Hot take: looking for a single silver-bullet Discord replacement is solving the wrong problem.

[canageek@wandering.shop]

@xgranade I mean in terms of it's a major complication that makes moderating and the technical knowledge need to make everything work much more significant.

I've heard advice against doing that because Matrix clients assume you're federated and don't support more than one user account

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@Canageek I've heard advice against partially federating (e.g. blocking some instances but not others from using federation endpoints) as that can cause rooms to get into inconsistent and malformed states, but I've not seen any advice to the effect that disabling federation *entirely* is bad? Perhaps I'm missing something, though.

[canageek@wandering.shop]

@xgranade So it *works* but apparently it's a problem as most clients assume you are only going to use one login, so if you want to log into two servers they have to log out of one and log into the other every time

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@Canageek Ah, got it, sorry for misunderstanding. And yeah, multiaccount support in clients is... not great.

[canageek@wandering.shop]

@xgranade Yeah, I'm going to wait a few weeks to see what happens when people who know what they are doing try them various software but right now I'm leaving towards Zulip or IRC or XMPP on my own server for text and TeamSpeak or Mumble for voice.

(I've already rented a TeamSpeak server for about $3/month but it's text chat is worse then IRC)

[slowfallinward@ihatebeinga.live]

@xgranade Yes, the problem that makes discord hard to replace is everything-in-one-place. People hate the idea of dropping this but it is how everything worked before, and it *did* work that way. I *remember* it working. I kind of hate the repurposing of that streaming-service meme as if once you say 3 different programs people can't process it anymore x_x

I guess one of the things that needs to get better standalone is multi-person video calling, but the *rest* of what Discord provides can 100% be replaced now if people don't demand it to be all together with identical UI

[mr_daemon@untrusted.website]

@xgranade A great example of this is DeltaChat being essentially ideal at replacing the "group chat with friends" part of the equation, while being delightfully straightforward to self-host and demanding almost no resources.

It doesn't fit the "big public rooms" part just as neatly, like IRC ou Discord would, however, and I think that's ok.

I'm at the point in my life where I don't really need "decentralized" I just need federated with a hearty dose of data sovereignty. If that happens to come from a handful of good things, I'm ok with that.

[elexia@catcatnya.com]

@xgranade that's what we used to have. don't understand why after a few years of discord this is suddenly horrid and something that "non-technical users can't be expected to be able to use". "non-technical users" did that for over a decade prior. probably including some of the folks that now tell us it's impossible to expect anyone to not sell their soul and firstborn child for a supposedly simpler to use everything app.

[sophie144p@mastodon.catgirl.cloud]

@xgranade I like what you have to say on this and it changed my perspective on it, thanks for putting it into words.

[apophis@kill-corporations.enterprises]

@xgranade the everything app is the online company town

[daedalouseros@hollow.raccoon.quest]

@xgranade@wandering.shop the worst part is: Stoat has all the same major features save video calls and screen share. But that won't matter to most people, because it's "not quite there yet." The solution is staring them in the face, it's just not getting done fast enough for the average person.

[dragonfi@social.jsteuernagel.de]

@reflex @xgranade

Interesting. I wonder why non-tech people would have issues with multiple apps though. If at anything, it would be a better UX metaphor to their day to day life. (My personal experience is that making them use the device itself is the hard part.)

In my house:
everything -> computer

In my grandmother's house:
call someone -> phone
watch a video -> TV
take notes -> pen and paper
solve a puzzle -> puzzle magazine
look up a recipe -> recipe book
look at photo of grandkids -> album book

[tiotasram@kolektiva.social]

@Canageek @xgranade Zulip seems reasonable FWIW. I use it for classroom stuff (I'm not the main person responsible) and it seems reasonable for the chat side of Discord.

[raffkarva@sunny.garden]

@Canageek

I recommended having a look at SimpleX. Open source; option to self host; chat rooms with message playback. No emails, phone numbers, or randomly applied usernames, therefore fully anonymous. P2P and group E2EE (video) calls.

I haven't self hosted it (yet), but using SimpleX and Flux infrastructure has been a breeze so far.

@xgranade

[jadedblueeyes@tech.lgbt]

@Canageek @xgranade FWIW on desktop you can just use multiple container tabs / profiles / etc, and mobile is getting multi-account in at least a couple clients (eg. behind a lab in element x)

[morningsong@weirder.earth]

@xgranade I deeply, DEEPLY miss pidgin. Because it could do both. It could talk to your friends on AIM. It could talk to your friends on MSN. It could talk to your friends on yahoo. You had everything in one place. You didn't have to compromise.

[kat_cal2@ck.catwithaclari.net]

@xgranade@wandering.shop that's not the point
the point is that there are several important defining features in discord that no functional project has replicated because everyone wants to copy whatsapp instead

[valk@social.treehouse.systems]

@xgranade That’s what I do now, different people on different apps. The problem isn’t that none of the apps do enough of discord’s weird secondary features, it’s that they do not replace discord’s core functionality in a way that works for the kind of people i communicate with on discord at all.

[flesh@transfem.social]

@kat_cal2@ck.catwithaclari.net @xgranade@wandering.shop I don't feel that's quite true, though I would ask what these particular features are.

[kat_cal2@ck.catwithaclari.net]

@flesh@transfem.social @xgranade@wandering.shop the most important thing that i want from a replacement is the structure of servers; not group chats, but the whole deal, with the division into channels (especially now with the extra channel types but that's not that important) and roles with permissions.