For a while now there has been a lot of arguing over Discord versus good old IRC. Clearly from a privacy and Free Software perspective, IRC is much better. Discord is proprietary, cannot be self-hosted, and has been proven to mine data for advertisers and CIAniggers.
From that view, it's clear why many would have an issue with Discord, but in order to deal with it, IRC people have to understand first what draws people to Discord in the first place.
Upon analysis, it appears that this may be in part a conflict between the Unix Philosophy and the exact opposite of that. What is IRC? IRC is a protocol for text chatrooms. You can also have private messages. It's small and lightweight, with various clients. What is Discord? Discord is everything and the kitchen sink. Discord has text chatrooms. It has private messages. It has avatar pictures. You can upload files. You can have an account with a friends list. You can have voice chat. You get to scroll back and see everything that ever happened in the chatroom before you logged on. Rooms can have pinned messages. There's invite links. You can have probably a billion other things I can't even think of right now. It's made in bloated electron.
A common retort to this is that if you want voice chat, use mumble. If you want chat history, set up a bouncer. et cetera. One tool for one job. But Discord users seem to like the 'integrated' approach. They don't want to have to set up all these other protocols and daemons and stuff. Discord does it all for them and makes it all easy and centralized.
Hopefully this sheds some light on the situation. Perhaps the solution is to convince the public to adopt the "do one thing and do it well" approach, or perhaps IRC should be changed to be/replaced with a new Free Software solution that appeals more to the younger generation's sensibilities. Whatever the case, let's discuss.
Discord is terrible nobody even plays games on it in any of the servers so I quit. Stupid dramas and power tripping faggots does not a good community make
Josiah Flores
The "do one thing" with ALL that Discord offers is just something the average user will go "but discord just does it without having to go through the entire setup" and, even if it's not a problem for someone like me to set that stuff up, I have non-tech-oriented friends that will certainly not switch from something that is chat, voice call, video call, file sharing, screen sharing and SO many more things already only to use a different software for every single one of those things. Which means that so that I can keep in contact with my friends in a meaningful way, I gotta use Discord.
What we need is a FOSS solution that does everything and MORE than discord and it does it more efficiently, or else no one will stop using it. However, with ALL that discord does, that's not gonna be easy.
Noah Fisher
Same reason why people use Facebook. Doesn't make Facebook any better.
Anthony Mitchell
>late to the party boomer doesn't know why discord spiked in popularity people liked it because it was so easy to use. creating a temporary server and making people join was effortless, people didn't need to register (in the beginning) or download anything, most people just had cookie bound account and registration didn't require email. the easy access is what hooked people and made it popular.
I dont really care so much about any of that as much as I hate discord for being full of faggots and ruining communities every single time they move to it.
Blake Hughes
>TL;DR Normalfags are lazy and don't care about privacy. Truly shocking news, desu.
>Discord will sell all of my furry larps to advertisers Are anti-discordfags that deluded? What makes you think they need to even make money at this point?
Julian Gomez
>What makes you think they need to even make money because they're a fucking company
it's just another symptom of the new generation that has absolutely no sense of privacy. "smart"phones have been eroding any sense of privacy for the last few decades, and normie children simply assume this is the way it has always been and must always been.
I started using Discord recently for a game that i have been playing for around 12 years now. For said game, everybody used to use IRC, but eventually everyone slowly migrated to discord. I finally got around to using it myself and it wasnt as bad as i was expecting.
For the faggots in here claiming that the Discord community is cancerous or normies ruined it or whatever, youre not wrong but you are just showing how young and stupid you actually are because the IRC community was the exact same way.
Elijah Adams
A company that has raised $130m from investors. They could sustain themselves with investor money for decades at this point so why would they sell data to advertisers when it's completely worthless?
>so why would they sell data to advertisers when it's completely worthless? Because money.
Parker Fisher
so now investors just throw money like that? ROI my man, ROI
Adrian Scott
>You get to scroll back and see everything that ever happened in the chatroom before you logged on. bouncers have been around, that also does not encourage much activity. >Rooms can have pinned messages. topic. >There's invite links. irc://#[email protected], you can also setup a link in kiwiirc pointing to the channel
Gabriel Morgan
Most platforms are bullshit filled with circlejerk and drama and I avoid those too. There are only a few IRCs I still visit because it can be just as bad. It's just that discord is new and hip and discordfags are going everywhere huffing their own farts and trying to convert everyone that makes them more obnoxious. I hate facebook and skype and many other social platforms for much of the same bullshit, its just that their users arent going around televangelizing all over the place.
Matthew Gutierrez
Maybe the one tool for one job philosophy can coexist with the pleb desire for convenience above all else with sanely-defaulted and sophisticated install options or something
Liam Howard
> you are just showing how young and stupid you actually are because the IRC community was the exact same way.
Fuck THIS. Discord is just a fucking platform, it's the users that fuck everything up.
Joshua Lee
>voice chat with one person is the same as a voice chatroom
Lincoln Scott
Nah I still don't buy it. Their CTO even said the rumours were entirely unjustified and cleared up any misconceptions about the value of data but you never see that posted in anti-discord threads now do you?
Owen Howard
Only if they stopped mining the data and selling them to the highest bidders.
Jackson Brown
every single discussion on "why don't people use [A] instead of [B] for communication???" is always the same fucking shit nothing will change until you can have A users talk with B users. We don't need free open source software clients to win over the normalfags we need free open source protocolsthat can be integrated together into the same client, or distributed across multiple programs and applications. we need to win over the companies, not the users, and right now the only way that could happen is if somehow the government stepped in, which isn't exactly ideal
these threads are always moot
Alexander Sanders
the unix philosophy does not filter down into GUI applications the way you think it does. it's an architectural consideration. having a single application that orchestrates external tools using a single GUI is perfectly in line with the unix philosophy. in fact a hypothetical GUI does one thing (provides a convenient interface to some set of functionality) and, hopefully, does it well.
you could clone discord but have it architecturally be in line with the unix philosophy while still presenting all the same integrated functionality. the unix philosophy does not mean "you can only do one sort of thing using any given piece of software".
this is all irrelevant anyway.
Aaron Wilson
>The CIAnigger said he's not doing the thing so clearly it must be true! So one IRC client has hacked together these features in some way. So anyone not using this particular client will be left out, as these features are not a part of the IRC standard. Someone already pointed out the difference between 1on1 voice calls and discord's voice chatrooms, but i'd like to question on the buffer saving point. Does that also save messages from when you weren't online, or does it only save history of chats that you had while the client is actively up? Because Discord saves not only the private messages you got while away, but also any and all conversations in the chatrooms themselves that happened while you were gone.
Brayden Barnes
>Perhaps the solution is to convince the public to adopt the "do one thing and do it well" approach, or perhaps IRC should be changed to be/replaced with a new Free Software solution that appeals more to the younger generation's sensibilities.
This is silly, are you saying that the solution is to "change the user to fit the tool" rather than the other way around? This is why FOSS junk has barely functional UIs and inpenetrable or non existent documentation. You can't expect every person to have the time and energy and knowhow to set up three billion protocols on their computer, each having their own stuck up community that demands that they "git gud" instead of making their tool better.
Discord works for a lot of people, so a lot of people use it. Just like all the previous tools worked, so people used them. You want more people to access your tool? You make your tool more accessible.
Ryder Peterson
Fair enough. That's why I included that as a possibility in the post. You even quoted the part where I said that.
Connor Richardson
not to mention nothing will ever gain mass traction if it requires too much intervention from a user, relative to the standard in the era. this is where IRC clients fall flat on their arse because they're either completely spartan command lines or they're retardedly "helpful" and stick a "convenient" list of networks, and then channels, in your face.
every fucking time i teach some friend or family member how to get on IRC, they're gone forever as soon as their client is terminated. this is because IRC clients are just trying to clone mIRC, poorly. bad discoverability, no persistence, too much painstaking intervention.
if people want IRC to steal back people from discord, they're going to have to write a client that is exceptionally user friendly and has some features that are frankly unheard of in an IRC client, such as parsing image links to embed them in chat.
David Flores
>But Discord users seem to like the 'integrated' approach. They don't want to have to set up all these other protocols and daemons and stuff. Discord does it all for them and makes it all easy and centralized.
You are legitimately autistic if you need this spelled out to you as the reason why Discord is the most popular chat client or why Windows is the most popular OS. People who don't know about computers and don't care to learn about them will flock to whatever requires the least effort to use.
You're also autistic if you think this is a bad thing.
Julian Evans
>Discord explicitly confirms in its privacy policy (discordapp.com/privacy) that it collects the following information:
> · IP Address > · Device UUID > · User's e-mail address > · All text messages > · All images > · All VOIP data (voice chat) > · Open rates for e-mail sent by Discord
>Discord does not explictly confirm that it collects this information, but still collects it:
> · All programs that are running on your computer
You'd also need to solve the whole issue with hosting as well. One big reason to choose discord atm over something like mumble is because there's no hosting costs associated with renting or hosting your own mumble server. A distributed solution that just werks would be ideal, but that "just werks" part is going to be tricky no matter how you slice it.
Isaac Harris
btw the Device UUID is a browser fingerprint (Discord is of course a copy of Chrome) and I believe this is how they share information with other companies without any say from you.
Levi Gomez
>People use discord for anything other than doing bydeo gaymes shit with their old friends who used to play wow / runescape and other shit like that.
It's your own fault if you're putting sensitive information and shit you want to be kept private in there you retards.
Mason Sanchez
Gamers truly are gullible retards
Caleb Hill
> >You'd also need to solve the whole issue with hosting as well. One big reason to choose discord atm over something like mumble is because there's no hosting costs associated with renting or hosting your own mumble server. A distributed solution that just werks would be ideal, but that "just werks" part is going to be tricky no matter how you slice it. Maybe it could be decentralized, in which servers are hosted by everyone in said server
Luke Myers
Matrix does everything discord does, but without the spying and drama.
Gavin Brown
But does it have le epic gaymur memez? xD
Thomas Rogers
No, I haven't come across that bug on Matrix yet.
Evan Perez
Except private direct messaging
Wyatt Sanders
discord blows and in terms of quality irc was just as bad the conversations are always the fucking same >epic memes >power tripping >guys sex >guys drugs >guys politics from what I can tell hundreds/thousands of people idle in multiple discords because of fear of missing out and yet anything interesting or worthwhile spreads across the internet in minutes so what's the fuckingpoint
Interesting. Perhaps that is the key. Abandoning the IRC protocol in favor of matrix. I know Riot is quite featureful, and has an aesthetic that is somewhat similar to discord and very similar to Slack.
Ian Thompson
it's a really obvious datamining botnet. it was always obvious, it was shilled so hard everwhere and the viral marketing wasn't even subtle. If a community uses a discord I stop participating in that community because clearly they are below even my rather basic level of intelligence. How dumb can you be to not notice all those features and integration come at the price of your personal security and freedom? Why would you run a program on your computer that does not actually run on your computer?!
David Fisher
e2ee too? looking better by the minute
Christian Kelly
Not using IRC with bouncer. Want profile pic?Use XMPP
William Lewis
I assume "Not using IRC with bouncer" was meant to be >Not using IRC with bouncer and your second statement might as well be >want IRC to have profile pics? use an entirely different protocol that also more than likely lacks many of discord's features Yeah matrix seems like the better option here
Christopher Sanders
People just need to be educated about privacy online, not everyone is born smart like you
It doesn't have an discord looking client so normans will never go for it
Josiah Bailey
I literally just mentioned Riot.
Joshua Walker
Riot looks terrible.
Dominic Bell
Does it? I really can't tell half of these electron flatshit UIs apart. I guess it could use a dark theme.
Grayson Morris
Use Matrix! Matrix general when?
Adrian Phillips
Yes it does, and the dark theme is actually even worse than the default. Apparently there was supposed to be a makeover but that was back in May and nothing has happened since. If only Nheko could get it's game on
Asher Gutierrez
As soon as they replace their slow as fuck backend And maybe some better clients
which free instant messaging tool provide the "user-friendliness" that is needed by non-techaholic users?
Cameron Robinson
You know they're invested by Tencent, a Chinese company successfully created a business that worth trillion based on a software similar to Discord?
Dominic King
>need to even make money Money is nice. People like money. They aren't running a fucking charity.
Jonathan Hill
>But Discord users seem to like the 'integrated' approach. They don't want to have to set up all these other protocols and daemons and stuff. Discord does it all for them and makes it all easy and centralized. Wow, really? You needed to make a post about this? Isn't this common fucking knowledge? I have set up an IRC bouncer on a VPS but I wouldn't do something similar again for anything. Why the fuck do I have to setup a server, compile ZNC, read a guide on how to configure it, generate SSL keys, and configure all my clients on 3 platforms (windows, linux and android). It's a basic fucking text chat, why does it need so much manual labor in order to have the most basic necessities such as history and remembering my channels. And it is clumsy as fuck to use. I need to have a different connection to the bouncer for each network and most clients don't know how to parse the history replay which ZNC sends when connecting to it. It feels like a hack. Bouncers try to improve the most basic protocol in the most hackiest manner without bothering to develop any standards. When will freefags get their heads out their ass and realize that ease of use, intuitive interfaces and powerful standards are absolutely needed to make passable software? You are the lazy cunts, happy to live in your own shit and hacking shit together to make shit that has a different shape. It's still shit. Get your head out of your ass and make something good.
Dylan Jackson
Bluntly put, but I do agree. We need to get off this IRC meme and move to something modern like matrix.
Joshua Lewis
It's not that nobody bothers to develop standards, it's that everyone does. They all think they know best so nobody will submit to any standard but their own. While functionally equivalent to a lack of a standard it is much harder to address because any attempt to do so typically results in n+1 standards.
Isaac Brown
maybe standards are just a meme?
Jack Morales
>tfw a community I've been part of for years decided to murder their IRC channel recently in favor of using Discord 100% I got pretty fucking tilted
Oliver Robinson
>being such a lonely faggot to care about public discord servers Ever heard of friends ? You know that discord userbase consist of small 10 persons average servers right? And that no one unironically care about your ebin subreddit server? Is it too complicated to understand that I can't convince 30+ people to install irc and teamspeak and then pay money for servers hosting when they can just leave a browser tab open?
Jose Wood
>the solution is to convince the public to adopt the "do one thing and do it well" approach To the average user, Discord does this in that it provides a more or less comprehensive solution for communicating online.
Beyond privacy, which I agree is a major concern, for the average user the FOSS solutions you present only exceed Discord in ecoteric realms that present no major benefits, while introducing complexity in terms of both setup and segregating software functionalities between programs that in many cases have a stronger intuitive use argument for being together and not separated.
Daniel Davis
>perhaps IRC should be changed to be/replaced with a new Free Software solution that appeals more to the younger generation's sensibilities Matrix/Riot exists which is a FOSS botnet-free way of messaging with the same functionality as Discord. Only differnce is they didn't spend 28 million dollars worth of loans from dataming companies on advertisement, so they're getting off a little slower. Normies probably won't switch until Discord gets sold to a chinese scammer (which happened to all the discord devs previous projects) but Riot is gaining popularity anyway. If you care about your privacy, tell your friends to install Riot and just leave behind the cancerous public discords. There's really no reason to let the content of your messages be sold to advertisers in 2010 + 8.
I like discords for few servers reason. One of it has many great artist like Sinensian, gipsysquid, scifijackrabbit etc So i am happy to be able to get invitelink to it.
You left out how discord stores all your shit and then, if its jucy enough, sells it to the splc who gives it to antifa who harasses your employer and makes you unemployable.
Don't use it.
Jackson Bennett
I wonder if discord will start doing that jew shit like slack where they start to charge you if your log gets too long.
Im sure they cant stay 100% free for ever just by selling data.
Samuel Lewis
>Im sure they cant stay 100% free for ever just by selling data. that's why they're gonna sell stickers yes, that is their official business plan
Joshua Nelson
Got an infographic?
Logan Kelly
Riot.im > Discord
Lincoln Fisher
>What we need is a FOSS solution that does everything and MORE than discord and it does it more efficiently, or else no one will stop using it. However, with ALL that discord does, that's not gonna be easy. Is it seriously that hard to copy literally every aspect of Discord but make it self hostable? I'm not a programmer so idk, but from what I've seen, FOSS software projects don't fail because of lack of development, they fail because FOSS developers have no fucking clue what people want. People want Discord, Discord has a great UI and amazing mobile apps, Discord has features people use, Discord is easy to set up. If a FOSS alternative copied Discord completely feature for feature, it would be easy to get people to switch.
If it's "just discord", what motive would they have to switch? They already have discord itself. I think Riot/Matrix will be the future. It combines a featureset that will appeal to discord folks with an aesthetic and design that will appeal to Slack folks (aka, no gaymur memes in the loading screens). I checked it out for a few minutes and apparently it has video calls? that's a feature neither of the other two have. Could be an attractive feature.
Josiah Martin
This. Everyone shitting on Discord users are contrarians too underaged to remember what IRC was like in, say, 2004. Powertripping ops, drama that leads to chansplits which escalates to netsplits, rainbow ASCII spam, CTRL-G spam, we had everything. The only difference is that we weren't being datamined as hard and had to install a client to chat.
Dylan Thomas
Discord does have video calls now. I know a lot of people that don't like the privacy invasion that Discord does, but the alternatives all either are harder to set up, or don't have the same features/UI. How is the Riot mobile app? The Discord mobile app is pretty fucking slick, honestly one of the best mobile chat apps I've used.
Jason Watson
The userbase of this program is cancer. Trust me, as someone who's used it for quite some time and been in a couple of servers, the people who use this are generally obnoxious.
Jason White
Yes. The data sure is worthless. That's why they make sure to index it in bulk to make profiles on people, just in case that totally worthless data is needed.
Gavin Morris
That's because the barrier to entry is incredibly low: click on a URL and chat away. Such a model has risks and attracting absolute shitters is one of them.
Matthew Jenkins
Ironically, that's really the only thing I like about IRC. How easy it is to chat on it. You can do it completely accountless. Just pick a screen name and start chatting! Discord kinda lets you do this I think, but I think some places will block you from chatting if you don't have an account. Having an account is nice, but there's a certain appeal to having the option of accountless connection
Gavin Lee
Yeah, but at least in IRC, you have people that are generally friendly and actually wanna talk and discuss things with you. When I came on discord, I was arguing about circumcision with someone in his server and he was like "well, you're stupid" and just kicked me. Discord is filled with too many of these power tripping faggots who wanna run their server more than they actually wanna talk about something. That's at least what I feel, maybe I went on the wrong servers, idk.
Jordan Thomas
You don't need an account to chat on Discord either. By default servers don't require an account, you just pick a name and go. It's actually just like IRC except it works right in the browser.
Eli Davis
In the heyday of IRC it was the exact same bullshit. Connect, say shit, mods shit on you, argue back, get KB'd.
Luke Diaz
Hosting mumble is dead simple and can be done for free pretty much or under $15/yr (think the cheapest plan on Ramnode, or AWS free tier), or using services like hyper.sh to just maintain a single container.
Austin Powell
Discord already has video calls and screensharing. And it should not be "just discord" don't miss the MORE on >What we need is a FOSS solution that does everything and MORE than discord and it does it more efficiently, So what should be done is not just copy discord, but copy it and then ADD more stuff so discord users have reasons to change.
Kevin Adams
Did you not read my post? that's what I was saying.
Luis Flores
i just can't stand the communities that discord creates
Christian Garcia
Does matrix allow this too?
Samuel Rodriguez
Sorry, it wasn't really clear. It seemed like you were just talking about Riot. Which could be good if it gets more functionality that the average user is actually interested in, since the average user doesn't really care about FOSS, only about being able to create servers and join them and share files, and video calls and all the shit discord does. Really just a discord clone that also does what discord doesn't is what we need, but no one seems like they want to support this, most of them are just like "go back to irc, use other software for the other things you want to do".
Jeremiah Watson
OP the unix philosophy is a dumb meme and you should feel bad about parroting it. Even loonix developers have realized. That said, it is nice how simple IRC is, but it targets different people.
