I would bet all the pieces to make a better communication suite than discord are there. They just need to be put together into a package and marketed well.
Comment on Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers
dan@upvote.au 5 weeks agoone point registration for multiple communities,
Federation, or at least some form of single sign-on with arbitrary providers (like we used to do with OpenID), is a better way of solving this.
tissek@sopuli.xyz 5 weeks ago
Zworf@beehaw.org 5 weeks ago
In other words: Matrix.
dan@upvote.au 5 weeks ago
I’ve never tried Matrix but I’ve heard good things about it.
Zworf@beehaw.org 5 weeks ago
It’s not as snazzy as Discord but it’s fully open-source and federated. So everyone can run their own server (I do, too). If you don’t care about running your own you can just sign up at https://app.element.io/ .
It also offers many “bridges” to other protocols, like WhatsApp, Telegram, even Discord. Those are not quite as mature and mostly third-party provided but they generally work well.
There’s a really great ansible playbook for installing your own. If you would like to have the full bridged experience, beeper is probably best.
dan@upvote.au 5 weeks ago
Thanks! I’ll have to see if there’s Docker containers available. Ansible is definitely doable too, but I prefer Docker. I’ll stick it on the same server I’m running Lemmy and Mastodon on :)
sonori@beehaw.org 5 weeks ago
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.
dan@upvote.au 5 weeks ago
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.
veniasilente@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
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.
sonori@beehaw.org 5 weeks ago
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.
veniasilente@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
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.