i still can't ping my friend and say 'hey check out this thing im watching on my screen right now', unless we're all on exactly the same ecosystems, and i send the correct link, and we're all logged in, and the engineer that day remembered to put the right meta headers in, and our credit cards haven't expired...

Interesting, maybe a system to send content to a friend instantly via text message is a product in its own right. I guess you mean a private link though?

The technical side of it is a solved problem. Everything you look at is hosted on a web page. You get a URL that points to it. You send the URL to another person and they can reach it, maybe with some additional stuff for time-stamping and chapter breaks and such. For bonus stuff you can include some account management for each user to be able to interact with the content but it’s not necessary and doesn’t need to gate you just being able to watch the thing.

The problem emerges when companies need to monetize the hosting and delivery of the content. It’s 100% a business model challenge, not a technical one.

yup my current most common method of 'socializing' digitally is me taking a screenshot of something interesting on my screen and sending it over some chat service (depending on who i am sending it to)

if i could open a screen share session with a similar easy shortcut, and broadcast whatever i have open on my screen with my friends, regardless of where the pixels originated, with a full duplex link i could talk over / see my friends with, i think i'd have much more meaningful evenings

This is... dramatic, when things like watchparty exist, or you can use something like Discord...

i can't even get discord working for what its supposed to be good at: chatting with one friend while we play a multiplayer game together

"can you hear me? I can hear you but not the game? ok now i can hear the game but not you? ok now i can hear the game bleeding through your mic? did you set up a virtual audio cable? is your mic patched through correctly?" every single time.

sometimes i just want to scroll reddit with friends, or watch a part of a dvd with friends, or play pubg mobile with friends, but i dont want to break out a display splitter and ask them to log in to a centralized service and accept an endless barrage of cookie banners and "Do you accept our new terms?" checkboxes and watch ads just to watch some memes with me (after i spend 30 minutes figuring out how their API changed so i can keep streaming the way i figured out how to already do it without issues just last week)

why cant i just send my pixels to my friends via bittorrent or some other protocol

Is it really that difficult to use discord for it’s original intended purpose?

Back in the day Teamspeak or mumble were hassle free.

it definitely used to be easier, i have a distinct memory of us being able to stream No Man's Sky around launch day to each other with sound mixing being handled automagically by discord with no hassle (we wanted to see if we could see each other if we stood at the same place at the same time (we couldn't))

teamspeak and mumble were definitely easier to start up and use once you get up and running the first time, i think i remember having to either install drivers or something else to get stuff like global push-to-speak and other core features to work

> Is it really that difficult to use discord for it’s original intended purpose?

In my experience, Discord is no more or less buggy than Teamspeak or Mumble