Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O.
2 years ago by LCP to c/technology
They also put ads on the screen and have been shilling their apps for a while now. There is not even a button to go to the webapp on their mobile site, you have to switch to desktop mode just to get in.
It has been in the works from the very beginning. They dropped their mask when things got put behind paywalls and they started censoring criticism. Hell they artificially pumped up emote slots on servers they were secretly running just to get the most users on them. why? To control the narrative. Those servers had the most users for this reason and their owners were thrilled about becoming essentially redundant over night which was more than just a little suspicious until they got found out. They also run their subreddit where they also censored any criticism for this weird bait and switch.
To those who say „who cares about emotes?“ I can only reply: You‘re missing the point. It‘s not about the what but the how. Discord is a sleazy company that gaslights their users to an extreme degree sometimes.
Now is the time for Matrix to improve usability and whatnot, because I think that's the most credible replacement.
I really wish Matrix had been more successful, but it has some pretty core problems that prevented it from gaining more traction.
It fell into the same trap as XMPP, though perhaps even worse, with a focus more on its protocol and specification than a single unified product vision. The reference server implementation is slow, and using a language not optimal for its purpose, with alternative server implementations left incomplete and unsupported. It took a long time for them to figure out voice and video and for it to work well, and the "user flow" still isn't at Discord levels.
I've rooted for Matrix for a long time, but as a former XMPP evangelist, to me the writing on the wall says it isn't suited for success either. I'd love to be wrong, but I don't see a way through.
What do you think the main problems are?
In terms of performance, there's Rust in the synapse repo already, and both Conduit (Rust) and Dendrite (Go) seem viable. If one of those projects reaches parity with Synapse, do you think that'll "fix" matrix?
If not, are there other issues core to matrix design? I'm not that familiar with matrix except as an occasional user that follows a few tech rooms, but I'd love to help out if I'm pointed in the right direction. I'm comfortable with Rust and Go (and do Python at my day job), so if backend performance is a bottleneck, I could make help out.
But if the problems are fundamental to how it's designed or how the project operates, I'd rather work on other things.
I do think the other home server implementations gaining parity (production-ready) with the reference home server would go a long way. I haven't run a home server but I've heard from those that have that it really has a hard time scaling. (Though this serves as impetus to give it a try over spring break)
Which brings me to the caveats of the protocol, I personally don't think the design is ideal, it's more described as a distributed message bus, what I've read of the spec it's over engineered, it made good decisions wrt using modern web technologies (JSON, WebRTC), but it didn't scope itself to the particular task.
That said, I haven't written a federated protocol, and they have. But if I was going to, I'd really want to look at Discord and see how to copy a lot of that model, but break parts of it out to facilitate federation:
I originally wrote a huge hypothetical design here that I speculated would fare better, but honestly the specifics become less relevant, point is that the shared state of rooms is a real challenge, and one out of scope for just a federated instant messaging system, and I'm no longer certain it's viable.
Although, I'm honestly surprised that there isn't a Fediverse equivalent/Alternative to Discord.
IK that platforms like Matrix exist, but what I'm talking about is a federated platform that's a clone of Discord.
interesting; is revolt self hosted too or is it just purely a discord alternative? it looks almost identical from screenshots.
The trouble with relying on each community to self-host is that it's unlikely to ever make it to the masses that way. Self-hosting is a significant barrier.
Welp, there goes the neighborhood. If they want to do an IPO they'll probably enshittify the hell out of the platform and jettison all remotely raunchy communities. Because nothing says "good investment" than a service that just drove out a fair chunk of its user base.
I just hope further Enshittification will cause devs to ditch it and start using proper forums instead. It‘s always tragic when a software has no other way of giving feedback and answering questions than Discord where you can‘t find anything, let alone with an external search engine. The abandonment of internet forum culture and searchable discussions has been one of the biggest losses in the virtual space.
I can't wait for Discord to enshittify so that lazy devs can't say "join our Discord for updates and support!" anymore.
Hate that shit.
Fiiiiiiiiiinally.
How can it not be awful for them too? Like users may even try to ✌️search Discord✌️ for their issue only to come up short and have fo ask a question asked a million times already. Gross.
gentlemen start your enshittification.
Great time to start working on a replacement... if you have several million hanging around.
Enshitification is on the horizon...
It was hard to get everyone off aim too but it happened.
Then again there is always IRC.
You SHOULDN'T have gotten people off AIM. AIM was awesome!!!
We used it literally til the servers turned off.
That's where a Ulysses pact can help: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/
I have a friend who is just so damn stubborn when it comes to mixing up their "comfortable" things if they aren't the one to come up with the idea
Very frustrating
Duuude. Discord is a dumpster fire right now. I'm interested to see how much hotter that fire can get.
What's the best alternative software to gear up to transition to? I'm pretty pissed because they finally got decent integration for PS5. I was playing Space Marines with a couple friends, one of whom is playing on PC, so we've been able to crossplay with voice chat.
Any suggestions for an XMPP client?
In an ideal world I want something that has Discord's "drop-in" chats where you don't need to "start a call" anywhere, you just join in. My biggest gripe with Element's voice chat
Possible alternatives:
- Matrix
- Would personally recommend using FluffyChat, NeoChat
- SimpleX
- Revolt
Simplex is cool, but it's more of a Signal/SMS replacement than Matrix. It doesn't really do rooms as you might want, and discovery of peers is pretty manual.
Cool tech, just not a Discord replacement.
Could we add Zulip? I think it even has IRC integration if I’m not mistaken.
XMPP, IRC....
You can try matrix if you're a masochist.
Discord, the social chat app popular with the video game community, has met with investment bankers in recent weeks to discuss preparations for an initial public offering as soon as this year, two people familiar with the talks said.
[...]
The people, who requested anonymity because the conversations are confidential, cautioned that the talks were still exploratory and that I.P.O. plans remained subject to change.
Privacy for Me but not for Thee.
First thing they will do is put in some AI that can talk to people for you or something.
So, tell me about matrix and how to use its full basic potential…
I wonder if Flotilla on Nostr will be ready in time. The nostr community can unfortunately be a bit iffy right now, but I like the tech, and I'm always excited to see someone taking a good stab at Discord.
Call it a server, then. Tons of people already call them Discord servers. And it'd be a lot more true of Flotilla than Discord. Functionally, from a UX perspective, there'd be VERY little difference to an end user. You'd get an invite somehow, probably through a link, maybe combined with whitelisting your identity for more private communities, and you'd be in, using a client remarkably similar to Discord once it's in a good spot. For most users, they can fully ignore the technical complexities.
Is there one very central, singular instance/server that everyone can join from, without causing performance issues (like if everyone on Lemmy was on the same instance)?
That's required for normies. Look, 90% of people won't ever move from reddit to lemmy because they'd have to CHOOSE an instance. It's not that the choice even matters TOO much. It's just the fact that there's a choice. It's a problem.
When Steve Jobs said Apple restricted your customizability and settings because users are dumb and don't know what they want, I always thought he was an arrogant dickhead. And he was an arrogant dickhead, but he was also right. Average users don't want choices, they want the OOTB experience to be as good as possible.
That's a moot point because Discord doesn't even have that. Community discovery happens almost entirely through users sharing invite links. There are third party websites that aggregate and categorize public communities with long lasting or permanent invite links, and that's about the only other option. Functionally, a user can ignore where the community is hosted. All that matters is that they get the invite they want, just like today with Discord.
I think you see it as a federated system like the Fediverse, but that's not really the case. Nostr relays are under no obligation to propagate content between each other, and for a Discord-like community, there's no real need to. Clients are free to connect to as few or as many relays as they like. For something like this, the relay used by the community would be baked into the invite so users can connect without worrying about it. From their perspective, the only real difference is that the link doesn't start with the Discord domain name.
I don't think Nostr can take on Discord. A big part of Discord is the voice chat channels, which, as far as I know, Nostr just isn't built for.
It's true that nostr as a protocol doesn't seem to have any real capacity for voice, but given a Discord-like community would probably "live" on a fixed relay, that server could also very easily provide something like a TURN server like Matrix clients use for voice and I think video support. The client could integrate support for it, and the typical clueless user wouldn't see the difference. For the more ephemeral nature of most voice communications, there's no real need to publish voice chat through Nostr events. It could be done, sort of, for any talks that need to be archived, but it's not a requirement for the vast majority of the voice chat happening on Discord anyway.
Unfortunately this is probably going to be a buy for me.
Seeing how the market reacted to the enshittification of Reddit, means that Discord probably has a lot of upside on the share price. The parallels between the two services can’t be ignored.
Run away.
Its the closest thing I've found to the discord experience, but it still feels young (I.e. buggy and laggy, UI feels off in a few places). Other than that its almost 1:1
I'm glad I deleted my account a while ago.
Another tough but not impossible migration for my crew, but there isn't a good enough alternative yet. Plus they finally got around to fixing streaming on Linux, apparently, and I'm about to swap back once my new m.2 is installed.
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That explains all the AI crap they've been chasing for a while now. They've been trying to juice up the value to make it look appealing to potential buyers because you can basically slap "AI" on anything and it instantly shoots up in value.
Discord is effectively dead if this goes through.
save