The voice chat rooms reminds me exactly of this program called Ventrillo or “vent” as we used to call it back when I was in high school. I’m officially old!

https://www.ventrilo.com/

That's exactly it yes. Discord is ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak, but hosted and with IRC channels.

A lot of people make comparisons to vent/mumble/teamspeak/irc, but I think Discord is quite a bit different.

I used to hang out on vent/mumble all the way from ~2008 to ~2015 when I switched to Discord. While voice chat is great:

1. Hanging out in voice chat for hours and hours can be exhausting

2. There's no history, so it's hard to have conversation/hang out with people who are busy

3. #2 leads to a lot of FOMO especially in younger people

Whereas on Discord, I can leave messages for people, have a channel where I post funny stuff throughout the day, share music and videos. I can have multiple threaded conversations, have multiple servers each with many channels, etc.

All of this was technically achievable with irc and advanced enough client/plugins, but it surely wasn't accessible to everyone, and definitely not free.

Obviously discord is different than only mumble alone. Discord is not very different from mumble + IRC, which is what we are comparing to and what I said in my post. IRC of course does have history if you keep your client open which most people do.

Most organized gaming groups used mumble/ts/vent and some combination of IRC and forums. The only difference here is that they're physically in the same app, and of course, there's embedded stuff which is just generally technical iteration (some IRC clients had it). Otherwise IRC always had channels and DMs and mentions and multiple servers. Only setting up your own server wasn't free -- you could easily hop on any network and create as many private channels for you and your friends as you wanted. Yes, older technology wasn't as accessible but at the core it's the same feature set.

> keep your client open which most people do.

[citation needed]

I know very few people who leave their computer on 24/7. I agree forums is actually probably closer to replicating what Discord has, those were definitely a big part of pre-discord communities.

And yes, my main point was that it has become a lot more accessible and free, leading it to blow up.

Nearly everyone I know has a 24/7 irc bouncer that is connected and stores logs. It does indeed raise the complexity of using irc but you can bet for sure that some subcultures on irc behave this way

I still use mumble

Hosting Mumble for coworkers since Teams feels sluggish and monitored. We could use both simultaneously but Teams takes exclusive control of the microphone... so they actively Extinguished that too.

On macOS, You can try to prevent this by going to midi audio setup, create an aggregate device, add the microphone to it, and then use the aggregate device in teams. This also has the benefit that Teams will not automatically adjust the gain for you.

Many hosting providers specifically disallow hosting of things such as IRC as that protocol has been used by botnets.

okay oldie... when I was in high school if you wanted to talk to your friends while playing games with them you both needed a second phone line, so your 56k modems could use the other line to play Doom

My first modem was 1200 baud. I remember looking with a jealous eye at my friends USRobotics Courier HST, with its awesome looks and blazing 14.4k speeds. I believe it set him back around $1,200 1989 dollars, or about $2,600 in today's terms. He could download a compressed 1.44MB floppy disk image with the latest Leisure Suit Larry game from one of several exclusive pirate BBS'es in just around 15 minutes (as long as mom didn't pick up the phone). Good times.

USR HST was very robust against phone pick-ups, it would quietly blink and resume working as soon as the annoyed would-be caller replaced the handset!

I spent $400 in hard-earned teenage income on a USR refurb and never felt buyer's remorse.

I totally forgot about this issue with dial-up modems. The good ones would temporarily pause a connection when someone picked up the phone and the cheapos would instantly lose the connection. My family was too poor to afford to phone lines and it made me value time online (also made me have to use the Internet at odd hours when people were unlikely to call the house).

Why would you subject yourself to that? Just have them come over and help you carry your heavy tower and even heavier CRT to LAN at their house, even if it’s a mile away (me and friends literally did this in Fremont, CA - though I believe it might have been a bit less than a mile)

I hosted a LAN party for my friends because I wanted to practice setting up a small network. It’s funny to think that was once semi-challenging.

The “DHCP server” for us was a sheet of paper where you’d write down the IP you were going to ifconfig.

Wingate memories coming back

The pain inflicted when someone had to leave the LAN and the BNC chain had to be broken and reconfigured....

Or... Someone getting totally owned in Doom cracking it and disconnecting a terminator.

Great times.

Not funny. Major PTSD coming back!!!

But then it would take 4 hours to figure out Windows networking in your computer. (Been there done that)

Too hard to get a ride on a random weekday night before any of us could drive :D

Yeah, my parents refused to buy a second line so this is what we did.

We stole an insanely long ethernet cord from school and hung it over our joined back fence. Lag? Ha! Broadband sort of existed then, just not in rural Australia, so we improvised.

When more people got PCs we would just carry our computers around the block. CRTs were not light, the advent of the lighter weight LCD was more pragmatic to us than to most I suspect!

Did you have to reconnect to EarthLink multiple times until it gave you 56k instead of 24 or 32? That was living wild baby!!

We didn't have Earthlink, we would dial the other person's modem directly and play Doom 1v1.

At my high school, our CS lab had two Teletype terminals that were connected to a remote HP minicomputer over 110 baud (that's 10 chars/sec) acoustic couplers/modems. You had to dial the computer's number then put the handset into a foam-lined wooden box and close the lid. To upload a game, like Star Trek, we punched the game onto paper tape while not connected, then fed the paper tape back through once we got connected. Getting a connection could take 10-15 minutes of manually redialing after getting a busy signal because the service was so oversubscribed.

Our "high speed" terminal was a 300 baud (30 CPS) CRT.

These 3 terminals were shared by about 15 kids per class.

When I was in high school if you wanted to talk to your friends you'd meet at a parking lot and do burnouts.

Were your friends burnouts in O shapes while your burnouts were in a D shape? :)

Roger Wilco

I bet you could have fit both on the same connection.

Ventrillo ended up being the defacto voice chat for years in the gaming community I was exposed to.

I think the first big one for voice chat in my friendship circle was "XFire" but when we started having bigger groups it didn't cut it anymore and we all moved to vent!

I remember I first heard about Discord as a Vent/Teamspeak/Raidcall competitor, and I'm pretty sure that was intended from the beginning.

I remember this too but we stuck to Mumble because it was lighter on system resources

Yeah, exactly. Their old motto was "Ditch Skype and Teamspeak" back when they were first emerging.

there's some incredible vent trolling content on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5AkIfgioA4

Shoutout to VideoCompiler if he's still alive. His Ventrilo Harassment videos are still golden.

Wow, that was some wholesome laughter. Brought me back to my high school and college days goofing around on vent.

Vi sitter i Ventrilo och spelar DotA

The vent join sound is burned into my brain.

pff in my days we used MSN messenger for friends and IRC for girls

"girls"

I [and household] are now in a similar situation.

At first, students got to use what they were already use to, but when the pandemic got painful and everybody flooded to online, thing went crazy. Discord is freaking enormous in that area rn. Servers for High school classes, university cohorts (ie. CS'24), university programs (ie. Electrical Engineering), There is even a course I am taking at uni where we have an official server with the teaching team, profs, auth with uni credentials, and a freaking ad-hoc ticketing system.

It is bonkers how much systematization is done through these bots.

Haha love how people have rediscovered the functionality and joys of IRC and the like!

Totally... If you enjoy the text/irc aspect, I welcome you to check out https://sqwok.im, a new realtime public discussion site very much inspired by growing up using aol chat/irc/icq/aim and others. I think we live at an amazing juncture of technology and ideas, where excellent communication software like irc that was always limited by it's own access requirements (install something, client, server, huh?), can now be made accessible to the masses, unlocking and hopefully creating entirely new experiences for people to enjoy!

I'll be doing a livestream on AWS Twitch on Thursday discussing Sqwok.im if you're interested check it out.

Or, if you enjoy the text/irc aspect, irc is still very much a thing!

Certainly agree! but it's still limited in use by design.. with Sqwok I'm trying to build something that anyone can use without any technical knowledge at all - Just open the url.

I'm on freenode daily :D

Wow, I visited the site. This is a super cool idea/concept! I hope it takes off and good luck!

thank you! appreciate the comment

Sqwok looks amazing :)

thank you! let me know if you have any questions

One thing that would probably be welcome is some builtin support for threads.

On the Python discord for example, there is a system of help channels which get assigned to the first person talking in it and returned to the pool after 30min of inactivity or once the problem has been solved. A bot keeps a few channels in a "free" pool, marks some as "occupied", and moves the surplus to a "dormant" section for UX purposes. Newcomers often get confused and ask questions in already-occupied channels, etc.

Bots make this possible but it's never as good as the threading that exists in Slack or Zulip. I'm sure any sizeable organization (like a University) is running into this as well.

Personally I think threads ruin conversation flow. If you want to have an in-depth conversation about a topic limited to a few people, you should either open up another channel or do a DM. Just my opinion, but I hate Slack threads and love Discord's system.

The point is not to break a single conversation into multiple threads, it is to split a single conversation away from the other conversations happening simultaneously in your #help channel. Effectively creating a channel, without having to bug a mod to get a new channel for your 5min conversation.

That is impossible in Discord as up to 250 channels per guild are permitted at a time.

Slack became a much worse experience when they added full threads IMO. Discord's new approach of allowing you to reply to a specific message, but not outright fork the channel, is a much better compromise.

this - Discord's approach of allowing you to reply, but having the message show up in the regular conversation flow keeps the feel of an actual conversation.

Screenshot of a reply: https://support.discord.com/hc/article_attachments/360099599... (from https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360057382374-R...)

You are assuming that the traffic is low enough that "a single conversation flow" is happening, or (like in your example) that multiple people reply to a single post.

If you have enough people talking past each other, even with the reply feature, it becomes a huge mess. Having a way to only show the messages that are replying to you while you troubleshoot a specific issue is what a thread view enables.

Having just migrated from Zulip to Slack, I find Slack's threading model really bad. Discord is a little better, but still fragmented over time in a busy channel. Zulip has the best implementation I've seen for putting semi-related topics together without getting drowned out.

Surprisingly, Slack's sales seem unaware of Zulip from what I heard from some colleagues so I doubt Slack is going to steal Zulip's (much better) threading model any time soon.

How would you cope with 100 guilds limit?

As a 29 year old, similar (to a lesser extent) deal. I've used Discord a huge amount over the past year, mostly for gaming but sometimes while playing different games at the same time/just hanging out.

As a 43 year old, I’ve been using Discord to collaborate within a small developer community across Europe and the United States (I’m in Australia). Since the pandemic, we’ve done more than code — supporting one another in our various COVID circumstances.

Teamspeak and Ventrilo were used similarly back in the 00s. I was part of different gaming communities and people would hang out in channels and hop in and out. The only difference was we had to use forums for chatting and posting images.

> Teamspeak, which has other problems

like server admins viewing the IP addresses of other users in the server, if that counts

The employees and their contractors and related at Discord corporate can see your IP address too and much more. Luckily it won't be Microsoft owning it as they could correlate against their software empire too.

But Discord does have significant profit motive to collect information about you. In fact, their entire proprietary protocol, client, and restriction of clients is based around ensuring this.

He wasn't talking about mass data collection used to sell advertising, he was talking about a the admin of a server with maybe a dozen users having access to his IP, which potentially could be used for DDOS or geolocation. The kind of 'data collection' which could have visible impacts upon his life.

And I am saying that there are human people working at companies too. The only difference is that if they cause you indirect harm their legal liability is abstracted enough you can't do anything.

They're not talking about Discord and their employees having your IP, they're talking about teamspeak server admins being able to see it and using it for nefarious means. On Discord, just because someone joins a server you created doesn't mean you get their IP. With teamspeak being decentralized, your IP is sent to admins which are much closer and interested in the same topics you are, so if you make them mad, they have the ability to retaliate by performing a DDOS or geolocating you to expose your location. With Discord, there's trust that Discord isn't going to suddenly make your IP address public for some reason - even if you make an employee mad, them accessing your IP just to leak it would be jeopardizing their cushy VC-backed job all just to 'expose' someone on the internet.

Discord has the same issue, essentially everyone who works in a somewhat technical role has access to their moderation tools that have zero auditing and reports of abuse (reading people's DMs "as a joke") are not uncommon.

Discord also refuses to delete any data you give them. Deleting a Discord account sets a lockout flag, changes the nickname to "Deleted User" and resets the avatar to default. That's it. They don't even bother setting the user ID on your messages to something common, to a bot (and anyone who turns on developer mode) all your messages still contain your Discord ID.

I also learned from personal experience that they ignore any requests for deleting data coming in via GDPR. These people need to get slapped in a lawsuit.

> Discord has the same issue, essentially everyone who works in a somewhat technical role has access to their moderation tools that have zero auditing and reports of abuse (reading people's DMs "as a joke") are not uncommon.

This is the first time I hear of this, can you please link a source?

The Discord subreddit has a few threads about this, but it has always been an open secret back when the Discord Developers guild still existed. I'm pretty sure it got axed because some staff members got too memey about abusing their database access.

So Discord has the same issue should be Discord had the same issue - I also can't find any mention of such abuse of power. The only thing is supposedly this Trust & Safety employee that revoked the vanity url /furry to give it to another server[0], and T&S needs full database access like that for obvious reasons (even if this employee did abuse it).

0: https://discord.news/trust-and-scam/

That's one incident. I'm talking about a pattern of behavior where staff members act unprofessionally. That includes telling your users "I can just change your ID lol" even if they don't end up doing it.

Discord didn't fire the person who was joking about database edits the most (or anyone to my knowledge). All they did was close the outlet for staff to show their badge off and brag about it. That doesn't fix anything, my assumption is that this is still going in.

> I'm talking about a pattern of behavior where staff members act unprofessionally.

Could you please provide some sources? As the other poster noted this is the first time we hear of this. Would be keen on knowing more

As long as you provide yours about Teamspeak servers.

I dont believe I spoke about nor said anything about Teamspeak. What are you referring to?

However, individually deleting messages using their API does delete them from their servers[0].

[0]: https://blog.discord.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-mess...

It does, but that is not always an option. What if you shared personal information on a server you no longer have access to? Your only option is to wait a week for your data export and then wait another 2-3 weeks for a support ticket to get to the stage of threatening Discord into actually removing individual messages. What if you're being stalked? What if you said something incridebly dumb on a server you assumed was limited to very specific people? A month to removal is untenable. Discord needs searchable dashboard that allows one-click removal.

Discord considers all servers public, not because they actually are (many are for friend groups or even classes etc.), but because that'd mean your consent for keeping any message you send is in question whenever someone is invited to a guild you were not expecting there. Their argument against removal is always "following public conversations is in the public interest". Any European court would tell them to fuck off if someone finally sued them over ignoring GDPR requests, because in the end most Discord servers (absolute numbers, not by volume) can not be considered public.

Not only that, Discord communities are all invite-only, even the discoverable ones are technically invite-only (discoverability process of Discord requires a permanent invite).

> Discord needs searchable dashboard that allows one-click removal.

The thing is there is no user→message mappings stored in their database. The data structures are designed for message→user traversal. Nothing like Facebook's user activity log.

at least on large servers, the search indexes are reasonably up to date and include user IDs.

(on small servers they're unfortunately on-demand, but you could still store a set of all guilds a user ever joined and build an overview)

I tried the data export, but did not get any of my messages from the guilds I am no more a member of.

Or someone with knowledge could port scan you and actually attack you to gain a foothold in your network.

with the amount of automated systems out there port-scanning IP ranges for vulnerabilities, being on discord with one (a vulnerability), even if discord exposed IPs, is not much more dangerous than just sitting around twiddling your thumbs waiting for a bot to hit your IP.

The risk of personal identification due to IP I can buy into; the risk that your already public IP may be exposed to a do-bad-criminal who wants to exploit you via Discord.. feels no more dangerous than having a vulnerable computer connected, anyway.

Don't underestimate the skill and ingenuity of pissed off 15 year olds.

With near unlimited time on their hands, and an information rich internet, they can find how to start pentesting.

Blind devotion to a cause and a flexible mind can overcome many problems.

Of course, but it seems fairly unlikely that the average gamer is running public-facing internet services.

There are some games that run peer to peer connections, and for those to work, they require inbound connections to work. As far as the security of the average game codebase is concerned, I'd say it's pretty terrible as nobody really audits these codebases for buffer overflows/RCEs.

Source Engine (CS:GO, Team Fortress 2, etc) has a bunch of RCE that were disclosed to Valve years ago and which they did nothing about, and which have been released to public at this point. Join a server and they can RCE on your machine. Another one can be triggered just from a Steam invite.

Too bad Valve makes money now and not games, they can't even get a fix out after it's been disclosed for years.

https://twitter.com/the_secret_club/status/13812019496479047...

https://twitter.com/the_secret_club/status/13809601207257333...

https://twitter.com/the_secret_club/status/13808687591292969...

Titanfall (the original) is another one (also Source Engine underneath but rewritten by Respawn/EA), a salty hacker who was mad he was getting rekt has been taking down the multiplayer service off and on for years now.

https://www.reddit.com/r/titanfall/comments/d10ori/tales_fro...

Last I heard he was starting to hit Titanfall 2 xbox servers too (since nothing has been done after years attacking the first one, why wouldn't he escalate it further?) and Respawn just don't care, they're done with it, they make piles of money from Apex now and don't care about supporting their older stuff.

https://mp1st.com/news/titanfall-2-servers-down-due-to-ddos-...

Given the clientele of this website, hoping a little name-and-shame might bring some attention to the issues...

As frustrating as it is, not a whole lot of people in the video game industry really care about that, and for those that do, they can't really do that much about it.

Once a game is sold, there's not much of an incentive to keep it alive other than making sure it's moderately playable so that they manage to sell expansion packs or downloadable content. A hypothetical "someone might overflow a buffer and run arbitrary code" bug is going to be pretty low on the list compared to "all the graphics are broken on the latest nvidia driver because our code base is held together by duct tape and wishful thinking."

Even for the developers that do care about writing decent code (and a lot of them do care about making great games), after 60 hours or more a week of fixing random bugs on Barbie's Plastic Adventures, Call of Battlefield, or Mobile Lootbox Idle Clicker, there's not that much motivation left at the end of the day to work on these kinds of issues.

It’s pretty frustrating with games like TF2 that still generate significant amounts of revenue but can’t even get major security problems patched let alone basic bugs fixed. And I’m not talking about selling new copies, I’m talking about hundreds of millions of dollars a year in lootbox revenue.

Games like DotA 2 that still get attention from Valve have all kinds of broken things. Bots were endemic in certain MMR brackets for a while (might still be, no idea), and they were pretty straightforward to detect. Multiple kinds of griefing were pretty much ignored, reporting players didn't do anything for a while, and so on.

Even Rockstar had the issue about load times for GTA online, which had they even bothered to look into it, would've netted them dozens of millions of dollars.

Until there's something absolutely catastrophic like a worm that spreads through a popular online game and formats hard drives/mines bitcoin/transfers all the hats to third parties, the industry will keep on doing the same thing as usual with no care. I wish it was different, but it's not, unfortunately. I definitely understand your frustration though.

this is true, but also goes for every internet-connected service that i choose to use, as far as my IP address goes

i've been invited to random, huge discord servers to play just one game, and after the games over i usually leave the server unless i know everybody. i never have to worry about the server admin or one of his buddies deciding they didn't like me for whatever reason and DDOSing the shit out of me for weeks, forcing me to change my IP address because i didn't use a VPN.

that's just personal; it could even turn a profit if a professional gamer joined a server, several users recorded the IP address, bet against them in an upcoming game, then DDOS'd the shit out of them.

The game server admin also sees your IP address though? So unless you are only hanging out on discord and not actually playing you are still exposing your IP address.

Also only the voice server admin sees the IP address and not every user on the server, so your scheme wouldn't really work either.

yes, i should have said "the voice server admin records the IP address" instead

i think game servers are a different subject, and they have their own buffet of problems

If you're in a situation where you do not feel safe by the administration team of a server, you probably shouldn't stick around. While I do understand the concern about something like this, if the admin team are people you know and trust, this data is not going to be used against you.

Trust is always important for these things, regardless of the platform. Discord didn't even have my email address for the four first four years I used it

I'm running my teamspeak instance within an LXC container on my physical host. So the only IP I do see is good old home (127.0.0.1). But admins better not use the IP-ban feature in this setup ...

I never understood what was wring people seeing my personal, private IP address... I can call my ISP and get a new one in seconds, or turn my router off for 5 minutes to get a new one.

When you're playing games, it can mean that people can DDOS you, or otherwise just like, send bad stuff your way.

Both of the solutions you have still disrupt the game, even if they do temporarily solve the issue.

Not sure how using discord really solves the evil admin scenario though? Since the game server admin will still be able to see your IP Address.

I really have a hard time imagining a scenario where I can trust the game server admin, but not the admin hosting my voice server. Especially if it's some team-based game.

I am not saying Discord solves this problem, I am just saying it’s a real problem.

Also, not every game that uses Discord has the “server admin” model. Most of the games I play do not. Still use Discord though.

If the people you're playing with DDOS you, you need to find new people to play with.

Games with matchmaking will permanently ban your account if you leave games too often. It's a risk: "CS:GO - Competitive Cooldowns and Bans - Steam Support" https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=1203-WJC...

How many competitive games are you playing where the enemy team is an admin on your teamspeak server and feels it is appropriate to ddos you?

All sorts of things can leak your IP. Source engine is one, Teamspeak is another.

Sure, but that doesn't help you in the midst of it.

It's also like, sort of kind of not how social games work in many cases. In order to make friends in the first place, you gotta get out there.

Do you want to be friends with people in a community where having the admin look up your IP and ddos you is acceptable???

Imagine I want to go out tonight. None of my friends do. So I go to a new place and start talking to people at the bar. One of them stabs me.

No, I do not want to be friends with those people. But I don’t know that yet, because we have not met. The only way to meet them is to... meet them.

The consequences of being ddosed are not exactly the same as the consequences of being stabbed. I think you'll survive this terrible, unlikely ordeal.

I can call your ISP and get your subscriber information (unless you're behind CGNAT).

Here's a convenient, albeit somewhat outdated pastebin explaining how https://pastebin.com/ViWmrsDJ

Not really sure they allowed to send you _any_ of that information in Denmark/EU.

Well, that is obvious and not changeable.

Like anyone together in a discord voice chat, since it is p2p webrtc, right?

It is not P2P. The place where they most clearly state that as far as I can find is actually the documentation for their game SDK[1], but you can check that this is the case with netstat. In general it’s hard to get good voice or video chat with P2P connections because of the low upload of most residential internet connections, so few serious chat apps do it.

[1]: https://discord.com/developers/docs/game-sdk/networking

There's also this: https://blog.discord.com/how-discord-handles-two-and-half-mi...

You might like what I am working on - it’s aiming to be Discord + Minecraft: https://jel.app

This looks really interesting. It solves a problem my Discord server has specifically. We do online improv and while most of the members don't have cameras we find the lack of a visual component is detrimental to the experience.

I notice that you have a support Discord, maybe a Discord integration would be good.

Yes for chat I am using Synapse/Matrix and will be adding Discord bridging.

I’m near middle age and discord is how I still talk to my friends from high school, college, and past jobs. My high school friends are pretty close now with my work friends, despite only ever have interacted on discord.

It’s hands down the communication tool i use the most in my personal life

Same here. What used to be a private IRC channel evolved into a Skype group chat and finally several years ago evolved into a Discord server. We game together often and even have poker nights through it. It's been a huge boon to my social life during the pandemic.

I'm really glad MS is not buying Discord after seeing what they did to Skype.

I used to use IRC+Mumble for this 13 or so years ago. You _can_ live without proprietary stuff, though I 100% agree it's not as flashy or convenient.

Why not matrix?

Matrix the protocol is not there yet. Element, its main client, lacks too many features to have the same experience:

- No concept of servers (in discord parlance). Its equivalent (matrix spaces, in https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc177...) is in progress

- No included audio/video calls. You have to link them manually and use a third-party stack, such as Jitsi

- Even if you have Jitsi the experience is not the same. Discord's experience is like a chat room, except with audio and video. In Element it's more like a standard call

> - No included audio/video calls. You have to link them manually and use a third-party stack, such as Jitsi

To be explicit, no group audio/video. I run my own Matrix server for my partner and I and it uses webRTC based audio out of the box for 1:1 calls which we use every day, and sometimes video. No Jitsi enabled in my config. (I only share this so other readers can gauge if Matrix can meet their needs.)

It is also worth noting that the WebRTC calls are E2E encrypted and look fantastic as they are often peer-to-peer so you can get an amazing connection if you have the bandwidth available.

I'm blown away by the audio and video quality of my Matrix calls. I always thought it was because, as I run my own server, there's no bandwidth limit, but I hadn't considered the whole peer-to-peer thing.

Mind sharing the Synapse configuration changes you made to enable the audio/video calls over peer-to-peer?

I'm using https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy and I can't recall off of the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure out of the box the coturn server will make webRTC "just work". I also explicitly made sure jitsi was disabled to make sure it wasn't using it, and yeah, this ansible playbook is game changing. I tried to run Matrix 3 different ways before giving up and using the playbook.

What client do you use on your devices to talk via the server?

For now element, but I hope to add the functionality to Ditto and switch to that.

Discord is free, no need for maintenance and much easier to onboard non-tech friends IMO.

There are also many free Matrix severs. But I agree that Discord has much more UX polish right now. (Especially around onboarding).

Not @fish45 but as someone in a similar situation, probably because "people our age" where already using it for gaming. Simple network effects. Nobody got out of their way to compare the best alternative from a technical and privacy related perspectives.

People just started using what they were used to, and now Discord is freaking emourms in that area. High school classes, university cohors (ie. CS'24), university program (ie. Electrical Engineering), specific sources...etc everybody around me is using discord.

My username and favorite aliases were taken.

Discord allows anyone to share the same username. It appends a nearly invisible hash to disambiguate, and you can even change it.

Discord does usernames right.

hmm, so on public discord servers if someone copies my nickname and pretends to be me, someone might not easily notice?

Seems like a pretty readily used vulnerability. I remember back in high school on AIM someone made a username very similar to mine and said some nasty things to a girl I was talking to - she told me to stop talking to her and I didn't figure out why until years later. I imagine the same exploit could be done more easily if you can use the same username and discord actively tries to hide the hash.

Maybe I'm just overly sensitive since impersonation has hurt me, though.

I'd argue the opposite - it's harder to get away with impersonation.

In the AIM situation, users go in "knowing" that usernames are unique, so if you see a message from user abc123, you "know" it's that person. Which means user abcl23 ("el" instead of "one") can impersonate the real user.

In Discord situations, (1) the user is more likely to know that usernames can be reused, since they weren't required to make a unique one to start - so they can be more cautious of impersonation attempts, and more importantly (2) the Discord devs know names can be reused/abused, and can build better mitigations if they so choose to (like e.g. putting a disclaimer at the top of any message from a user you've never contacted before, etc.)

Depends on the setup of the Discord server.

Many servers have different "roles" created, though often they're just nothing more than a title and a different color for your name when chatting on the server. If you don't have the default role on your server, then anybody would probably notice the fake person is a fake because they'd have the default role color.

Second, servers can require that your account have a verified phone number for you to join or chat on it, which raises the barrier a bit for creating fake accounts.

Finally, even if they join a mutual server and send you a private message, when you view the message, you won't see the private message history of the conversation with the real account, giving away that it's at the very least a new account.

Overall, it's harder to impersonate on Discord than it is on AIM, but still certainly not impossible.

This sounds wrong. Since Matrix is federated, you can still be echelon, just not @echelon:theserveryoutried.com.

Furthermore, this is just the MXID, the Matrix ID. This is usually de-emphasized in the UI and only used to disambiguate and add users (as you say).

What is usually displayed to users are display names and these are allowed to have collisions, in which case they get disambiguated via MXIDs.

Usernames don’t even matter that much thanks to nicks (display names) which are available in Matrix (and unlike Discord, they are available in DM’s), and furthermore, you can get an account with a smaller provider that federates if you really want a username taken on matrix.org.

Other Discord features like servers aren’t there yet, but “usernames” doesn’t seem like a real deficiency.

They were taken on one server. Matrix is a federated protocol so any account on any domain works anywhere. If @echelon:matrix.org is taken, you can have @e:chelon.org if you want.

Wouldn't Mumble be closer to the described use case?

Not really.

Discord has both text and voice (and IIRC video) chat. Mumble is voice only, and the UX is... dated.

Second this. Recently setup Mumble server and it's clearly meant for non-visual use because of its gaming roots. Which is good when you want TTS with chat but annoying to learn and navigate. I suspect it's primary use case is push to talk voice communicate in games.

correct

AFAIK there are no Matrix clients with voice channels.

We used Vent like this for a decade; we just always had a big call going at all times with my HS friends post graduation.

God there's a name I haven't heard for a decade or so.

A discord chat got me through one of my very difficult classes in university. I think without it I probably would have passed, but probably wouldn’t have understood the material half as well.

My daughters are 16 and 17 and use it exactly the same way. It’s far more valuable to them than any social media. My TTRPG group meets on discord too.

I believe before Discord got the high ground there was a program called Curse. I wonder if it is still functional.

Curse Voice was discontinued few years ago, after Amazon bought Curse and later turned it into Twitch app

What do you feel is missing from Discord?

Personally, I wish the desktop client was a bit more lightweight. I understand why they went with Electron, and I don't think they could have afforded their speed of iterated development as a small company otherwise, but I still wish their app was a bit lighter on my laptop. I'm especially disappointed that cordless [1], a very usable third-party terminal-based client for Discord, was banned due to a ToS violation.

Secondly, I wish there was better support for E2E encryption, even just in direct messages. I wouldn't even mind it as a paid feature.

Similiar issue with the browser client. I observed it eating away 40% cpu doing...nothing? I can't do anything else with my laptop If I want to be heard or understood by others

As someone who uses discord as chat only (if even), their CPU (and partly RAM usage) is simply not excusable. And Audio & Video are not argument for such a bloated client either, well done WebRTC is everything but bloated.

Yet Discord still provides a richer feature set with less browser UI lag than Zulip.

It really is amazing how absolutely terrible the enterprise grade discord competitors are.

At least webex seems to finally have a working audio test button.

and with this lightweightness the ability to customize the client more, maybe even create popouts to monitor multiple chats simultaneously or do one server per window.

Unfortunately software companies now view customisability as a bad thing, as their priority is profit, and that often involves making the client less usable. Discord wouldn't be able to periodically shift around the UI to make you accidentally click on the "Gift Nitro" button if they had to respect the layout you customised.

Why would moving the UI about result in 'accidental revenue'? We're not talking about ads here.

I'm just as confused as you are as to why anyone on the planet would click where the "attach image" button used to be, see a popup for gifting Nitro, and go "sure, let's do that instead", but evidently Discord thinks that at least some people are going to do that, or else they wouldn't have made such an absurdly hostile change in the first place.

Presumably they're banking on people who would have gifted Nitro in the first place but were just unaware of the feature.

I wish I could choose my own font!

Not making the useage of third party clients a ToS violation.

Sometimes it feels like technology from the past was so bad that, given no alternatives, it interferes with the thing you're wanting to do (Skype/Internet Explorer). Those products can easily be subsumed by a competitor that is a superior product (Discord/Chrome).

But now it feels that because the options for those niches have been completely filled by those services, everyone becomes beholden to them, and in many cases there are undesirable aspects of the services that are not mutually exclusive with them being the most competent product on the market (inability to use Discord 3rd-party clients, Chrome's user tracking, Plex still showing you advertisements after buying a yearly subscription).

It feels like those products became too polished and attractive to users, if there exists a good reason to convince them to use something else, and even if we want to move off them, the network effect inevitably draws some of the holdouts back in (Messenger as a compromise for not using Facebook, sites that are incompatible with non-Chrome browsers). These products now have millions of active users whose behavior can be controlled or manipulated on a whim, for better or worse, if the company decides one day to make changes.

Now I'm starting to get the impression that succeeding in being the best solution in a given market is not necessarily a universal good. So many people were loathing how terrible Skype was for the longest time, and so Discord was founded. Yet, while the experience of participating a chat community is so much easier than in the past, I can't help but thing that so many people are now beholden to a new technological dependency.

What I have to wonder is: if money was not a factor in driving developer decisions, would Discord have allowed third party clients to be used? Preventing automated spam is not a problem unique to Discord.

Spam is not a good reason anyway. I would argue browser based spam automations are more easy to setup than modified clients. And Discord can do shit against those.

Day to day the thing I dislike most about discord is that I can't have multiple instances of it open, or pop-out a channel to its own window. I'm in a bunch of servers but there are 3 channels and a DM in particular that I would love to just park on the second monitor forever and always have visible.

You can always open discord in your browser and open each channel/dm in a new window. Infinite instances.

I know it's been a few hours, but if you see this, look at the Discord PTB and Canary builds. I run all three (std) so I can keep a number of prime channels open. Hope that helps.

The only thing I would change is small and weird: I wish you could make the window smaller on desktop. The min-width is almost half the size of my screen; it shouldn't be hard to gracefully collapse things further as you resize

You can actually override the min width for the window by adding a "MIN_WIDTH" field to Discord's settings.json: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600294...

Can't guarantee it'll be usable without using some custom CSS though.

For me: per server avatars and/or usernames. Or even some sort of straight-up multi-account support. Being able to choose a display name upon joining a server, rather than after, would be a great start.

You can have a peer room username and avatar in Matrix. It's just a very hidden feature.

Doesn't help me as a Discord user though. (I do use Matrix too, but only have one logical identity there so it's not a big deal to me.)

I am also a little miffed that someone can right click my profile in one server and then see that I'm the same guy in another. Just a little annoyed, not much, but it'd be nice to turn it off. Unless I missed an option?

IIRC, it only shows mutual servers though, right?

Yes if you're on two servers with someone and you right click their name it will show that it's the same person on the other server. It's not really private information if user IDs are public, I just prefer to keep things a bit more private if I can.

Their treatment of Linux is pretty terrible, where they block you from even launching the app after a minor update until you go download and install the new .deb file. I've had many times where I went to jump onto a quick Discord chat only to have to stop and jump through those hoops.

To be fair, the client forces you to upgrade on windows too, although automatically. Which in windows-land is business as usual...

> Which in windows-land is business as usual...

Did i miss any recent innovations in the Windows space? Because no automated updates for your software is literally one of those things that make Windows so bad as an everyday desktop.

Mobile website. Back in the old day it was possible to join without registration. Just visit the project invite link and start typing. Then it required registration but still worked on mobile. Now it no longer works on mobile, you just get "install app or GTFO". I've stopped using discord then.

It works fine on mobile.

https://imgur.com/9PiRQTI.jpg

It does not work on mobile. When you visit invite (as new user would), e.g. here https://discord.com/invite/trbteNj it will automatically open play store with discord app. It cannot be disabled.

Additionally, when you visit discord.com shortly there is login button visible but then it disappears and only install app button is visible, login is no longer possible.

(It is possible that old users have some cookie settings that allows them to use mobile website but new users can't)

Tested in chrome in Android 10

Tracking multiple threads of conversation in text. I'm not saying it needs Slack, HN or Reddit style threading, but some way to separate multiple topics of conversation that form within a channel.

Organization of multiple channels across multiple servers. Currently, I have 4 different servers, each with a different group of friends. But not every channel in each server is something that interests me. So I'd like to be able to reorganize them into channels to check whenever there are updates, channels to read occasionally, and channels to ignore entirely. But the channel organization is owned by the servers, and is therefore not something that I can re-organize on my side.

Not being able to choose a different avatar per server is a complete showstopper for many of my use cases (mixing gaming/work/personal personas in the same account): https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600293...

Honestly, in terms of features, not much. The biggest issue personally is that screen sharing on Linux with multiple monitors doesn't work well, but AFAIK that's a chromium thing. Another thing I'd really like is for twitch streams to be integrated with Discord streams. Otherwise, the main thing I'd want out of an alternative is privacy.

LaTeX support!

MathBot fills that void although in a bit of a hack-y way. Native Latex would indeed be nice

They said on Twitter that they have no plans now to include it.

https://guilded.gg is pretty decent

Telegram groups' voice chat seems pretty similar.

The kids are using Guilded and dropping Discord these days, from what I hear.

Just Googling it, I haven't seen what makes it better than Discord. It reads like an alternative for the sake of competing. Not a bad idea, but I think it'll always be lagging behind like the wake of Facebook/YouTube/Reddit clones we've seen over the years.

Guilded eng here... in general, our marketing focuses heavily on chat because that's the first feature people switching from Discord will evaluate as table stakes, but our thesis is that team communication shouldn't be limited to just 1 format. To that end, we have lots of different channel types (calendar, forums, docs, media, etc). Admittedly our primary focus is esports teams, so a lot of our features are geared towards that (like inter-server tournament brackets). In terms of product roadmap though, you can think of it like how Basecamp is to Slack. We think one really well-built and integrated tool is better than having to juggle dozens of separate tools when managing a team/project/whatever. Hope that helps!