Discord and The Issue Transistioning to Alternatives

Giggs

I won't lie, I am not totally anti Discord right now, possibly cause I haven't done as much research into how it all works as others, who I've seen people go as far as to call it Spyware. I just thought I would make this as a discussion thread. All of my friend circles are pretty much on Discord, and not to go to personal, but to give some context, I don't have too many friends offline. I've actually meet a good number of them on vacations, and I wouldn't trade my friends for the world. I say this because I lived through an era of Skype, and where that was the go to chat app. Now, we all have transitioned to Discord when it was first starting due to multiple issues with Skype.

While Discord is serviceable, a good chunk of friends in all of my communities at least have minor complaints about Discord. Yet, I can not imagine them taking the plunge to move to another service, let alone after migrating and settling in for such a long time. I don't have much experience even with other stuff like Revolt or anything else, and I am pretty settled in my ways myself. I guess I offered my experience to put this question out.

Have you transitioned you and your friend group to another service like Discord, how difficult was it for you? If I did ever decide to jump ship, what advice would you offer?

Reveriemoe

I think I feel the same way about it, I had no experience on Steam groups or Skype, so apart from anonymous message boards (which have definitely declined a lot since the early 2010s), it's pretty much the only thing that's ever given me a community to speak of. Certainly, if Discord pushed some update that ruined everything, I'm not sure where everybody would go, which is something I'm concerned about, enshittification and scope creep are very real issues, and the more random shit they add to the UI every year, the worse it becomes to navigate (there are TWO separate things that I accidentally click on regularly because of their aggressive placement), and at some point it'll be too much. But I did have one group of vaguely far-right people who jumped to Telegram I assume because they didn't want to get banned, and while I was invited I didn't really bother to check in because I guess for me to have one tab open for just one server wasn't really worth keeping track of, so as concerns potentially moving, my anecdotal experience may be something to consider.

Giggs

Reveriemoe

Yeah I think the constant random UI changes and updates that don't add much are the most common complaint among friends. I probably wouldn't consider Telegram at least for a main use for chatting. I only hear weird stories coming out of it and I don't know just an odd vibe around it personally. Signal and Revolt are the ones I really think of when it comes to alternatives. That is just from what I have seen so far though. I have the same concerns about where folks would go if Discord REALLY started to fail.

cat_beepo

slack would honestly be my ideal chat app for hobby groups, but it got marketed as a workplace chat app, which stinks because I honestly think it's better than discord

The whole opt-in to joining channels, rather than muting channels needs to be a think the next gamer chat app focuses on

mechap

Big tech hosted centralized platforms are doomed to their own self-enshitification and this new trend for new projects to stand up a discord server instead of hosting a discussion forum where users can exchange ideas, offer feedback, and provide support to each other is not going to bring any good.
While discord does have a search feature, conversations are typically not indexed by external search engines. For this specific reason, most people are unable to find threads discussing their issue without logging into discord and searching there and that inevitably leads to new users asking the same questions or raising the same issues over and over again.

In general, I believe that the centralization of everything is exposing just how many people and companies exist as parasites in our online ecosystem.
Fundamentally, taking power away from big tech and decentralize is the correct thing to do but the average user who unfortunately doesn't give enough of a crap to deal with all the thorns of weird projects will instead prefer the slick product with the vast sums of venture capitalist money poured into it.
And honestly, how could we blame them for preferring a service with a lower barrier of entry ? The way to get people away from those services is to reduce barrier of entry as much as possible.

Colgatto

Signal is the easiest alternative for me when I try to make friends transition to a better messaging app. It's pretty lightweight to install, secure (there are potential security issues but only the most hardcore tech enthusiasts care about them, overall it's miles more secure than common alternatives. Check on twitter if you really want to learn about it), has nice features (delayed response, stickers ✨), and the onboarding is great.

Telegram I never used, has a reputation of being used worldwide for illegal communities (drug dealing, scammers), which is dumb because it's one of the least secure messaging apps out there. I advise to never use it.

Small aside, I hate that whenever I join a club, work in any event, or do anything in a group of normies,everyone turns to WhatsApp group. This is especially egregious when you're for example doing volunteering work and need some documents or knowledge. "It's in the WhatsApp group!" Oh great, sure, add me. You join the group and there's no history (for you, don't worry Meta servers will keep all your messages safely for their own purposes), so you have to tell them to send the documents again anyway. You could refuse to join the spyware, but in these kind of groups it's hardly an option unless you have a good friend already in the chat that will relay the relevant information to you. But if you're good friends you'll probably talk him out of using WhatsApp...

What I like to use is matrix, but good luck getting people unfamillar with tech on it.
On paper it's great, it's an open source protocol (like IRC), highly secure, tons of features for rich messaging, decentralized servers, and tons of stuff I forget. But in practice the onboarding is horrendous, available clients are a bit clunky, messages can take very long to load especially in encrypted discussions, the search feature doesn't work well, sometimes the client breaks...
All in all, I really love it and I encourage you to try it, but I couldn't force people that aren't slightly into tech to transition to it.

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