What are we going to do about it?
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
Edit: thanks to @[email protected] 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
How do we get them to switch to something like Element?
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.
Fun is always great to capture the masses!
thats why I want misskey the emoji reactions to anything are always more fun than just likes
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.
Yeah it’s probably just a client side issue but the OP mentioned Element, specifically 🤷
I just wanted to point out that Element is no fun! No fun at all!
It works and it works great for what it does. Even voice and streaming are great with Element. It’s just got a terrible, no-fun interface and pointless limitations on things like looping videos. You can’t even configure it to make them play properly (as in, automatic and endlessly, the way they were meant to be played! 😤).
Looping videos and animated emojis are super fun ways to chat with people. Even in professional settings! It really breaks up the humdrum and can motivate people to chat and share more.
Element is all serious all the time and going into a chat channel there feels like a chore.
If I’m talking with people about the topical thing which is why I joined a room in the first place, the last thing I want is a looping autoloops fruityloops annoyance. Plus, not autoplaying and autolooping them saves battery.
I hate to break this to you but that means you’re not normal. If all you ever do in chat is talk about serious things that are of such earth-shattering importance that it would be incredibly rude and obnoxious for someone to post a silent looping video you’re not normal, and no fun at all.
The way Element currently works, it’s made for people like you… A strange minority that probably only thinks about “chat” in terms of communicating for an end goal and not for the pleasure of conversation.
Plus all this stuff can be disabled in discord too, if you want to be that serious. There are per-role and per-channel settings that let you disable images, link embedding, external emojis, etc.
It gives you choice. I have no choice in Element, it’s always unfun all the time.
Oh, do cry me a river while you’re at it. Pretty much every community everywhere has a
generalormemesroom, those are for the meme gifs (or wait, these are webp these days…).It is, but Element is still the “Gold standard” Matrix client and the most popular. And if you’re going to create a brand new chat protocol, you should make sure that your flagship client measures up to the competition.
Also, people forget that Discord’s streaming capability is, unfortunately, absolutely top-notch; no other community-screensharing platform has fewer issues, and my friends and I like to watch each other play games often.
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)
I mean, there are quite a few such providers: https://etke.cc/
Fair enough, I do mean moreso for self host in a way, like I’ve seen some game hosting servers, they have a VPS they already paid for and use Pelican or Pterodactyl to host it all, being able to throw matrix into the mix easily would be great in those cases. Seems like this would be a separate situation, which is definitely fine, just not exactly what I meant.
Well if you have a VPS then installing the dockerized Synapse just takes a few minutes.
I’ll have to take a look, I have synapse running but I can’t actually connect to my server at all, need to set up the database and sign-ups and all that shit.
Are you using the dockerized version? If so it sets up (a) database etc.
https://hub.docker.com/r/matrixdotorg/synapse
I was being a bit lazy and tried this first https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=elementsynapse
I do have a few docker stacks running so I should just bite the bullet and go that route instead probably.
(lol didn’t meant to make this chain about my situation)
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.
Your view of Matrix seems a bit weird. AFAIK I can do all the voice/streaming/community in Matrix as well as it’s done in Discord.
Also, no, my server isn’t slow. matrix.org might be, I don’t know.
Matrix is notorious for its poor performance with large/numerous groups. They keep claiming to improve it, but it’s still bad.
I mean, it’s great that it works for you, but be honest: isn’t your tolerance for technological friction a bit higher than the average bear’s? People complain that Mastodon is too hard, and Matrix is ten times worse to sign up for and use.
I hate to say it, but Matrix is never going to be mainstream. Its UX is bad and it seems like it’s too bloated to fix. If I tried to get people to move from Discord to Matrix, they’d never take me seriously again. It was hard enough getting people to move from Facebook Messenger to Signal.
I run a Matrix family instance. My elderly parents use it as their main way of communicating with us.
Sure, I set up their accounts - but all that difficult to use UX seems to have passed them by completely since they’re very happy with it.
Setup is the hardest part. Syncing multiple devices and device migration are also hard. I’ll bet you’re going to act as tech support every time they get a new phone. That’s fine for your family, but it’s hardly going to scale.
The performance issues show up when dealing with large groups syncing between instances. You might just not be using it that way, but that’s what needs to work seamlessly for a viable substitute for Discord.
How large is large? A few hundreds? Not seeing any performance issues.
If we’re talking about Matrix as a Discord alternative, then that would mean thousands of channels, each with hundreds or thousands of users, many with constant activity.
I’m not sure if anybody actually uses Matrix at the scale of the average Discord user. Sliding sync is supposed to help, but I don’t think the Matrix architecture can realistically scale that high.
I have a Matrix server. I’ve also used a half a dozen others. Every one of them you have sit there and stare at it for 5-10 secs and watch the messages roll in every time you open the app.
I can’t speak to your server but I don’t have that issue. It was solved with Sliding Sync quite some time ago.
Sliding sync did nothing.
I’m guessing your issue is in your installation.
You missed the part where I said I’ve also tried a half a dozen different servers. And if they all also screwed up then that is just a different type of problem that still exists.
Sorry but this sounds like a skill issue.
Loading times are a skill issue? You could at least try to make sense while you’re being a dick.
I’ve never had any problems with low speed. Maybe it’s hosting provider?
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.
Isn’t there any solution for that yet?
None of which I know…
Or Matrix?
According to history:
Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable, or…
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.
Discord is going public soon, so start the timer…
Discord is scary popular though, like Facebook popular. I am really scared the enshittification will stick hard, like it has for Facebook.
they already forced ads on discord.
RIP D&D campaign’s chat service 😬
Yeah, so many projects and companies using Discord for support seemed like such a bad idea.
Element is a Matrix client
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 mean drag them from platforms that have a vested interest in keeping them locked in and squashing competitors like the Fediverse?
In platforms that spend billions on engagement optimization algorithms, with the sole purpose of keeping users addicted, basically with government and business landscape backing?
Look, I’m optimistic about the Fediverse, this is a great refuge in the hellscape that is the internet. But you can’t make people want to change. I’ve learned this IRL, but see it with (for example) persecuted people continuing to use Twitter even though its owner basically has a gun to their heads. There’s a big gulf between being a fantastic refuge and taking the internet from Facebook and Google. Even if every phone on the planet had an easy button to switch to Fediverse alternatives in one click… many would not take it, and that’s an utter fantasy.
This pretty much. At some point one has to accept that the people who want to be saved can be saved, and those who don’t, can’t. We shouldn’t (reasonably or not) waste ourselves for the latter in spite of the former.
Matrix/Element has shitty usability and reliability compared to Discord.
For lots of communities, they could use modern forum software like Discourse with better results.
XMPP / Jabber is better.
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.
This isn’t true at all. Most people do not care about privacy; those that do are an extreme minority. You (presumably) and I are part of that minority yet even we still comment here, in a public space. The issue with forums has never been about privacy because most are content with pseudonymity. It is a big mistake to think we need to cater to the extreme minority in the privacy space when tackling big issues that involve a majority who do not care.
That’s why I specifically wrote “completely public” not “private”.
I think most people know that a discord server with a few hundred or thousand members can hardly be considered private. But I can imagine that there are people who don’t want to put it directly online for everybody to find on Google. Not that I like that.
Yeah, I don’t post private shit on forums, I discuss things publically so I can collectively have a conversation with countless other people.
If you want to have a private personal conversation sure use a private chat room, but I need that public space to discuss and learn, active publically accessible forums / lemmy / other equivalent communities are goldmines of information that benefits all.
You can lock down forums to were they’re un searchable unless you have a login. Tons of forums are like this.
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.
Further hampered by the Steam “discussions” that are an incredibly unmoderated cesspit.
This is so true! I always hated the Slack/Discord format and will always do. It’s just a mess.
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
https://matrix.org/docs/communities/moderation/
Tell me about Element. This is the first I’m hearing about it.
https://matrix.org/
Element is the name of the official Matrix client, but there are many others.
It’s a secure messenger
What are its pros and cons? What does it offer that telegram or similar don’t offer? Is it good for group chat? Is it available on multiple platforms?
Telegram is not a secure messenger.
Yes to multiple platforms, groups etc.
So, I’m going to say that I don’t use telegram and only know it as being presented as a secure messenger platform. As a result, I am just asking follow-on questions to further discern what makes Element preferable. And this is no different because I feel like this is exactly the problem lemmy and other platforms like it have. There are people who love them, but when people ask about them, they don’t offer any really informative data to support why they like them.
What makes Element (matrix) a secure platform, and how does that differ from telegram or signal or whatever. Like. What is matrix good at? That’s what I’m asking. Why suggest it over something else?
Matrix is a decentralized platform with the same level of security/encryption as Signal. Being decentralized you can run your own server, and chat with others on other servers.
It supports groups, voice, streams etc - similar to Discord/Slack/Teams etc.
Open source. Multiple different server and client implementations. Mobile platforms, “all” operating systems, and with bridges so you can have your IRC, Telegram, Slack, FB Messenger etc channels go to your Matrix account/server.
If you are against a change in the first place you won’t switch, anyway.
Please, ask.
Simple. It’s fully free and open source. The server as well as the apps. Therefore, you can trust it as a privacy friendly solution a heck of a lot more, than any other solution like WhatsApp.
Signal is secure as well, but the server is centralized.
And Telegram is not considered secure because of their implementation and shady practices.
I did ask. Why is it like pulling teeth to get answers? I don’t use WhatsApp. Never got on that bandwagon. Something being free and open source doesn’t mean it’s good. Something being trustworthy from your standpoint doesn’t explain why it’s trustworthy to a layman who doesn’t understand why you think FOSS = trustworthy or good. It’s FOSS and you’ve looked at the code and found it to live up to its claims of being secure?
I’m not sure where the hostility is coming from here but I’m more pointing out that I can use a search engine to find out about matrix to some extent, but people who use the platform and have a better understanding of its pros and cons have valuable information to pass on. But when you ask them about it they’re full of recommendations but those recommendations often don’t have much in the way of information about what’s good about the user experience or feature set or even the code. I’m trying to show that the particulars of why you like or prefer something matter.
True. But it’s verifiable.
Popular FOSS projects get audited all the time. Heck, there is even automated software to detect anomalies in code changes.
Auditability is the only reason why you can only really trust open source but not closed source. With proprietary software you’ll always have to trust the developers to not do something shady and are competent enough. With open source you can simply verify it.
Also being open source is what usually makes popular FOSS more stable and secure than most closed counterparts. A LOT of people donate their work and since it’s completely public, most want their contributions to be in good shape. If only a few or no other people see your code, you are tempted to write bad code a lot more. This of course is not always the case but more often than not.
Also in most developed countries it’s illegal to purposefully introduce manipulated code. And I don’t think most people would risk punishment for that if literally anybody could find it.
Sure. But most people don’t care about the details, unfortunately. In the case of messaging they just want to communicate. And if someone asks me, which platform I’d recommend I will always start with the most secure and private.