Comment on Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers
veniasilente@lemm.ee 8 months agoIn 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.
That falls into the same two fallacies as the ones of complainers against Youtube alternatives:
- that in order to offer an alternative to a service you have to replicate all of it
- that you have to provide an alternative to only one service
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 8 months 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 8 months 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.
sonori@beehaw.org 8 months ago
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.