- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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.
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.
As far as I understand, the sole reason is “everyone else is using it”. Which also seems to be the justification for using Messenger, WhatsApp, X, Instagram et al despite knowing better. It’s hard to be outside of the walled garden if everybody else is inside.
Or does it make it easier to distance yourself from those who eat that garbage up? If you value privacy, are you willing to throw it away for someone else?
All my friends are on discord, if I’m not on discord I can’t really talk to them.
You’re basically going wHy dOnT yOu jUsT cuT oFf YoUr FrIenDs
Use Bridges. If you still need to interact with people on legacy platforms, use bridges.
Matrix make it super easy to interact with people on Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. Set this up for yourself and you get to be the pioneer of the group who can lead them to a better way.
And how is that going to help if you’re the only one in the friends group that uses Matrix? Your messages still end up on discord and half the features won’t work. What do you achieve compared to using a throwaway account?
You will be the only one at first.
If you use a thrrowaway, Discord still keeps their dominant position and have no competition, so they will keep enshitifying.
If you use a bridge, more of their accounts will be just bridging bots, real users will be on the alternative networks and they will be forced to compete.
So what features do these bridges support? Does voice chat work? Can I share screen through them? Can I upload attachments?
I would love to switch to something open source, but communication with other people usually has to have the same thing on both ends.
Discord won because it offered more than mumble/teamspeak and did more and better than skype at the time and looks like even to this day. It’s even better than slack and teams when it comes to resource usage.
I’m pretty that they had valid reasons to have achieved such a dominant position in the market. But we can say the same about every other platform. Facebook, Reddit, Microsoft, Google… All of them were once the underdog who got a good product and leapfrogged the competition. The problem is what they did after to keep this position.
There is no way to get out of this cycle unless we start championing open source solutions, even if technically inferior at first.
The reason open source solutions never end up overtaking these stupid services that come out and then commit suicide every 7 years is because they’re always technically inferior at first, and oftentimes the open source alternative doesn’t even have anything remotely close to the paid service on the roadmap.
Maybe this is because of the issues with scaling up a dev team that’s formerly just been driven entirely by people’s free time, maybe it’s just that the ball never gets rolling to begin with, and only people who are ideologically vested in the idea of open source over even their own efficacy of use are the only people who are going to use these alternatives, who knows. Probably, it’s just that venture capital is usually willing to back the private, “presentable” company, over the open source guys, for pretty obvious reasons.
It’s just short term interest vs. long term interest. In our current economic layout, the former wins pretty consistently. I’d even go so far as to say that the former wins pretty consistently with most kinds of human planning just generally.
I do not have a good solution to this problem.
So far, the only reasons I’ve seen people switch from 1 communication app to another, be it for gaming or just day-to-day messaging is either better features/better quality or what they’ve been using so far turned into shit. And once enough people switch to the new better thing, the rest will follow.
Unfortunately the open source alternative cannot offer either, it’s why they rarely succed.
When whatsapp first started to gain traction it was vastly superior to sms, mms was never really a big thing here.
Discord became king because Microsoft bought skype and made it shit and teamspeak/mumble were not as conveniant.
So next open source thing will have to be at least as good as discord and discord has to become really shitty before anything changes. So far, discord has been anything but flawless, but ads are the first step of the enshitification. People will likely switch to web client + adblock. And when discord decides to block that, that’s when the first massive wave of people will switch to the new big thing and probably never look back.
I am hopeful the next thing will be something open, I am very much into that, I always try to look for alternatives, but average person doesn’t care, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.
I don’t want to self host a bunch of shit and spend a week troubleshooting stuff, no one wants to do that.
edit: plus that way you’re still literally just using discord through a different UI, what’s the point of it anyway
there’s literally one person I ever knew that used Matrix and they fucking sucked
You don’t need to self host, there are servers that do this for you
Judging people based on the messaging platform (or vice-versa) is one of the most shallow things there is nowadays. It’s like girls who say they don’t date anyone who uses Android.
Rossman Repair moved their main group over to Matrix. There are people making the jump.
Or maybe he’s saying your friends are garbage eaters. Or at least content to chow down.
Holy fucking shit please touch at least 1 (one) singular blade of grass I beg you motherfuckers