I really miss the old school PHPBB forums which were "slower" and that was good for support from the vendor's point of view. Very few cases require real time staff chatting and available all the time. It seems to invite more trouble than its worth.
On the other hand for just browsing around I don't need to sign up at all, and I can stumble across interesting things through either a web search or perchance a link from elsewhere. With Discord neither is possible, because it's all inaccessibly hidden behind a login wall.
Personally there are only a few forums I'm really actively participating in, but there are quite a few more I'm just happy to occasionally browse through, and quite a few more I just randomly stumble across while searching for information on whatever subject currently occupies me.
While having to sign up separately for every forum might be considered somewhat more of a hassle, personally I don't find it that annoying and in any case it's only every now and than that I actually feel the urge to actively contribute something.
The way Discourse (or Facebook groups for that matter) works on the other hand means that all the serendipity stuff of randomly stumbling across some interesting forum thread on a subject I'm interested in or a problem I'm having can't even happen in the first place because like I said it's all inaccessibly hidden behind a login wall.
So I'll gladly trade the "inconvenience" of separately run forums and even slightly annoying sign up procedures for being able to just casually browse through and being able to find them at all in the first place.
i found that discussions were more civil, trolls were quickly purged and it was difficult for them to rejoin due to this admin wall.
it created a nice garden effect against shill/ratioing where there is little to no barrier to creating mass number of accounts to impact opinions.
But the point of your complaint is that many communities have moved away from phpbb or similar type forums.
what's wrong with that?
did anything change in the way Discord works cuz of that? because I didn't notice
There is a gaming area with a list of all the popular gaming discords, and it still shows your gaming status if you are playing a game. Was there anything more to it than that?
Screen share, video conference, filesharing (TS had a primitive fileserver), and rich text/emoji, persistent chat, and a better UI for moving from server to server.
The mumble client already supports using certs for identity. I think if Mumble could make multi-server browsing easier and have screenshare/videoshare, that would be enough for many people to swing back to a decentralized tool.
After screenshare and server browsing, having "Mumble as a Service" to spin up a new server instantly ala Discord would be the killer migration feature to compete.
I wonder if any Mumble developers think about pivoting to a more direct competition with Discord? Or if any people with videoconference software dev experience would know where to start on Mumble?
Like?
You don't even have something as basic as adjustable message retention. You host your service on Google Cloud and AFAIK, you don't use E2E for anything, not even direct messages.
Your privacy policy includes the following clause:
We may share information if needed to enforce our Terms of Service, Community Guidelines, or other policies, or to protect the rights, property, and safety of ourselves and others.
Oh, and according to the same privacy policy you retain deleted account information for at least two years by default. Anything else requires the user to "submit an ID for an age verification appeal". That's telling in its own right.
And yet they have not been purchased yet.
> Discord collects everything you do inside
Make a post on HN saying "disable newrelic if you value user privacy" and see how well that goes.
> Things tracked outside the program include : programs you run and other system specific information that can identify your hardware (such as your HWID's)
Discord does not collect the programs you run on their server. It does scan for them to enable the game tracking feature. See the post by u/GlenMerlin:
> Logging your opened apps is an optional setting (mostly done to detect discord rich presence for games, so your friends can see you're playing halo infinite and join with one click) and you can turn it off and the data is stored locally.
> All it takes is 1 breach to make every message you ever sent public information.
I can assure you extracting any sizable fraction of Discord's messages will incur at least a few hundred petabytes of data transfer fees within a day, triggering DLP alerts or maybe even regular billing "unnatural increase in data transfer costs" alerts. Even if Discord were hacked, their infrastructure makes actually downloading user data both infeasible and riskier than just dumping the user DB containing emails and hashed passwords. To add, that's just for data stored on the server - the actual "science" api containing things like how you use Discord likely accumulates hundreds of petabytes worth of data a month on its own, it'd be easier to download the generated user behavior reports than to download the data itself.
The E2E criticism is valid but users obviously don't care enough to move off of Discord, even with the privacy campaigns against them and efforts to move communities over to Guilded.
Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful. They routinely suspend inconvenient servers without giving it a second thought. They've used gaming as a ticket to fame, but then scrubbed every mention of games from their UX after receiving $100M from a VC company.
I've stopped using Discord for most purposes. For group chats I use Wire, which admittedly has much shittier UI, but it's free for small groups and E2E encrypts all conversations.