cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/17617609
They supposedly can be disabled in settings- but we all know that won’t last. They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode and it’s only a matter of time.
this will always happen unless we move to FOSS
Enshittification Continues: Discord to begin showing advertisements on it's free platform
Submitted 7 months ago by empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com to technology@beehaw.org
Comments
umbrella@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
Kaldo@beehaw.org 7 months ago
Hope we get some comparable options yet, I only know of matrix and that one allegedly has tons of security and performance issues.
baseless_discourse@mander.xyz 7 months ago
Can you list some security/performance/feature comparison between matrix and discord? I don’t have the need for these class of product, but I am trying to get the hype behind discord.
reddthat@reddthat.com 7 months ago
Mattermost does most of the required discord features. (Pun intended)
Is open source and is selfhost-able. I think there are some SaaS hosters if you need them too.
GadgeteerZA@beehaw.org 7 months ago
It’s often not the cost of the software, but the hosting costs, especially on a growing platform.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
platforms can be peer to peer too, with maybe a smaller tracker. i think its viable
shirro@aussie.zone 7 months ago
Most of these platforms make no money but have taken huge amounts of VC funding which they have burned through. For the VCs to unload it and cash out they need to show the product can be monetised and them try and shift it before the users leave the platform. Idiot users want all the features of a product developed by lots of talented full time paid staff but don’t want to pay for it themselves so they leap from startup to startup then complain when the inevitable happens while dismissing open source alternatives as inadequate for their needs. Why should we care? I don’t.
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
While I don’t disagree with the sentiment, the Discord Nitro subscription has been around for a long while. From what I’ve seen using the platform it seems relatively popular. I’d guess adding ads to the free tier is as much about enticing people onto the subscription (which presumably won’t have ads).
tlf@feddit.de 7 months ago
Ubtil they go to the Netflix model where users can experience both a subscription and ads at the same time.
Diotima@ttrpg.network 7 months ago
And Nitro isn’t exactly inexpensive either, or wasn’t last time I used Discord.
LoreleiSankTheShip@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
I’ve been using Discord almost since launch, and in that time, not a single feature did I find as an important addition to the program. It is now much more bloated with unnecessary stuff, stuff for which they paid those talented devs you mention.
I would have been perfectly content with a one-time payment to use it and it would have worked perfectly well for them with that model if they didn’t get greedy and want to stuff it with random junk to justify a subscription.
I don’t mind paying as long as it’s not a subscription scam for no reason at all.
rinze@infosec.pub 7 months ago
IRC still rules. No ads in my irssi.
Vodulas@beehaw.org 7 months ago
Does IRC do voice nowadays? I think that is the main reason people use Discord
ezchili@iusearchlinux.fyi 7 months ago
You mean does the 80s-based protocol that doesn’t even support encryption support voice?
It doesn’t support having messages received while you were offline
IRC supports one and one thing only: N-wise chats to connected clients. That and delusional nerds who like to think they’re better than everyone else
rinze@infosec.pub 7 months ago
If you mean that in some channels only some people can actually “talk”, I think it depends on the configuration of the channel, but it’s a possibility.
I thought people used Discord because you could have video / audio chats (not sure about this, I’ve used it very sparsely.)
And then there are Open Source projects that use Discord as the documentation repository. Hell is a place on the Internet, apparently.
northendtrooper@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
slowly moving myself to revolt.chat.
Its sad since I’ve been with discord since almost '15.
jarfil@beehaw.org 7 months ago
Compared to Matrix, or any E2EE chat, this doesn’t sound good:
we take your privacy very seriously. And with end-to-end encryption coming to DMs and group chats soon
Compared to Discord, or other established voice chat systems like Mumble, this doesn’t sound great either:
We are currently rebuilding the client and the voice server from scratch. The old voice should work in most cases, but it may inexplicably not connect in some scenarios and / or exhibit weird behaviour.
The “app” on Android seems to be just the webapp running in a standalone window.
I’ll concede them the OpenSource and self-hosted factors, but it doesn’t seem like a suitable replacement for average Discord users… then again, the ads might push them over.
politicalcustard@beehaw.org 7 months ago
Oh, this looks great. Honestly, I am very happy when closed-source apps become worse, these are all just opportunities for open source to move in and take over.
empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
so this project is open source, which is nice, but still seems to rely on centralized servers. Does it use P2P for voice+video+fileshare so that the original devs aren’t on the hook for insane bandwidth requirements? I can’t see anything about their networking systems in the FAQ or info pages.
I may consider getting my friends to switch sooner or later if it’s more P2P based. But I don’t really want something that runs ALL traffic through central servers, because the bandwidth costs will inevitably just lead to the same situation that Discord is now in.
jarfil@beehaw.org 7 months ago
It’s self-hostable, and they seem to be switching to webrtc, not sure if P2P or not. In 2022, they claimed it was using minimal resources on the server:
developers.revolt.chat/faq/monetisation
They also don’t seem to consider federation as a priority, but then again neither does Discord.
krash@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
What made you choose revolt chat over matrix? Just curious.
Segab@beehaw.org 7 months ago
Oh cool there’s an Android app, that’s gonna make it so much easier to recommend!
Mikufan@ani.social 7 months ago
Back to TeamSpeak! My account is almost 20!
anteaters@feddit.de 7 months ago
Yes, but mumble. Fuck that discord noise and back to the old ways.
empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
TeamSpeak has always been better tbh. For actual gaming voice chat discord actually sucks, it’s low bitrate and very high latency. It’s benefit was just easy coordination in larger servers without the need to constantly self-host and self-manage your own server like TS.
Mikufan@ani.social 7 months ago
I know, but now i get my idiot friends to come back. (i even host a TS server)
ezchili@iusearchlinux.fyi 7 months ago
Which is better in what way exactly?
excel@lemmy.megumin.org 7 months ago
“Discord said users will be able to turn off the ads in their settings.”
smb@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
usually at first you can do such, and later on, when a ceo wants more money, you then can buy that together with the new “pro” features actually nobody needs nor wants.
maybe better look for more stable solutions before they start acting like a broadcom ;-)
empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Sure, but you really expect that option to stay available for very long after 90% of users turn it off?
FrostyPolicy@suppo.fi 7 months ago
For now. I’m quite sure that option will disappear at some point in the not too distant future.
Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org 7 months ago
I’m so tired man. I just want it to stop. It feels like everything nice is slowly being squeezed in all aspects of life.
Anything that capitalism touches or influences has begun to choke us out. It just seems to continue and doesn’t seem to ease up or improve. Maybe I’m just noticing it more, but the past 4 years felt like things accelerated quickly
anachronist@midwest.social 7 months ago
This is the definition of late-stage capitalism. Capitalism starts out by finding useful things that improve lives for at least some people (potentially by ruining it for others). For instance, it invents assembly lines to make manufactured goods cheaper but in so doing makes the worker’s job dull, repetitive, stressful, and robs him of his agency. This is early stage capitalism. Things are getting worse for some people but broadly better for many.
But then later on capitalism runs out of things to improve. You can only invent the assembly line once. You only get that boost when you implement it. So you have to come up with something else. Maybe you computerize things. But eventually you can’t wring any more profits out of production and profits must go up, so you have to take them out of the customers. You roll up all the competing firms into a monopoly and then start jacking up the price, slashing the quality, etc. This is late-stage. It becomes more and more parasitic and the snake eats its own tail.
LilaOrchidee@beehaw.org 7 months ago
I like how you highlighted the main problem.
crazyminner@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
We need a Federated FOSS Discord alternative built to work with the activity pub protocol.
baseless_discourse@mander.xyz 7 months ago
why activity pub? I don’t think it is designed to do group chats.
dan@upvote.au 7 months ago
It’s not designed for real-time communication at all. XMPP is a better fit.
Zworf@beehaw.org 7 months ago
Good. I hope people will move away from it soon. I hate Discord for banning third-party clients and datamining my system for installed apps. So I’ve never really used it.
It does mean I’m excluded from some FOSS projects’ support like Home Assistant but to hell with that :P
helenslunch@feddit.nl 7 months ago
You mean like they moved away from Reddit when they killed 3rd party clients and openly began selling user data to data brokers?
Or how they left Twitter when it was bought by an egomaniac who killed 3rd party clients, fired the entirety of the moderation staff, then required users to log in to view posts?
Or maybe how they left Facebook after any of the many times they’ve been caught collecting user data against their will, promoted genocide, never allowed 3rd party apps, and willingly manipulated elections?
Nevermind the fact that those platforms have had ads for decades.
Yeah sorry, ain’t gonna happen.
Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
Hey I am here
dan@upvote.au 7 months ago
Facebook used to allow third party apps (e.g. Snaptu started as a third-party app before the acquisition) and exposed most of the functionality via their API, but it’s not really a thing any more after Cambridge Analytica - the API was locked down significantly. You can’t really have it both ways… Allowing third-party apps also allows those apps to scrape and store user info, which is what Cambridge Analytica did.
empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
ideally such changes to advertising and the ToS arbitration clause removing consumer rights will help give a lot of the open-source communities a gentle push to get off of discord. It’s become far too central to too many communities and is impossible to search for knowledge.
ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
I’ve only ever used it in browser to limit what it can see on my machine. I was told by one of my coding professors once that one of the signs of a virus is if it monitors what apps you’re running, I’ve been cautious ever since of anything that does that (obviously it isn’t the only sign and isn’t instant virus bin, like I have an app that monitors GPU usage and throttles apps to keep from cooking my machine)
Diotima@ttrpg.network 7 months ago
Don’t forget that it saves even your deleted DMs for as long as you have an account!
dan@upvote.au 7 months ago
People will move away, sure, but to another proprietary service that’ll do the same thing in a year or two.