What are we going to do about it?
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
Edit: thanks to @Xamrica@lemmy.dbzer0.com for this translation alternative: https://translate.kagi.com/translate/https://www.xataka.com/servicios/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-porque-ahora-todo-reddit-discord-eso-preocupante
Yeah I remember voicing this concern when all online communities seemed to be going to discord and people seemed to mainly laugh at me in response at the time.
Fuck Discord
Companies putting their stuff into discord is like all the businesses that ditched a dedicated website and moved to facebook however many years ago. Yay, now it is on a format that doesn’t work well for presenting static information and will inevitably require account registration!
Newest iteration of “this meeting could have been an email” has become “this Discord could have been a wiki”.
And someone (on the Far-Right) is always trying to buy Wikipedia, monetise it, X-ify it, or take it down. I think Wikipedia is abusive - exploits volunteer unpaid labour - should have been created by an NGO like UN and kept safe for mankind like our Library of Alexandria. But it is what it is. Preppers download the whole site regularly in order to have that knowledge under their control in case is ever gets taken down or spoilt and they are rebuilding civilisation post-Armageddon. I keep meaning to download it myself (note to self: do that soon you lazy b. no more excuses!)
I quite like Discord, but I really only use it for it’s original purpose - a place for groups of friends to hang out, play video games with voice chat, and maybe watch shows/movies together. For these purposes, Discord is great!
I have found very little value in how Discord gets used for anything and everything else - forums for video games, support channels for businesses, 1000+ member communities, etc etc. All of those use cases feel better served through traditional websites and forums… but it’s so much easier to set up a Discord server for the average person it has turned into a weird default.
In that regard, fuck Discord.
Yeah anything ephemeral is fine like chats and what not. But this idea of using it as support platform is just dumb. You end up with people asking the same question over and over and it either doesn’t get answered because no one is around to answer it or likely because they’re annoyed at the same questions over and over. There is no organization and no institutional knowledge. It’s like it ends up being set up by people who think it’s what the cool kids want. And these giant communities just exacerbate this issue. Everything ends up being noise. It’s the reason I usually ended up turning off the world or general channels in WoW. It just ended up being annoying and distracting.
When I’m trying resolve a situation that I need some sort of support I wanna be able to search if others have had the same issue and see discussion around that topic. I don’t need synchronous communication for that. I don’t care if it was 3 months ago someone had the problem if they figured out how to fix it. The way to do that is forums, Reddit (well before the enshittification), or even Lemmy.
In my head Discord = toxicity. Not sure how it got that rep for me but it has gotten it. Thus, wont lose sleep if it dies out. Perhaps I am wrong. Reviewing rationality of this prejudice is on my ToDo List after a million other things…
I despise discord from a user interface and business practice perspective. What a piece of shit
This is exactly what I was gonna say: I’m amazed that so many millions of people can tolerate its atrocious UI. Even now, the amount of notifications I get from the constant text channels across “servers” (which is such a misnomer for merely “communities”) is so ridiculous that I ignore 99.9% of it.
Element needs to be better. Discord is awesome with the way it auto-plays looping videos/gifs and has animated emojis.
Seriously: That’s all they’d need to do. The element devs need to focus on fun.
Isn’t that a client side issue though? Element is just one Matrix client. I haven’t used it myself but heard from others that Fluffychat (another Matrix client) is more like Discord.
What would likely help a lot if it was easier to get set up, particularly on a VPS or something like that. Small businesses and or larger community projects would be more likely to jump on possibly.
Another thing is ability to easily join, a lot of the above just have an easy link to join their discord server, not sure how easy matrix on boarding is currently as I still haven’t gotten my instance functional yet (not even half done with synapse configuration seemingly)
Fun is the least of my concerns. I don’t know why people compare the 2 when they have almost nothing in common. One is a chat app and the other is a voice/streaming/community app. Matrix is slow as hell and the way “spaces” are implemented is a joke.
Honestly outside of the incessant pop-ups and upsells and the whole selling everything to AI companies, it’s pretty great for private communities.
Most of these communuties using Discord are better served by something that isn’t a chatroom. So, so, so confusingly many of them use them as a store of permanent information. Like a website+forum.
Many times the benefit of Discord is the ability to paywall parts of it with Patreon integration. We need more foss and federated options that do this.
Or Matrix?
According to history:
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Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable, or…
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If it reaches a critical mass… You can’t. See: Facebook.
The Fediverse can adopt a few nice communities, but honestly bringing the larger population seems hopeless.
Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable
Discord is going public soon, so start the timer…
larger population seems hopeless.
But what is the barrier? We have a functioning infrastructure. We need to solve the last piece of the puzzle.
People need an easy way to join!
Mastodon has already shown that this works. Even if they aren’t as big as others yet, they still make up about two-thirds of the Fediverse. Now we need to replicate this for Lemmy, Pixelfed, and so on, and share our findings along the way.
You don’t…you go back to forums. They’re searchable. Discord and Facebook and well anything self hosted isnt via search engines
But many people don’t want to have everything completely public, even if privacy is a illusion there.
We have to accept that and provide a solution for both.
Rant
I don’t think you can for most people that is what is so infuriating right? In my experience people who are entrenched in Discord are completely and utterly entrenched in it, to the point that I have lost contact with a lot of these people effectively since I don’t use Discord.
The important choice was with all the community leaders who decided to make the move to Discord at crucial moments where they could have NOT done that.
I think any shift off of Discord is also going to have to come from community leaders of organizations, projects, game development communities etc… deciding to move off the platform at crucial decision points.
However, and this is something people who happily pushed their entire lives onto Discord would confidently tell me we could easily do if Discord got bad, everyone isn’t just going to straight up leave once they have built their entire digital communication around Discord…
Now I frequently see game developers complain that they can’t accurately get a picture of their playerbase because large categories of players aren’t on their discord!! and I have to keep my palm from blowing a hole through my face when the two loudly meet.
The brainworms are so bad that these developers will conclude the issue is with their playerbase not wanting to use Discord instead of it being an issue with DEVELOPERS DECIDING TO COMMUNICATE WITH THEIR PLAYERBASE WITH A SHITTY, EXCLUSIONARY TOOL THAT HAS AWFUL SEARCH.
I can’t express how much this gets under my skin, it is like this assumption that if you are even slightly a gamer than you are on Discord all the damn time has become rheified and cemented into place so rigidly that developers are literally tossing away large swaths of their playerbase feedback because they refuse to use a different tool to get feedback and communicate with their community. No forum, no custom website, nothing, Discord or bust.
I have seen the effects in games like Battlebit where it is clear that the developers were catering to only a small subsection of the playerbase that was very active and prominent on Discord and it ended up torpedoing the game because changes kept happening that clearly signalled to large portions of the playerbase that they were basically invisible to the developers.
I have watched this problem, stewing in my frustration, evolve from a minor personal annoyance to being a serious systematic issue causing community organization to become dysfunctional and broken because Discord is clearly a shitty tool for that community (that clearly a lot of people refuse to use or check regularly)… and YET everybody in those communities behaves like it was always a foregone conclusion that the community would have to move to Discord, that is just the way it is.
screams into void
Gamers are so confidently stupid.
Also before anyone says “well it is a good tool for communicating with friends in a DnD group or something” … yes I know it is good for that, you know why I know that it is good for that? Because that is the easiest usecase for any communication and organizational tool to tackle, Discord isn’t good at this usecase, it is just a laughably easy usecase compared to how mindbendingly difficult it is to wrangle larger communities of… not necessarily friends.
I think your argument relates closely to something I’ve noticed happening over and over with more than just game developers. Far too often I see people expressing frustration that the Internet doesn’t give them more accurate information about the real world. Way too many people, apparently including many of the richest and most powerful people alive, have come to see the Internet as a magical machine that will do anything they want it to do… if only people would use it differently! Like, they legitimately seem to expect the entire population to post their entire lives online, unfiltered, so they can be used as automatons by people they’ve never even met.
For forums: Yeah spaces are pretty great (have a look at Mozilla for example) and it can be an alternative IME.
For gaming which even if unasked about, is the majority of the users: When we can have push to talk option (client side, which can be done relatively easy) and proper 30+ FPS Screen share for gaming features, I think it’ll be much easier to convince people to try it. Everything else IMO is QOL features that I don’t mind about. We also tried to use mumble, but the lack of Screen share moved us straight back to discord eventually…
Matrix sucks. It barely has usable apps and it lacks basic moderation tools
Element is the name of the official Matrix client, but there are many others.
Yeah I remember voicing this concern when all online communities seemed to be going to discord and people seemed to mainly laugh at me in response at the time.
Because there hasn’t been a single proper alternative until very recently, and even then they’re not as user friendly.
Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects, I don’t know what you mean by an alternative to Discord because my argument is that Discord is shit for organizing.
Discord is great for chat, both voice and text, it is a great live space to have for a community. I don’t dispute that. Sure there hasn’t been good alternatives to recently for that specific usecase…
What I dispute, and what I am pointing out is that Discord ate forums, it ate all kinds of public, publically accessible formats for online communities that were much more easily searchable and collatable into useful information for everybody.
Discord is a fucking hallway of a thousand fractured silo’d conversations locked behind an account login. I hate Discord for destroying the internet before it which I could freely browse and learn so much more from.
Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects
Terrible how, though? That’s exactly what it gets right. You have easy-to-setup roles and channel accesses, onboarding experiences for people joining a larger server, a huge ecosystem of bots for various purposes, etc.
okay, it is bad for not being indexable, but it’s good at what it does and it’s popular for a reason.
I once had my account banned because I was a member of a server that was banned in that hugely discouraged me from using it for that purpose. I might be in the half dozen servers at the moment none of which I’ve looked at save for two in the last year and I primarily use it for offsite DMs and even then I strongly prefer signal for people I know.
online communities seemed to be going to discord
That can also be seen as “nature healing itself” in context of giant AI botnets scraping the whole internet every second. It’s only natural to go private nowadays.
No, it isn’t.
Make no mistake a primary monetization vector for Discord is to scrape the shit out of everything said on its chats.
By suggesting Discord for privacy you are effectively only giving corporations the benefit of a commons while denying that to people.
Discord is NOT private, it is a corporation and your data is valuable.
Discord may offer to sell chat histories in certain communities (after “anonymizing” the data, yeah right like they will do that effectively) directly to AI companies.
Discord is only private in the sense that you are advocating for only a private for-profit corporation being able to enjoy the benefit of scraping and collecting our conversations.
This is not healing, this is the vision of the internet as a truly open shared space that benefits all… dying because people like gamers were too foolish to see the coming catastrophe from putting EVERY community under the control of a single company struggling to make a profit.
I agree that Discord shouldn’t be trusted and might turn out to be a bad actor some day. Anyway, the more general tendency of moving away from public spaces is a right and natural thing. So it’s best to do the same as with Discord but without Discord. In the upcoming era of AI hiding knowledge is a good thing to do, and I’m personally not used to this yet.
I’m sort of tired of articles describing some catastrophe that happened ten years ago and saying “it’s worrying.”
Is it? When was the last time you googled something and the first website that came up didn’t spit out some SEO or garbage content?
Like every day? Yeah it’s worse now but Google is still useful for a lot of things.
That being said, I do have AdBlock so it’s a different internet for me.
Have you ever tried DuckDuckGo or Qwant? They have better results in my opinion, as long as you don’t care about the business snippets.
Today. Among thousands of times.
I’m with OP. People have been screaming this for ages, and the collective societal reaction hasn’t even been apathy, but “We vote for Big Tech CEOs, full steam ahead.”
So… Yeah, I’m tired, too. Screw it all. Let the internet burn in Reddit/Discord/SEO hell. Maybe we can build something from the ashes.
How about strengthening the Fediverse and Lemmy?
Let the internet burn in Reddit/Discord/SEO hell. Maybe we can build something from the ashes.
So basically, let the world burn? Because that’s what it looks like we’re heading toward right now because of big tech.
Maybe we can build something from the ashes.
The big question is whether it will be us who do that.
Ugh, Discord is an information black hole. I despise how so many of my niches have fled there.
Reddit seems to be trying to destroy that “role” of theirs as hard as they can though. A few very niche subs I follow are drying from some kind of “bug” that deprioritizes their discoverability.
It’s not a bug. It’s absolutely a feature for making Reddit more generic, farmable garbage and noise.
They are both trash. How can we get more people to join Lemmy and the Fediverse?
“The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
Users will search for new places. The fact that we are here is proof.
Build it, and they will come.
Yeah, well, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok are not the net, they are siloes. Discord too. Even Reddit is trying as hard as it can to be insular.
Much of my family doesn’t even know how to use a browser, at least not beyond the bare minimum for work. They probably never will.
I think old school internet folks are underestimating just how much of a grip Big Tech has on users’ attention.l, and their devices.
I think old school internet folks are underestimating just how much of a grip Big Tech has on users’ attention.l, and their devices.
With all sincerity this is fine. Seriously, let’s leave it this way.
As someone who was already around when Eternal September happened the Internet was never for normies and inviting them into the space has destroyed it. Everything that attracts the attention of normies ends up ruined; MySpace, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, Slashdot and so very many more…they are all trashed because when they attracted enough users the commercialization started.
So maybe lets just leave the Fediverse for those “in the know” as long as we can.
I run a forum where the first post was started 23 years ago. Although the activity has drastically gone down during recent years, people still occasionally come by. I’m very happy I kept it up, even though a lot of people switched over to a Discord server.
Recently we had an incident where the sole admin of the Discord server was banned and the whole Discord had to be abandoned and created from scratch. People still keep using this trash! I’m not arguing with them, I’ll just keep an alternative up. One day, when Discord really enshittifies itself to a point where it becomes unuseable, people will be happy for my stubborness. I hope.
(It’s a forum for an obscure space pirate game for the PC - I-War 2. Its first post is here.)
Forums are where I learned literally everything about technology I know now. Every hack, jailbreak, method of bypassing something, building, literally anything I’ve done around my tech hobbies. Pi hole, emulation in the late 90s, how to use Photoshop, how to run Linux from a USB, everything I’ve learned from forums. I’m sad to think that me joining certain discords help deliver the death knell to the concept of forums.
I’m not convinced at least half of those communities trust Reddit and Discord enough to leave forums, but then again I stopped using them mostly because I haven’t had time for those hobbies. My emulation groups are still active on forums, at least.
XDA forum was that for me. Great place to start and then follow links or do more research using the keywords used in the discussions. Just helpful for things like learning if a kernel is potentially fixable or not before buying a second-hand device for a custom rom project. The new look / reorganisation of stuff annoys me though as I find it harder to find stuff than it used to be but that’s because I am using it on autopilot. I guess new users might find it attractive / easy to navigate?
