Agreed. Live chat has its place for certain things, but for other things a forum type interface is better suited.
That post seems to be missing.
FaceDeer 5 points 3 years ago
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.
sailsperson 7 points 3 years ago
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.
noodlejetski 27 points 3 years ago
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.
noodlejetski 20 points 3 years ago
the only reason I can think of is "to spite me".
Kaldo 7 points 3 years ago
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.
lucien 6 points 3 years ago
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.
Stormyfemme 2 points 3 years ago
Discord is a replacement for Skype and IRC. People use it as a substitute for all that plus forums and sometimes an entire website and it’s exhausting.
jimmyjoners 54 points 3 years ago
I just hope this is the start of an internet renaissance with less corporate control.
h14h 18 points 3 years ago
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.
orsetto 11 points 3 years ago
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.
UltimoGato 6 points 3 years ago
The other limit was the speed of your dial up modem.
Lowbird 1 point 3 years ago
People do remember it with rose colored glasses - there were fewer niche communities, fewer lgtbq+ communities, slower connections, 240p video at best (so much anime I somehow watched like that... Sorry anime), sexism and racism in a more general way vs now as like society and particularly techie culture at the time in general, not being able to use the internet when someone needed to use the phone, and so on - but while we gained a lot with time that we take for granted now, we did lose stuff, too.
I hope we can bring back something of the good that was lost, now and in the future, as well as find new good things.
At least, surely, there will always be cat pics.
mbryson 13 points 3 years ago
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.
Lowbird 3 points 3 years ago
I had the same issue with Mastodon when I tried to get into that, although perhaps worse because I was never into twitter either (thank goodness, honestly).
Lemmy though feels like old reddit from before the Digg exodus, if anything, or like other old forums that reddit drove either out of business or at least out of sight. It feels familiar and nostalgic and fresh at the same time, and there's an element of hope to it to because it's not just another corporate monster.
jimmyjoners 2 points 3 years ago
I'm not convinced you need corporate money though. I think grants/user contributions (add the awards concept like Reddit has?) can get you pretty far a la Wikipedia.
alehel 47 points 3 years ago
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.
duncesplayed 27 points 3 years ago
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.
OneRedFox 17 points 3 years ago
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.
Klinkertinlegs 15 points 3 years ago
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).
Klinkertinlegs 5 points 3 years ago
I hope so.
Stormyfemme 0 points 3 years ago
Reddit blew up when it got decent mobile apps. If the fediverse (is that really what we’re calling it?) gets decent mobile app support that helps simplify the onboarding process and connection to communities there’s a much higher chance.
quantumantics 2 points 3 years ago
@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.
yistdaj 2 points 3 years ago
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.
amki 1 point 3 years ago
undefined> 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.
Fearofthefamiliar 44 points 3 years ago
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
dzaffaires 9 points 3 years ago
Why is (part of) their userbase dissatisfied? I know almost nothing of instagram.
Fearofthefamiliar 12 points 3 years ago
I'm not very familiar with Instagram either, but it's infamously bad for its users' mental health, it's recommendatiom algorithm is unreliable, and it collects a lot of data. Honestly it's possible that a lot of its regular users do like it and that I just don't tend to hear from them
nxtequal 7 points 3 years ago
As others have said, ads. The app is also overrun with spambots posting links to scams to buy followers or ForEx or whatever they're selling. The algorithm is really, really bad, at least if you're an artist of any kind. IG was one of the first apps to attempt to steal TikTok's short-form video format, which means it's hard to get your content out there if you're just posting images. And there are a LOT of content reposters.
honk 35 points 3 years ago
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.
ram 31 points 3 years ago
Github, but Gitea's not yet federated, though they're working on it.
crank 3 points 3 years ago
I have been on/off gitlab for a few years but they do sometimes weird things that drive me nuts. For example last time i check you cant search a repo issues without logging in.
One of main things i use repo sites for is to troubleshoot and searching issues is a great way. Why put a barrier to that? I cant imagine it is a big server load. Just dickish.
jon 2 points 3 years ago
You can search issues without being logged in, but that setting has to be enabled in a repo or group's permissions (Settings > General > Visibility, project features, permissions). Project visibility has to be Public, and issues should be set to Everyone with Access. I think tissues are defaulted to private or internal by default.
greedytacothief 5 points 3 years ago
That's big, I'm stoked for that if it happens.
liontigerwings 36 points 3 years ago
They're the safest. It has the highest cost to run of any other site pretty much. The amount of data uploaded is staggering.
They may deserve to be replaced, but a competitor has the highest hurdles to overcome. You pretty much need to be another tech giant or the public needs to have a new perspective on how to pay for content rather than ads.
jimmyjoners 13 points 3 years ago
Yeah only way I see it working is if it's more of a peer to peer / torrenting concept. As in while you use it, you are "seeding" other videos / content as well.
throwaway 19 points 3 years ago
PeerTube is exactly this, it's federated and uses WebTorrent. https://joinpeertube.org/
teawrecks 7 points 3 years ago
And then you run into the challenge of moderation.
If it's possible to be handed random videos to seed that you've never watched, criminals would take advantage of that to upload illicit content that no one wants hosted...
It may only work to seed videos that you've explicitly whitelisted. Ex. Maybe "liking" the video also automatically volunteers some of your bandwidth to seed it. But then you will still open yourself up to legal disputes from copyright trolls. Just like YT, they would still be able to go around spamming C&Ds at everyone, and who is going to have time or money to fight it? Most would just take the video down immediately.
And that's all assuming that exposing your IP directly to the public doesn't leave you vulnerable.
On top of all of that, one of YT's biggest values is that you can view most content in a browser while not logged in. Which I'm guessing is where a huge number of views come from. The core users would just be footing the bill for a bunch of freeloaders. But assuming everything else is solved, maybe it's worth the tradeoff...?
amki 2 points 3 years ago
I internetted in a time where sharing an audio file was a real undertaking, maybe with better infrastructure the size of video won't be a problem.
Maybe it's me being short-sighted but I don't see video going far beyond 8k for almost all applications.
lemillionsocks 26 points 3 years ago
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.
Laser 1 point 3 years ago
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.
local_taxi_fix 5 points 3 years ago
Teamspeak has a pretty slick new version that looks very much like discord. Not fediverse but pretty easy to self-host.
d4r1us_drk 24 points 3 years ago
For Discord we have Revolt (almost a 1:1 clone) and obviously Matrix and XMPP.
rnd 14 points 3 years ago
Oh BTW, the Cinny web client for Matrix does a very good job replicating the general layout of Discord without being an outright clone. There's even a feature to "Categorize Subspaces" that lets you precisely replicate the server/category/channel structure of Discord using Matrix spaces.
d4r1us_drk 1 point 3 years ago
I have never tried Cinny, time to give it a try
swnt 11 points 3 years ago
I think Discord is still too new and still in the phase where they're baiting users on their platform with superious UX and "verything is easy". They haven't yet started shitting on their users. But who knows ^^
d4r1us_drk 5 points 3 years ago
They are already shitting on their users, recently they disabled permanent invite links for non-comminuty servers, if you want to get permanent invite links, you need to make your server a community, which I think it will make it public (not sure). In the other hand, Discord is still a giant cesspool of malware.
kresten 2 points 3 years ago
Also just the blatant push for introducing more and more nitro-only feature bloat into the average users UI. I haven't ever seen the gift button being used, but it's still right there on the text bar, where it serves no purpose.
teawrecks 5 points 3 years ago
Nice, was just looking for something! Will have to try it out. Discord on Linux barely works. And when I stream gameplay to friends, sound doesn't work out of the box, so I have to use pipewire to combine it with my mic's stream.
d4r1us_drk 9 points 3 years ago
Take a look, it even supports bots. And yes I know I use light mode.
teawrecks 4 points 3 years ago
It's not quite clear to me how hosting works. If I want to set up whatever the analog to a "discord server" is for me and my friends, do I need to host it myself? Or can I join an existing instance and then create "servers" on there? Or since it's using matrix, do I join a matrix instance and this is just a front end for matrix that works like discord? misread your original post.
I feel like the support page on their site is pretty sparse at the moment.
d4r1us_drk 3 points 3 years ago
Revolt is it's own thing, it's not Matrix. You just create an account at https://app.revolt.chat and start using it, just like Discord. With Matrix you can do the same at app.element.io, you don't need to host your own server, even though that is possible.
d4r1us_drk 3 points 3 years ago
Revolt is really amazing, the only thing that it's missing (for now) it's E2EE, the team is working on implementing it as far as I know.
NattyNatty2x4 2 points 3 years ago
Discord tried doing NFTs?
d4r1us_drk 2 points 3 years ago
I know, you can still self host it tho, don't know how good is that option.
d4r1us_drk 2 points 3 years ago
Yup, that's a problem
d4r1us_drk 2 points 3 years ago
It's the closet thing there is to Discord while being open source. It's not federated though and it still doesn't support E2EE at the moment. If you want to give it a try, visit https://app.revolt.chat
Spellblade 23 points 3 years ago
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.
PoorlyShaveApe 10 points 3 years ago
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.
cstine 10 points 3 years ago
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.
PolDelta 35 points 3 years ago
I would love for something to replace YouTube, especially something in the Fediverse, but video unfortunately has much higher storage and bandwidth requirements, so it's hard to imagine that not being totally cost prohibitive at high levels of traffic, even if it's split across so many different servers. I'd love to be wrong on that, though.
Menachem 15 points 3 years ago
The other problem with YouTube/twitch alts as opposed to reddit/twitter is that a lot of the creators people like the most actually rely on those platforms to serve ads in order to make a living. That content can't exist on FOSS systems unless they somehow manage to attract advertisers, which seems next to impossible
amki 6 points 3 years ago
I feel like the trend is going towards serving ads in stream anyways, the twitch ad/ad blocking war is/(was?) ongoing last I checked.
I don't see why that would be impossible in a federated setting.
Menachem 5 points 3 years ago
While some streamers could get direct sponsors, that option is really only available to a select few of the most popular ones, and would still deprive them of the extra income they currently get from ads served by the platform. You'd have to convince advertisers to trust that each instance is going to serve their ads fairly and not additionally host content they don't like. A system to distribute ads between instances would be complicated enough to write in the first place; these sites have a lot of QoL updates to push before they even think about doing something like that.
croobat 6 points 3 years ago
Yeah, video is just that much more expensive to store. I am sure a lot of current Lemmy instances are still lighter that some "cat meowing for 3 hours" video. And let's not talk about all of those channels that upload dozens of gigabytes of data on a daily basis. I fear we may never have a suitable replacement to YouTube (that it's not just another asshole mega corporation).
fruitywelsh 6 points 3 years ago
Yeah, thats why strata like peertube reducing costs with p2p sharing helps, or lbry (rip, I think) attempt to put in donations and tipping directly in was key for those to gain any traction.
Going further in cost reduction is what I am hopeful for. Better AV1 support and IPFS support are two develops I am following. A more radical approach may be using latent space generation from AI models like stable diffusion to generate frames locally instead of storing and transmitting perfect copies.
Nankeru 23 points 3 years ago
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?
kalleboo 24 points 3 years ago
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
duncesplayed 9 points 3 years ago
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.
peteriskrisjanis 10 points 3 years ago
@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.
duncesplayed 6 points 3 years ago
That is a good point actually! That means they would have the freedom to move over to a new platform.
hampter 21 points 3 years ago
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.
peteriskrisjanis 4 points 3 years ago
@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.
hampter 8 points 3 years ago
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.
DanielPlainview 6 points 3 years ago path: 0 44661 45007, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 0
daan 1 point 3 years ago
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.
sj_zero 3 points 3 years ago
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.
daan 3 points 3 years ago
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.
noodlejetski 7 points 3 years ago
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.
makingStuffForFun 6 points 3 years ago
Tiktok is Chinese military funded. It's not going away.
Lowbird 1 point 3 years ago
Even though Tiktok isn't a one-to-one equivalent of youtube, I wouldn't be surprised to see a closer youtube equivalent come out of China, Russia, or even North Korea (the people are poor mainly because the country puts all its wealth in the military, and it already has extensive foreign espionage and media manipulation arms - if it wanted to, it could pour a lot into controlling a major video platform to get ahold off all that data).
In a more hopeful world, maybe a different small country might invest in it on a governmental level, similarly.
Saudi Arabia is already heavily investing in the gaming industry, in an attempt to diversify their economic reliance away from just their oil.
Qatar already has a lot invested in, and profit from, aljazeera (state-owned news) poking at all its neighbors' human rights abuses, too.
Saudi Arabia - or another, unexpected country - could absolutely do the same with English-language social media, especially given the current lack of competition for youtube. Government funding could scale that barrier and snag a source of income and an espionage advantage for the host country.
Especially since Saudi Arabia, though rife with human rights abuses, is allied with the U.S. and thus less likely to become the target of a "ban tiktok specifically" push.
(sidenote: the "ban tiktok" bills would ban a lot more than tiktok, including VPNs - that subject's a whole can of worms too).
RandomVanGloboii 1 point 3 years ago
YouTube has been enshittified long ago, especially after the Adpoclaypse
lhx 22 points 3 years ago
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.
nodiet 15 points 3 years ago
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.
lhx 1 point 3 years ago
Oh I agree it's hard. AV1 helps, but until we get even better compression codecs, it's just not going to happen. Eventually, though, you'd think storage and bandwith costs will get down to such a level that we think of 1080p videos the same as text messages now.
croobat 20 points 3 years ago
Discord already kinda sucks, I find the app not nearly as smooth as before, and it tries so hard to choke nitro into you, it also has so many bloaty extra features.
Maybe it's just the use I try to get from it. Discord has evolved more towards community channels, and for that (at least the bit I tried to use them) it seems fairly decent. Most of the time I just wanna use it to play with 2 or 3 friends, I could definitely use a minimalistic app that does just that.
amki 9 points 3 years ago
Wait a little until https://github.com/vector-im/element-call / https://call.element.io/ is done. It's not polished yet so I can't really recommend it but once it is properly intergrated in Matrix this will be my go-to solution.
honk 8 points 3 years ago
If you really only want group calls for a handful of people I can only recommend Signal for that. Just create a group chat in there. You can start a call and select it to not ring on the other peoples end and then you can just hop in and out just like a discord vc. It has a desktop app for Mac/Linux/Windows too so you could use it while gaming too. The app is not pretty but it's minimalistic and it works. Everything is end to end enrypted even the calls and video calls.
You could even screenshare with it but i never tested how well that works. It's free and open source. It is not federated however. But still the most easy to use and best secure and private messenger out there.
Lowbird 5 points 3 years ago
I want lightweight-as-possible app that just does voice chat for games AND facecam chat for games, now that so many people have those. With little overlay boxes for your friends, similar to what streamers do. Partly because this would also enable deaf people to play with sign language chat.
sub_ 6 points 3 years ago
They were trying to disallow third party ads for streamers https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65834521.amp
rothaine 1 point 3 years ago
Charlie has a good summary: https://youtu.be/-5zGuFPxW88
They've since walked back a bit, but the writing is now on the wall.
OverfedRaccoon 3 points 3 years ago
As for YouTube, Odysee exists and has a mirroring for YouTube uploads for content creators, but it's mainly just tech and crypto people at the moment - yes, there's others, but most everyday people have never even heard of LBRY or Odysee.
SillyLilJester 3 points 3 years ago path: 0 63687 67212 73889, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 2
RedComet91 2 points 3 years ago
As annoying as this is, I think we need to all accept that this is the reality with all alternative platforms. It's up to us to outnumber these people.
OverfedRaccoon 1 point 3 years ago
I haven't seen that personally - for me, that experience was on Rumble. I think that's where a lot went. My experience on Odysee has been largely tech/crypto, DistroTube, The Linux Experiment, Linux and privacy stuff. But I guess everyone's experience varies. I went in subbing to those channels, so maybe I got served more of the same.
OneRedFox 18 points 3 years ago
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.
Andreas 11 points 3 years ago
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.
darvit 16 points 3 years ago
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.
Andreas 2 points 3 years ago
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?
darvit 3 points 3 years ago
There's a page explaining it in more detail, but basically, all servers need to verify the complete chain of state events in order to trust data and messages about the room. This is because otherwise malicious servers could make bogus state events and messages that are not valid, like scam messages and unauthorized room setting changes.
In matrix, when you create a new room, or edit room settings, a state event is made. The same is true for changes in user permissions like who is admin, and for settings related to who can join the room.
The last one is key, because this means that in order for servers to trust other servers' messages, they need to verify if the user that sent the message joined the room in a legit way.
In order to do this, when a user joins a room it must cause a state event. However, this makes it easy for people to abuse, by joining a room with a ton of accounts, it spams state events to all connected servers, which bogs them all down because they are required to process all state events in order for chain of trust to function.
Even for rooms with non-malicious usage, servers can still be bogged down if the room is very big, which might be what happened with you or your friend joining a big public room.
Basically, in my opinion, Matrix cannot be used with public rooms as it stands today.
amki 2 points 3 years ago
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.
Bubbline 17 points 3 years ago
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
DawnOfRiku 4 points 3 years ago
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).
cambionn 16 points 3 years ago
Well some Discord channels are already synchronising their content with Matrix, using the room feature to mimic the channel structure. OpenStreetMaps does this for example. I wouldn't mind that normalising as at least, it stops me from needing to use Discord myself. But the fact it still synchronises back to Discord is, of course, not ideal. Small steps to the right direction I guess.
Replacement would be nice, but I mainly use it for some local communities which I expect will be the last to migrate. They barely got a start on Discord...
RandomVanGloboii 2 points 3 years ago
You can synchronize with Matrix? How?
cambionn 2 points 3 years ago
With a bidge like the guy below said. I think the owner of de Discord server needs to set it up tho, and I don't run any Discord servers, so I don't know the details. But I noticed sone servers do it.
swnt 15 points 3 years ago
Personal Knowledge Management Apps / Note-Taking Apps.
After EverNote and Co. many people got angry / fustrated.
Since I found https://obsidian.md I'm actually happy with everything - as the plugin's are open-source, it's flexible and there is no lock-in as it's all simply markdown format. ObsidianMD is just a markdown viewer - but with superious UX. There are also alternatives to that like Logseq though.
After seeing this, I cannot imagine anymore to use something like Google Notes, OneNote, etc.
s900mhz 3 points 3 years ago
Also shoutout to Logseq, love this app. Open Source and privacy focused. https://logseq.com/
crank 2 points 3 years ago
I have reluctantly been using obsidian after trying every floss alternative. It is portable, easy to start with and there is a rich plugin community. Unlike joplin, the closest floss competitor, it actually stores files in plain markdown so if you need to access them through another tool you can. Obsidian adheres to the unix philosophy better than joplin. :(
They are both electron which sucks but at least with obsidian you do not have to be running the application all the time because of the plain markdown thing.
Goodtoknow 2 points 3 years ago
There's a tasks extension that will show all of the tasks across any note in a sidebar
Gray 9 points 3 years ago
True. It does look like Peertube has some instances with videos hosted on them. But yeah, storage and bandwidth costs would be much tougher problems to solve than for lemmy as soon as it started to scale up.
rgb_leds_are_love 12 points 3 years ago
A logical extension of your post really makes you think just how much of social media post-2007 was set up on fundamentally unsustainable business models. Engagement is not a good business model! Making investors pay for users was always a bad choice and sooner or later, investors were going to ask for their money back!
It will be interesting to see how social media changes post-2023. With Meta almost vestigial (except Instagram and marketplace), Twitter and Twitch absolutely clowning away their positions, what's next? Jeff Bezos and/or Daddy Sundar reinvesting in social media?
I highly recommend watching Louis Rossmann's video on Reddit - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqL-G3GFqRU&t=728s
CynAq 4 points 3 years ago
Absolutely right. What makes or breaks any social media platform is the ease of forming large communities (which goes hand in hand with the number of total active users) first and the user experience second.
"Fediverse" seems to suffer greatly from a UX point of view, mostly due to decentralization, which creates this isolation effect for newcomers.
Take mastodon vs twitter for example. For someone used to signing up for twitter and instantly gaining access to virtually everything the platform has to offer, mastodon has a big threshold to jump over before you can have a twitter-like experience. At least it feels like it until you get used to the experience. That's still the biggest barrier in front of large scale adoption of decentralized social media platforms.
negativenull 9 points 3 years ago
Stackoverflow (not quite a huge tech company) is edging.
milan 9 points 3 years ago
but that i think would rather make matrix servers go boom ... literally i am afraid when i look at the various bugs and performance bottlenecks of synapse, which at least right now is the most popular server
Haunting_Tale_5150 6 points 3 years ago
I think it would take a while for any social media to have one, then again I didn't expect Reddit to shit the bed the way it has. If there's any that I think will be specifically fast, it would be Twitch.
Youtube is the least likely, no matter how many times it shits the bed, people stick to it because all the other video sharing services simply aren't supported by the big content creators.
noodlejetski 7 points 3 years ago
as soon as youtube blocks newpipe, exodus to peertube may happen
I'm willing to bet that the percentage of people watching Youtube via Newpipe is at least an order of magnitude smaller than of people browsing reddit through third party clients.
BackOnMyBS 6 points 3 years ago
With people learning about Fediverse, I'm guessing Instagram. Why? Because IG has become overwhelmed with influencers and TikTok-like junk. The initial wave of people into Pixelfed will be techies that want a break from that scene. Their friends will hear about it. The friends that just want to have an IG-like experience to share their pictures with friends while avoiding all the rest of the noise will slowly transfer over. Once they hit the critical mass, the switch will happen. This will take at least another year or two.
spoonful 3 points 3 years ago
Yeah instagram is utter garbage. From photo quality to the current environment. Pixelfed is a really awesome federated alternative though I don't really see how it could resist the same fate if it ever got as much mass.
isosphere 1 point 3 years ago
I think there's a missing link in your forecast: what will make people who are not techies, who currently use IG, stop using it, leaving behind their contacts at IG? They aren't going to want to use two platforms, so it'll have to be a clean break. I don't think hearing about alternatives from techies is going to do it, IMO. It's how a lot of people keep in contact.
Network effect is really sticky. Most of the users of the internet were once techie folk. Now it's everyone.
BackOnMyBS 1 point 3 years ago
that's a good point. people will want to leave IG to get away from the influencing culture of IG once they hear about a cleaner alternative that they can use to block out the influencing. that's going to be the slowest part. I'm likening it to how people left MySpace for FB to get away from the madness that was MYSpace for the less cluttered and more exclusive scene that was FB.
another aspect to this that I didn't mention is the integration with the Fediverse that will be popularized by the Reddit migration. once people see that their Lemmy, kbin, Mastodon, and Pixelfed can be accessed from a common location using a common language, they will see it as simpler, more integrated, and with more control over their social media with a rejection of corporate BS. this depends on how well the Fediverse integrates the different media and advances in phone apps.
additionally, I've ran the models (X^2, regression [y^2 = ax^2 + b^2], confirmatory factor analysis, global environmental multiscale, and Tyra Banks). the stats show a range of 5%-75% probability with a ±10% error depending on how I define the degrees of Farenheit (mostly went with radian degrees👌).
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
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.
save