I’m personally crossing my fingers for Discord.
The day I don’t see “join our Discord” where I would earlier expect to find “visit our forums” will be a good day.
A bloated live chat monolith is not what I want to use to discuss game bugs or podcast episodes.
Agreed. Live chat has its place for certain things, but for other things a forum type interface is better suited.
Yeah, several groups of friends of mine are using Discord to chat and arrange roleplaying nights and such. I use those regularly. But I’ve got several “project” Discords that are forum replacements and I find I almost never go there. Certainly never when I don’t have some specific goal I’m trying to fulfill.
I don’t know when they introduced it, but at some point, in some servers, I noticed a new channel type: forum. The fact that this is a thing is the greatest proof that Discord is not the end all, be all solution to communication.
Nothing is, really. One thing I really enjoyed about the 00s web was its diversity, because different things had different places and different formats, and the ever-lasting stakeholder grasp wasn’t as successful at trying to put people in one place to show them ads and drive engagement to please the statistics gazers.
The “forum” was introduced within the last year or so.
that’s my biggest pet peeve, too.
GloriousEggroll, the mastermind behind modified version of Valve’s Proton, posts his code on GitHub, and then links to his Discord as a place for reporting bugs.
I actually quit using his Linux distro in large part because the communications were so terrible with Discord being the only way he disseminates information (so so poorly).
There were issues and the necessary information couldn’t flow effectively in either direction.
Thats uhhh… interesting. Why…?
the only reason I can think of is “to spite me”.
Ab. So. Fucking. Lutely.
Revolt seems to be to Discord what Lemmy/Kbin are to reddit, but I dont see most people bothering with it unless discord makes some reeaaallly huge mistakes to piss the community off.
People seem pretty annoyed at the changes to usernames, but probably not enough to leave Discord.
Tbh that whole change has been kinda blown out of proportion, it doesn’t really affect people in any meaningful way IMHO. Discord will have to do much worse to get people to actually stop using it, it is way too convenient as it is, unfortunately.
Hah, yeah I don’t see people going from “I gotta change my username” to “I gotta change my username and find all my communities in matrix etc.”
I see this as falling under painful but kinda necessary admin, which is nowhere near the level of friction required for a platform switch with massive disruption to communities.
That said, the barrier is lower for chat servers than it is for social media - history matters less in discord than it does for reddit, for example. If the server owners decide to migrate to another platform, they can probably convince people to migrate given a good enough reason and alternative. The people online at any given moment matter more than the last couple months of chat history.
So much!
It’s just hard to really focus on the content. Short term chatting? Ok! Longterm discussion? BAD!
I honestly don’t think the fediverse will become nearly as popular as many seem to.think. It’s still complicated to use/understand for many non-tech enthusiasts, and in the case of Reddit, while people are angry, I doubt most of their users are going anywhere any time soon. Some will leave, but it’s not going to be a small number.
We keep going on about how Reddit relies on it’s “creators”, without whom they’ll die. Frankly, a lot of the highest rated content is just repost of old videos or tiktok videos. A lot of that stuff isn’t original, and the deep conversations are, in my opinion, few and far between. Sure there are some communities whi h have this, but they’re not exactly over represented.
I don’t have statistics to back this up, but I’d be willing to bet an entire doughnut that most reddit users have never posted even a single comment. People with that level (dis)engagement aren’t the type to seek out alternatives. They just kind of drift away.
I honestly don’t think the fediverse will become nearly as popular as many seem to.think.
Probably not gonna get Twitter/Reddit-sized, no, as those platforms have userbases the size of a large country. It’s mostly a question of “can we attract enough users for the ecosystem to be workable” and I think the answer is “yes.” Hell, for me it already is.
It’s mostly a question of “can we attract enough users for the ecosystem to be workable” and I think the answer is “yes.” Hell, for me it already is.
And this I completely agree with.
We may be few, but I’m proud to count myself among those who quit Reddit because of this. (Not that I wasn’t looking for a good reason for a long time).
As long as there’s enough of us to maintain a community here, then we’re golden 🙂. And I’m definitely under the impression that we’re getting there.
I hope so.
Reddit started out with more tech-y users, then got more mainstream. Maybe the same can happen here.
I knew about Lemmy, Mastadon, and PeerTube before this this latest mess with Reddit, but this finally gave me the push to come over as I’m sure it will for many.
@alehel @noodlejetski I’ll add that when Twitter first hit the fan there was a large influx of Mastodon users, but it quickly fell off. Perhaps there are more tech-savvy Reddit users who will dive into the Fediverse than did with Twitter/Mastodon, but for your average user we’re not approachable enough yet to overcome the inertia of familiarity.
Even if it quickly fell off, I think approximately 70-80% of current Mastodon users came from Twitter, and a big reason for people leaving (after poor onboarding experience) was the small size of the Fediverse. There just weren’t enough people in the Fediverse for the network effect to take hold. With each influx of users I expect to see a slightly higher proportion to stay, although I don’t see this influx (from Reddit) as being particularly large in the first place.
A lot of that stuff isn’t original, and the deep conversations are, in my opinion, few and far between. Sure there are some communities whi h have this, but they’re not exactly over represented.
If you get the deep conversations and the conversationalists the fluff will follow.
Discord is a likely contender, but I think it’s likely to be Instagram. It’s got a very dissatisfied userbase, and there’s already a few reasonably active pixelfed servers
Yeah I’m loving pixelfed way more than IG
It’s got a very dissatisfied userbase
I really don’t understand where you’re getting this from. Because, at least my Instagram, is thriving. Honestly, I see so much wonderful art on it every day, it’s ridiculous. I also follow many news outlets, magazines on it. The platform has never been better. Also, it has the advantage of having my entire professional and social circles on it. Everyone I know is using it daily, interact with each other.
Also, you can hide that barrage of reels very easily. Just tap […] on a suggested reel, then tap “Disable suggestions for a month”. It does exactly what it says.
I just hope this is the start of an internet renaissance with less corporate control.
It’ll be hard to get people to not only detach from something they’re accustomed to, but also then attach to something unfamiliar.
I tried and am trying again with Mastodon, but a lack of users I wish to follow, a more confusing premise at times, and just overall more enjoyment overall (if that) with twitter as a platform makes it a challenge.
Lemmy however has checked all the boxes. It literally feels exactly like Reddit, and honestly like a fresh start to avoid the various decisions both Reddit admins and the community itself made along the way. I’m hoping more for the latter experience than forming when diving into the fediverse, but my above statement is most likely applicable for a wide sample of people out there.
I’ve been having trouble getting going with Mastodon. But I’ve also had issues with Twitter as well. Lemmys been great so far.
That’s certainly what it’s feeling like to me.
I remember when I was a kid and the Web 1.0 stuff was popular, things like IRC chat and forums were too intimidating/confusing for me to get into. My introduction to being an internet “citizen” was Web 2.0 and the MySpaces/Facebooks/Reddits of the world, where I had a UX approachable enough not to intimidate my teenage self.
The shift towards the Fediverse feels like a blend of many of the best aspects of Webs 1.0 and 2.0 – I have a UX that feels familiar, but one that comes with a bottom-up, decentralized grassroots feel that is reminiscent of the early internet.
I’m bullish for sure.
I always like to hear about when internet was at its early stages. I’m born in 2001 so never got the chance to live through that era, but to me it always feels so much better than what it is right now.
Hearing you say that we are experiencing a moment similar to those is making me so happy.
I was absolutely amazing!
complete wild west. only limit was your mind/imagination.at least it felt like that, when I was young ;-)
yeah the corporate greed is at its peak lately…
I doubt it, things cost money, that’s how we got in the corporate trap originally. If you invest a ton of time and money into something sooner or later you need to get something back.
There isn’t much left.
First Facebook with their whole meta thing, then Imgur deleting all NSFW content and images uploaded by non-registered members, afterwards Twitter and now Reddit.
Twitch made a big mistake with their new sponsoring rules, but seems like they are reverting / changing it again due to bad community feedback.
Discord had a few changes the community didn’t like, but nothing ground breaking yet. But they get more and more greedy and their platform is filled with scams, hackers, bots and sadly many bad people like child predators and content which Discord support does nothing against. They seem not to care.
YouTube, well, I think they might be next actually. More and longer unskipable ads, restricting or demonetizing many videos, bad communication with their creators and less rewards for smaller creators. In addition, they might put high quality resolutions behind their already existing expensive subscription paywall. There isn’t any competition which is urgently needed.
UPDATE: Bad news about YouTube continues. Just now, YouTube Ordered ‘Invidious’ Privacy Software to Shut Down in 7 Days.
Which other big social media platforms are left?
I don’t really see YouTube failing anytime soon. They have such a massive userbase, it’s hard to imagine any other platform taking over anytime soon, regardless of shitty UX decisions. Creating a successful video platform like they have is an enormous challenge, the only reason they succeeded is because they were early.
@hampter @noodlejetski @Nankeru *cough* TikTok *cough*
In all seriousness, Google does not know what to do with YT. It is very hard to monetize. They tried to do whole TV thing, which fell flat on it’s face. it keeps being huge money sink, and moderation is nightmare and algorithms seems to fucking up constantly.
They can’t get rid of it, because it is huge, but it is not fire sure profit.I don’t know about YouTube not being profitable, but even if they aren’t, you’d be hard pressed to find a company better equipped to handle a money sink that Google. In 2022, they had a gross profit of 156 billion… I don’t think they are panicking, scrambling to monetize YT at Alphabet HQ.
The problem with anything video is still that it costs way too much to host, unless you’re a giant who already has their own data centers and massive data pipes. You can’t just throw it on a cheap VPS like text-based services
Are you thinking of it as a centralized replacement to YouTube? If you’re centralized, yeah, you probably need a data centre the size of Malta. There are decentralized alternatives (like PeerTube) where the cost is also distributed. If you’re using PeerTube, you literally can “just throw it on a cheap VPS”, and lots of people do, with no problems.
I think the real reason decentralized video isn’t going to catch on is because video (and YouTube in particular) has not been a community thing for many years now. There are very few YouTubers who make videos to build a community or connect to a community. YouTubers are on there for money, and there’s really no alternative that can both host the videos and pay out big cheques to content creators.
@duncesplayed @kalleboo tbh most of YTs I know either run sponsor ads, or have Patreon/paid for community. It is already slowly moving away from ads system in YT, which simply does not work.
That is a good point actually! That means they would have the freedom to move over to a new platform.
@duncesplayed imho making PeerTube or other Fediverse video service very good at UX and easy to use will allow these communities migrate when they feel like it.
I think biggest issue might be running video service like this and having running costs for video storage, etc. As always, communities might be willing to factor those costs in their pledges.
I think PeerTube needs easy to use setup / reliable network of hosters, and good UX to manage community, live streams, chats, etc.
Youtube just went after invidious as well.
Matrix synapse and dendrite aren’t great implementations of the protocol so people probably won’t host them, but conduit is 90% of the way there. Another 5% and I bet discords start to drop like flies.
Conduit looks very interesting. Synapse is way too bloated to run and dendrite is way too buggy in my experience. Maybe conduit will become a better home server? I feel like the matrix devs just keep adding more and more features to their protocol, but they fail to implement usable servers and clients. IMO they should’ve kept things more simple.
It isn’t perfect. It doesn’t support spaces well, and sometimes it’s chasing the latest standard, and there’s still a lot of missing stuff with respect to admin features. OTOH, it is incredibly light. I run it on an Atom D2550 alongside ejabbered and lotide, and that box basically idles.
There’s only a few projects I personally donate to.
I was already able to deploy it on my Raspberry PI 4 without any issues. It was using a lot of CPU when joining large rooms, but now it seems to have calmed down and it’s using 1-2% CPU, which is very reasonable. In comparison, home assistant runs at around 2-3% idle, and lemmy fluctuates between 4% and 10%.
Thanks for bringing this up, this is great! It’s also written in Rust, and I love Rust, so I might contribute this summer. I’ll add it to my list of potential project to contribute to, along with Lemmy.
Tiktok, Snapchat, OnlyFans
Signal would actually be a decent Snapchat replacement since it can do both disappearing messages and stories. now if only they’d finally release usernames and phone number privacy.
Tiktok is Chinese military funded. It’s not going away.
The problem with anything video is still that it costs way too much to host, unless you’re a giant who already has their own data centers and massive data pipes. You can’t just throw it on a cheap VPS like text-based services
Discord:
They started the software as a light weight voip solution for gamers. And imo they kinda lost focus a long time ago. It is now a sluggish, bloated, messy piece of electron software that has privacy issues and runs very poorly. They keep adding new features that are all paywalled and the pricing is just unreasonable. I’m not against paying for a service at all especially if it is free of ads but i feel like 10$ a month is just way too much for a chat app.
Discord still runs way better than Slack though.
well…idk. I didn’t use slack in years but it’s not really a good point for discord.
It’s like advertising Chlamydia with the slogan "It’s not nearly as bad as Sysphilis! Give it a try!
What does that make Teams? 😛
It’s a microsoft product. So it’s definitely the worst kind of infection
And unlike Chlamydia I’m not having nearly as much fun getting it.
probably some kind of autoimmune disease without any cure
I still like IRC and I’m surprised that it got almost completely murdered by Discord.
Matrix may be helping to dwindle IRC as well.
One can only hope so. I hope matrix gets a solid push when the chat gatekeepers have to open up because of EU regulation. If they can get invovled in the planned standards an implement them fast enough into matrix that might be a gamechanger.
As OneRedFox says, it’s all about the UX. From the perspective of your average gamer, IRC has awful UX. I know that speedrunning, romhacking, and other gaming subcommunities have used / still use IRC, but they’re very much on the technical side of gamers. Discord is a lot friendlier to the average gamer (I know, I know, it’s Electron and proprietary and shit for reasons besides those two, but consider your average console CoD player here). I still like IRC, too, though I’d love to see it evolve a little more quickly. IRCv3 is nice but my goodness, how long have they been working on it?
Yes please Discord, it is so worrying how everyone has all their private messages and content in an unencrypted app owned by a corporation who gives 0 shit about privacy. They won’t even delete your messages if you delete your account/leave servers / get banned. In fact there is no way to delete all your messages
Feels like I’ve been stuck using it just by default, because everyone else I know is, and there’s nothing decent fitting that particular use case. Skype definitely wasn’t cutting it. I at least avoid communities that are trying and failing to be forum-like, and just keep it to ones with people I know, and my viewers. Still run a Teamspeak server for a select set of friends to do YT recordings on, as it predates Discord, and is generally more stable (avoiding voice dropouts).
Well, I don’t think it will STB, but YouTube needs a FOSS equivalent that has the same capabilities sans ads. But, that’s $$$$ infrastructure so I don’t know if that will ever come.
BUT, I really hope that by the time Discord pisses off its users, that matrix or another federated equivalent will have figured out the UI/UX to capture a large chunk of those users. I used to live in IRC, but discord finally killed it. And I hate using proprietary software for so much chat.
Peertube is a thing. The problem with a platform like YouTube is that it’s so dependent on its creators, which peertube just doesn’t have. Although not FOSS, I am quite a fan of nebula since it is kind of a community owned project and many of the channels I was already subscribed to are on nebula too. I don’t mind paying a few bucks a month to access ad free content while also supporting the creators.
I’m thinking Twitch. Discord, imo, is just starting down the bad path but it still does what it’s supposed to do very well. Twitch, however, wants to enforce rules on content creators that might lead to them leaving entirely.
Well, OwnCast exists.
Anyone with owncast experience want to chime in? I don’t stream on twitch, I barely log into twitch, but I occasionally tune into certain streams. How easy is that through owncast?
The streamer side is not difficult at all. Can’t really speak for the viewership side as I haven’t tried that.
I didn’t even know this existed until now. I’ll try it out!
Good news! Twitch is currently shitting all over itself with T&C changes around mandating exclusive streaming on their platform from their partners.
The hilarity is that some of the streamers are moving over to Kick, which is a platform that may or may not have been built from the stolen Twitch source code, which is just the most amazing drama possible.
I worry about Discord imploding because everything is behind the walled garden and difficult to extract unlike a forum board or playlist. The landgrab with account renames will be an interesting test for them.
Good news! Twitch is currently shitting all over itself with T&C changes around mandating exclusive streaming on their platform from their partners.
The hilarity is that some of the streamers are moving over to Kick, which is a platform that may or may not have been built from the stolen Twitch source code, which is just the most amazing drama possible.
YouTube. It will be a real loss because I doubt even Archiveteam could backup all the useful YT videos.
What about YouTube?
I looked online and there seems to be PeerTube at least.
YouTube has been upsetting its users for over a decade now and also needs to make more money. The only thing stopping it from being overtaken is the sheer amount of infrastructure required to host videos on that scale.
Discord is doing a lot of stupid things lately i must say
God I hope so. Discord works fine as a voice chat and groupchat for games. But it’s insane to me that people use it as a replacement for message boards or websites and hosting files. It isnt indexed so you cant google it and a groupchat is a terrible format for this. Even as reddit dies you have some people acting like a glorified group chat is a good alternative. As an addition and supplement to a message board or website community sure this is how it’s always been even in the old days there were boards with an active IRC chat. As the replacement? Awful.
It is a terrible format but it has the extreme advantage of being free.
The whole current fiasco stems from services being free and then trying to cash in later hoping that users won’t switch, there’s no guarantee that Discord won’t pull similar stuff to Reddit. In fact they already are hostile to third party clients.
Discord has to pull this sometime becuase venture capital isn’t going to sustain it for eternity and “Nitro” makes next to nothing compared to cost. I just hope Matrix has the tech to save me when it hits.
yeah i totally agree
Teamspeak has a pretty slick new version that looks very much like discord. Not fediverse but pretty easy to self-host.
I hear that YouTube and Twitch are in the process of enshittifying, so probably them. Would also like to see Discord get replaced by something like Matrix, but I think the UX isn’t ready for that yet. On the plus side, the Matrix protocol supports bridging to other chat platforms, so that’s cool.
Matrix’s client UX is improving a lot, there is the Cinny client that mirrors Discord’s layout perfectly. The issue with Matrix is its protocol, which faces scaling issues because each instance joining the network is supposed to replicate the entire Matrix network, which will make it difficult for small hobbyists to add instances without crumbling under the load when the network gets too big. There is another Discord-like alternative, Revolt which is self-hostable and uses its own protocol but doesn’t have federation yet.
This is not true. Data will only be sent to your homeserver if a user on your homeserver joins a room on another server. And only the data for that room is sent, not the whole network. The room data only contains all state changes, and a small amount of recent messages. The amount of state changes is the biggest problem.
Matrix protocol does have a giant problem regarding spam joins though, which make a complete instance basically unusable. Last time I talked with people related to the protocol they didn’t want to or know how to fix it, because the need to verify all room state changes.
Thanks for the information. I set up a Matrix instance with a friend before and noticed it had significantly more resource usage than expected of a little chat client, then someone else explained that Matrix was trying to discover all of the other nodes on the network so I assumed it was true. What causes so many state changes to be generated?
which faces scaling issues because each instance joining the network is supposed to replicate the entire Matrix network
Makes sense, after all matrix multiplication is O(n2).
What do you mean replicate the entire network, does it include all messages on all instances?
So it would be like Lemmy if everyone was subscribed to everything on all instances?
Nah it only replicates joined rooms-
I tried Cinny recently, but unfortunately it was a buggy mess that kept crashing and I couldn’t even login to my account. I ended up going with Nheko.
Github, but Gitea’s not yet federated, though they’re working on it.
Gitlab’s a great alternative too, it’s definitely more resource intensive than Gitea but their community edition is packed with features. A federated Git platform sounds intriguing…
Hm did they leave ruby on rails behind yet? Last time I set it up it ATE resources like there’s no tomorrow…
Gitlab’s a great alternative too, it’s definitely more resource intensive than Gitea but their community edition is packed with features. A federated Git platform sounds intriguing…
