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.