’ll just use something that doesn’t bother me.
A freshly installed client will also require you to take a tutorial again once logged in. I like to try different OSes so this tutorial is also a pain.
The difference in quality, reliability, featureset, and native platform integration between Element and Discord is night and day. Discord wins in all categories other than "you can host it yourself".
Can you elaborate on what is missing from Element with regards to feature set and native platform integration? What is wrong with Element's quality in comparison to Discord?
Mumble is atrocious for the end user, teamspeak is atrocious for folks running servers and end users and don't even get me started on what Skype ended up as. They really don't compare to something like Discord at all, which is a corporate hellscape but is admittedly very low barrier to entry (and more importantly just works).
Not saying they weren't UX nightmares, but that's where people were and that's why they switched off. Communities liked TS3, there was little delay, it was private, but you had to protect your IP.
> Gamers aren't going to leave what they already have -why would they?
There are several reasons, based on personal experience with discord's limitations, why some gamer would switch.
1) Lack of accessibility. It is very hard to include deaf people in voice chats.
2) Lack of advanced voice capabilities. There is no way to setup channels where there talkers that are only heard by a subset of listeners. If you are using discord voice to coordinate large groups of players it can be extremely hard to manage.
3) Lack of Bot developer support. There are significant issues with how Discord has developed their APIs and how they treat 3rs party developers.
4) Censorship. Many gamers are irreverant / bot PC and the centralized nature if Discord pretty much guarantees that Discord will eventually face issues with moderation and censorship that will drive people elsewhere.
If Fosscord can keep (feature complete) client interoperability while adding additional features for self-hosted servers, there is a decent chance that a significant minority would move to Fosscord.
I would expect that if such starts to actually happen, Discord will do everything they can to put legal and technical roadblocks in the way of Fosscord.
There are a number of services that provide speech-to-text services. Being able to hook a voice chat feed into one of them for live transcripting would be pretty game changing for conferences in general.
Side-tangent, but when i saw it introduced in MS Teams (for recorded meetings, there is now a transcript tab that you can watch in real time as the meeting goes; sorta like live captioning written in a format of a legit transcript that you can read later too), it blew my mind with how useful it was. Not that i need it, but it is super helpful to keep track of who said what and when (nice when you accidentally get distracted for 5 seconds and dont want to get halfway lost), and the transcript even assigns names to what was said.
In the specific example I have experience with, our deaf person had access to a live translation service but only if there was a way for the translator to access the Voice Chat via phone. We spent a while looking for a solution but weren't able to find one.
In the end, we were able to find and setup a bot and some other software to get transcription working but it was far from easy.
#2, they've enhanced voice channel services for large events and there's been a "god mode" voice button (ie everyone else is turned down and God is full volume)
#3, there's way more discord bots than for any other platform and they're way more useful
#4 is pretty funny given people have been screaming at Discord for years that they have a lot of child porn, right-wing political extremist and white supremacist groups - including servers that exist for the sole purpose of coordinating attacks on LGBTQ community servers - and Discord has just shrugged and said "we don't have the resources to police it."
That doesn't accomplish what I am describing. For example, suppose you want several squads that can coordinate among themselves but also still hear the overall commander, there is no way to accomplish this.
> there's way more discord bots than for any other platform and they're way more useful
There's also been a lot of developer goodwill that's been burnt over the years and a thus reason to believe that 3rd party developers could help accelerate the move to an open source discord compatible ecosystem.
> pretty funny given people have been screaming at Discord for years that they have...
Which is precisely why more and more moderation from a centralized provider like Discord is inevitable.
The very first bullet point states that it has Discord compatibility. Also, that isn't Discord's logo. I'm not sure if it's "legally distinct" enough, but it isn't stolen.
If I found something better than Discord for gaming (less bloated, more FOSS, better microphone filtering), me and my friends would switch over-night. That said we don't dependent on any wider gaming community hubs on Discord, we just play with each other.
You are partially correct. Community and network effects are strong, but Discord has technical features no FOSS equivalent currently has:
* One-click audio-video screensharing
* One-click video conference and chatting
* Emojis and inline images
* Decent UI
Bonus: Discord gives people the super quick option to have a hosted private server.
Discord can do all this because you are the product. Sure, there is nitro, but Discord is spyware that looks at every process on your computer and I'm sure they are using/selling that data.
So I believe that a client/server architecture that can do self-hosting and meet those technical requirements, could possibly bolt-on "single identity" ala Discord.
Does Matrix support instant screenshare/video chat rooms?
In Matrix (element.io here), you can click on one button in any room and start a video chat, and then after one more click screen share. The rooms aren't dedicated to voice/video but it definitely is very easy to do that.
It is implemented using Jitsi at a protocol level but the end-user doesn't usually notice that.
Not evidence that they are selling or even collecting this data, but discord _must_ look at the process and/or window table periodically to know when you are playing a video game so it can give you the one click stream button.
I have at this point lost count of the number of times I or someone else I know on Discord has described getting Youtube recs or ads directly referencing shit they'd just talked about.
I started getting blasted with YT recs for weeks for a channel I had never heard of, never watched, had no real common connections with ... until someone referenced them in a conversation on Discord.
Now, you can shit on that as anecdotal or "intuition" or whatever, but come on. This is HN. No one here is ignorant about the level of data sharing that goes on in the adtech space, and everyone claims they don't until Gmail's selling you ads based on your emails.
It's not like someone's just argued that the president is a space alien. We're talking about suggesting a for-profit internet company is doing something that literally damn near all the for-profit internet companies do and have done now for decades. The bigger question is to how anyone could be so credulous as to assume they are not.
This is the same thing people accuse Facebook of and nobody has convincingly proved Facebook does it. I despise Facebook as much as the next HNer but I am loath to make it seem more capable than it is. Likewise with Discord, I sincerely doubt they can handle combing through voice + text data to build profiles of users, and I'll keep that stance until someone convincingly proves that they do.
Natural Language Processing is literally a major wing of AI development and data science, but even that isn't really necessary. Matching text on ad-based keywords has been going on since fucking About.com.
I'm not shitting on it, I'm just asking what level of information we have about which data Discord is actually collecting/storing and what they're doing with it.
Personally, suspicion. The other two comments combined cover it: Discord does look at all your processes to see if you're playing games, and having not read the EULA but knowing how "free" apps that cost money to operate work, I assume they are doing some kind of analytics and selling that data.
It's just an electron app. Rather than just flinging mud, it'd be relatively easy for anyone to actually find evidence of this.
That there are several articles about people reverse engineering the client and protocol and nobody else has brought this up, I feel pretty comfortable calling this unfounded unless you can provide some indication otherwise.
> Given that that information does go to the server
That "given" there is doing a lot of work. I've never seen any reference stating that it's sending the entire process list anywhere.
The current third party protocol implementations all expose setting the game/activity you're playing directly, sure making it look like everything is done client-side.
You would have to show all network activity from the app never includes this type of information or anything derived from it, because as soon as anything goes server-side it can be used for anything. Is this actually easy?
That's what you'd have to show (prove the negative) to disprove what unethical_ban is saying (that it is spying on you).
All any of the people claiming that discord is spying on you need to do is capture one packet going out that does have that sort of information, or find one piece of code in the client that supports doing so. That is the part that I think would be relatively easy given that it's primarily just a gob of javascript in a chromeless browser.
> find one piece of code in the client that supports doing so
But that's the point. There is a "server" running on your machine that is snooping on your processes (therefore the one-click integrations). The "client" you interact with never sees this info, instead just what the "server" exposes to it, so I claim you'd need to reverse engineer the "server" or wireshark your network and read probably-encrypted communications...
Discord is not spyware, it does not sell user data, and it doesn't collect all the programs you use on your computer. If you have the setting to show what game you are playing it periodically checks your processes and looks for a match locally before setting that match as your status.
When something UI/UX pops up on HN I always look for screenshots or GIFs showing core interactions. If there aren't any, I move on. I don't have the time/energy to install, inspect, etc.
Basically I'm as shallow as folks swiping on Tinder. Show me a pretty UI/UX and I'll be all over it.
Looks to me like they just straight up ripped the Discord front-end, changed the parts where it connects to a back-end and hosted it. Registration page has links to Discord's ToS, opening dev tools will give you a message about working at Discord. You can even try to buy nitro on it and it will try to call stripe with what I assume is Discord's key.
Scummy as hell.
Now we just need distributed crypto identity (open source keybase) so you can maintain identity across platforms, with the ability to transparently sign and verify messages regardless of where they’re persisted. This would allow for message logs to be ETLd while timestamps and provenance is maintained.
I don't even want to maintain identity across Discord servers, I certainly don't want to automatically-verifiably maintain identity across completely separate platforms. :(
An aside: I realize I've been brainwashed by popular shorthand nomenclature when I see 'crypto' and immediately cringe. My brain expanded this to 'crypto [currency] identity', despite its usage in this sentence clearly meaning 'crypto[graphic] identity'.
Open-source client for a closed-source commercial offering. Could we perhaps now have a open-source server in future as well? oh wait! There it is! Nicely done.
Does Discord have open APIs that this can be built around, or will this be a callback to the IM wars when competitors kept shifting things to break compatibility across platforms?
Discord has a bot API but using any unofficial client ("self bots") can get your account banned. The Discord Matrix bridge warns about this, saying that attempts to use the friend request API from a bit will probably get your account permabanned (and the feature isn't active by default AFAIK).
Discord doesn't seem to go after unofficial clients as much as they could, but if this client becomes popular they'll probably go after them.
While this is largely identical to the API used in the client, using the API against user accounts (as opposed to bot accounts) is called self-botting and is prohibited. Usage of third party clients can get you banned, and unfortunately this has already happened at times.
> using the API against user accounts (as opposed to bot accounts) is called self-botting and is prohibited
Gotta love how they reframe the conversation about user's rights. It's like how car companies of old redefined[0] walking as "jaywalking", reframing the conversations about street space in a way where the car became more important than the pedestrian.
What they call "self-botting" is arguably the whole point of having general-purpose computers available to general population. Bicycles for the mind and all.
--
[0] - Allegedly; it's a factoid I saw repeated on HN. But even if not true, this doesn't affect my point.
To be fair, I think that a large part of trying to control automated access to Discord is genuinely in the user’s interests: a common reason to use the API under the radar would be to mitigate privacy protections, anti-SPAM, bot oversight, etc.
On the other hand, Discord has drawn some ire for their behavior. Third party clients are obviously not malicious or abusive, they are simply unauthorized. Tools that allow bulk deletion of messages are also very much not really abusive, though they may consume a lot of server resources if the architecture is poorly optimized for this use case. Yet these are probably the main legitimate use cases for so-called self-botting, and while many users have not been banned for it, many report having been banned for it. I have used both without issue, as well as done some manual self-botting, so I can only guess it is not really intentional to kick off legitimate users.
Personally, I did not mean to convey any particular feelings to the legitimacy or morality of Discord’s stance, just to provide what I knew in a relatively neutral fashion. That having been said, while I find Discord to be relatively inoffensive, I am getting a bit bothered by the recent rebrands and crackdowns, and I sincerely long for a federated open-standard IM that works like email. But, I know lacking a good product, with good UX and some decent mechanism to handle abuse, it is a pretty asymmetric battle against IM clients with huge network effect advantages. And with email, you can see some cracks in its openness, as a direct result of trying to deal with abuse…
Well, it's a private company and it's their infrastructure, their systems and their service. We all may dislike the practice but they have the right to enact their ToS, as long as they act legally in regards to payments, etc.
Discord is seeing a huge spam/bot epidemic with stolen accounts right now, makes sense that they want to get on top of something like that.
They're doing exactly what Twitter and Instagram do. They don't like people using their own automation because the companies either offer automation products themselves, or they have lucrative partnerships with companies that have exclusive API access to their platforms, who then go on to sell automation capabilities to users.
There's no technical reason users can't automate how they use the services, and the security angle is an afterthought. The reason user automation is banned is because it might impact these companies' revenue streams.
This is really cool. My only disappointment is that this could’ve been a non-electron alternative to the discord client, but they chose to build on electron anyways.
With that it would waste more resources on running a partial web browser for one small GUI application where soon any system with 8GiB RAM or less is considered an obsolete and unsupported user experience when starting more than a few instances as they aren't shared nor do they have a small memory footprint.
It is not impossible to duplicate Discord (e.g. www.kaiheila.cn ), but what makes a SNS unique is really the user base.
WeChat sucks, but it's still used by billions. People are not using WeChat because WeChat is great or Tencent is great. People are using WeChat because their family, friends, employers, favorite medias and hospital reservation services are there.
After having talked with Cancel at the start of the Ripcord project, I can't imagine he would be at all interested in collaborating with other people, even in the sense of supporting other people's projects like this, unless it immediately benefits him.
Does anyone know if they’re struggling with Discord compatibility?
I wish there was an open standard like we have with email, which I guess is IRC. There’s something frustrating about seeing services like Twitter and Discord holding dominance over such primitive concepts.
What makes discord is the community around it, and the fact that 3rd party sites have decided to support it.
Also there's the legal (important for edus, etc) and other support from the Discord people themselves.
Gamers aren't going to leave what they already have -why would they? Edus sure as heck won't -who does that leave, a couple of hackers? Maybe?
A better approach would have been to:
a)Not use Discord's logo in your README.Md FFS
b)Build up infrastructure similar to and competitive with Discord's but FOSS oriented
c)THEN after b is accomplished, work on a client and a server.
Like the many reddit clones that have come and gone (and the slashdot clones before them) this will be a mouse fart into a hurricane