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

[ben@mastodon.lubar.me]

@xgranade people keep asking on the Steam forums for Valve to add all the features of a forum to Steam's chat window and I don't think they realize that what they're asking for is for Steam to add no new features but to move the existing ones around in confusing ways

[zyd@yap.zyd.lol]

@xgranade Discord is hardly an 'everything app'. Its a way to have a group chat with subchannels, along with voice and video/web sharing, rolled into a unified interface. I suppose that makes it 'everything'? I don't know, I feel like you underestimate how much low friction matters to maintaining even your small friend group chats.

[ryusei@techhub.social]

@xgranade

I don't mind this approach and most nerds don't, but as you said, the issue is selling this to the people who use Discord. It's free, easy, and is the home of so many large communities that would break some of the solutions we propose. The idea of having 3 different apps for calling, chatting, and long form communication is just not appealing to most people, even if I really like it. I'm pretty sure my friends would sooner text or call me before ever using a Mumble or XMPP server lol. I find Discord overwhelming and exhausting, so I hope we're really able to solve this.

[tojikomori@urusai.social]

@xgranade hmm. this makes me think federation beyond oath / user profiles is an anti-feature for these use cases 😬 (these use cases: closed-door and smallish open-door interest-specific communities having mostly unthreaded, chat-like conversations)

the best experiences i've had on Discord were on servers with firm moderation. reading your post, i realized moderation of a federated chat room can only be as good as the weakest popular instance. defederate that instance and you end up with malformed chat; keep them, and you have to accept their weak moderation.

i'd rather be in a room where moderators try to apply themselves more consistently, and if i don't like their room then i'd rather find a different room on a different server than end up in a space that overlaps with their mess.

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@tojikomori I've long said that moderation on Discord is best-in-class. I do think good moderation with federation is entirely possible, but it's much more challenging than moderating something centralized.

In the case of Matrix, part of the problem is that a room administrator has comparatively few tools for blocking bad homeservers as compared to selective defederation on the fediverse.

[tojikomori@urusai.social]

@xgranade i'd like to believe it's possible, but given the unthreaded nature of chat-like interactions i don't see how. defederation on the fediverse mostly works ok because our conversations here are so heavily threaded. even then, instance owners are cautious about defederating popular instances like mastodon.social. but imagine removing all the mastodon.social-equivalent posts from an unthreaded chat stream.

[bryanredeagle@beige.party]

@tiotasram @Canageek @xgranade It also has some pretty good administration docs.

[0xtero@ohai.social]

@Canageek @xgranade XMPP & Teamspeak + web based discussion forum used to be the default combo for lot of hobbies in the days before Discord. They never went away, but users disappeared. Still a viable solution. The problem is getting your users to leave Discord. Looking at what happened to Twitter and Reddit, it seems the cost of leaving is still higher than enduring enshittification for the majority.

[cy@fedicy.us.to]

Yeah, just use mumble for voice chats, and the Fediverse for everything else. And git to communicate with other users of some open source. (Not github.)

[ahalam@social.vivaldi.net]

@valk @xgranade

What is Discord’s core functionality? Is it the UX, and/or the way chats are organized?

[ck@chaos.social]

@xgranade I actually thought Mozilla Persona was a descent approach to the "yet another account" problem. Pitty it never really wet anywhere.

[lispi314@udongein.xyz]

@xgranade On one hand yes.

On the other libpurple is kind of entirely built around the notion of supporting dozens of separate protocols.

That's an acceptable kind of "everything program" to me.

(The source probably amounts to dozens of related programs with a more-or-less unified UI.)

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@lispi314 Yeah, no, libpurple is awesome. It's still doing one thing, though, in the sense of that comparison, as compared with how Discord also has forums, open membership channels, add-ons that run on top of video calls, calendar integration, and so forth.

That's the kind of everything-app that I think is best avoided?