“Better messaging app” my bubble ass
Keeps changing ui every month for no reason Keeps adding disgracting prolife fluff that looks like shit. (Neither can be turned off) Support is abbysmal. Linux client is garbage. (Screenshare anyone) Bloated mess. Hates mods and custom clients. Too big ( had a server of 3k people, know how many people I got to switch?90) Their team us a bunch of pedophile furry porn lovers.
Fuck. Them.
I literally don’t even install it on Linux because the screen share works more often through Firefox than through their native app. That doesn’t mean it works consistently, and there’s never any sound, but at least I can sometimes make it work in the Firefox webapp. The native app is worthless.
Discord is spyware and all of my friends are the laziest most boring people for thinking they should spend their entire social lives on one app.
plus doesn’t it just feel awful to use as software? the way lemmy looks and responds to clicks is night and day versus the le epic gamer kid dark mode awful buggy weird PC web view thing discord does where like, if you want to copy and paste you have to use their little tooltip menu which sucks instead of the system one. every time you launch it it forces you to wait 10 minutes for it to download every piddly little update which probably sucks and doesn’t matter…
lemmy is buggy and has its flaws as well of course but it’s just like…this is a good solid website. good bones. like the old days.
I see a few claims of spyware in here. Not that I doubt you, but where can I find out more?
I’m not sure it’s correct to call Discord spyware, but it certainly has privacy implications. https://nerdbot.com/2023/02/24/using-discord-consider-these-security-and-privacy-factors/
So the basics of what I’ve read is:
- Discord stores all messages and media. If you delete it, or delete your account, its still there.
- Discord does not SELL that data. Instead, they hand it over to the ad companies that are the shareholders of Discord.
- Discord has lots of security flaws that are abused by third parties all the damn time.
I know its different now because Discord has nitro and there are lots if good reasons to subscribe. But Discord ran without all if that subscriber funding and in that time they probably found ways to make money off of what resources they had at the time… Information.
Discord stores all messages and media.
I mean, how else do you think they can make it so all your existing chats show up when you log into your account from a different device? Signal stores all your messages and media as well, the difference is they encrypt it on their servers. Discord doesn’t.
If you delete it, or delete your account, its still there.
That’s more problematic, and there should honestly be a law against that. Come to think of it, doesn’t that violate the GRDP? Either they have to treat their EU customers differently when it comes to this, or there’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. In the former case, you might be able to force them to delete your data by using a VPN to pretend you’re in Europe.
That’s how Reddit works/worked. Probably lemmy too though I haven’t looked too close. Deleting your account doesn’t necessarily mean the content your account created is taken with it. Things not being deleted with your account is a werid thing to cite for spy ware, lots of stuff works like that and you can delete it, just isn’t automatically deleted with your account.
Discord having security flaws does not make it spy ware. There have been some pretty severe security issues but almost every one I’ve heard of has its roots in a gullible user running some sort of application on their machine or scanning a QR code with the Discord app which makes it extremely clear you are logging into another device… The only one I’m aware of that I found very concerning was iirc a werid video player vulnerability that could yank your token.
I highly doubt Discord is giving advertisers access to the messages on their platform. That sounds insanely illegal and also largly a waste of time cause if they are doing that it doesn’t work very well.
Why do you read Lemmy, while discounting the opinions and perspectives of other people here?
Alright, replies to my initial comment got me motivated to look for the receipts:
https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-stores-billions-of-messages
- yes discord saves every message forever, to an extent that they are almost certainly breaking GDPR laws.
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/rsxeee/you_should_never_use_discord_and_heres_why/
https://meaww.com/discord-who-owns-jason-citron-microsoft-acquisition-company-net-worth-10-b-talks
I heard this argument so long ago that basically Discord doesnt sell data but instead shares it with shareholders, which includes many ad companies, including tencent. They probably give this data to their linked partners like twitch and Microsoft. Discord still isnt profitable and they are a public company, they are expected to exhaust every opportunity to give value to those shareholders.
Fuck Discord. It stole entire communities from us. It is the opposite of privacy. And, subjectively, their client applications are just a horrible mess.
Sorry how did it steal communities? If communities migrated to Discord, the communities saw value in using it.
The UI/UX is a convoluted mess. Whenever I say this elsewhere I get downvoted to oblivion and people tell me you just gotta learn it.
Well, yea, that’s the problem. I shouldn’t have to “learn” a UI, things should be apparent and obvious.
There’s not even a useful intro the first time you launch it. Yea, it shows you what the buttons are for, but never explains the concept behind things. Guess you’re supposed to intuit that stuff?
Well, yea, that’s the problem. I shouldn’t have to “learn” a UI, things should be apparent and obvious.
Counterpoint: vim is very well liked for it’s UI, but there’s a very steep learning curve.
To your point, though, the learning process ideally ought to be seamless and linear; each new thing you can do with the application should be mostly obvious given what you already know about the UI, not force you to learn everything from scratch or do work to learn it (unless you’re into that kind of thing). I don’t think Discord is the worst offender of this rule, but they could make it better.
I do agree with this, however I also have to say being someone who’s been on the canary branch and has the newest version of the new UI once you learn it it’s so much better mobile wise doing literally anything it just makes sense and goes with the mobile flow a lot better then the old ui was, plus it has a side bar which is really nice… The beginning new ui with the guildbar at the bottom was atrocious though, so glad they scrapped that model.
Also it used to be fast, but got bloated and lost its greatest advantage. They abandoned every design choice that made them popular in the first place.
My discord client (the official app on both PC and android) are blazing fast.
I’m not sure what everyone is complaining about in the comments. I use discord pretty much constantly and at all times.
Nitro ads? It’s 1 very minor ad when you launch the app. Then there’s no more ads.
Not as good as forums? Bull. I get an answer to my question immediately on discord. I may never find the answer to my question by sifting through dozens of pages of forum posts of someone having a similar but not congruent problem to mine.
Can’t find information? Discord has integrated forums with a search feature in each server.
Bloated? How so? You have an inbox and you have your list of servers on the left hand side. Okay, some of the options are a little obscured, but it’s not like Discord is doing anything except connecting like minded people via text and voice/video chat.
I sincerely don’t know what anyone is talking about. But part of me thinks it’s because discord doesn’t have E2E encryption and yall wanna discuss some naughty shit.
Nitro ads? It’s 1 very minor ad when you launch the app. Then there’s no more ads.
Recently I launched Discord on desktop and got big splash screen screaming about new shop items. Earlier, I’ve got constant popups about new nitro perks, new avatar decorations, new app icons.
Not as good as forums? Bull. I get an answer to my question immediately on discord. I may never find the answer to my question by sifting through dozens of pages of forum posts of someone having a similar but not congruent problem to mine.
You may get an answer immediately, but this answer will be lost after some messages. Someone with the same question may ask it again instead of searching. People in chat may get tired to answer over and over. On forums you have one question 10 years ago and answer to it. No need to ask again.
Can’t find information? Discord has integrated forums with a search feature in each server.
Discord’s internal search is very limited, not as good as Google. Discord is very hard to archive, so at some point information will be lost.
Bloated? How so? You have an inbox and you have your list of servers on the left hand side.
If you have many servers, you’ll get many notifications and new messages badges. You’ll also have many useless channels, which you need to manually mute or hide.
it’s because discord doesn’t have E2E encryption and yall wanna discuss some naughty shit.
I don’t really think encryption is mandatory for every chat app, it has some problems with transferring messages to other devices. If you’re working on some project, you probably don’t want it to be leaked, so you’ll encrypt your messages.
Discord has gotten much worse about pushing Nitro everywhere, and I can’t be the only one that sees it more than just on launch.
Can’t find information?
Right. Discord itself is another silo, and a public forum is going to be better for just about any non-ephemeral type of info (pretty much everything Discord gets used for that is not messaging.) There are a lot of communities that decided with the fucking of reddit to move to Discord, which just changes which silo the info is at, and in this case is less accessible because it’s not publicly searchable, indexable, etc. Things like the Internet Archive exist for a reason and have massive utility, and they can glean nothing from Discord. If Discord dies, so dies all of the info with it.
Bloated?
Discord, and like basically all of the modern Electron messaging apps (Slack’s probably hiding in a corner trying to avoid getting noticed in this conversation) are massively bloated. These are basically ridiculously overgrown IRC clients which we had back in 1998 that cover about 90% of the functionality of Discord, except those IRC clients used to run in single digit mb’s of RAM and CPU use was basically negligible and they launched more or less instantly. Can’t launch Discord on either an M1 MacBook nor my I9 PC without it taking long enough to load for me to grab a coffee.
Anyway, Discord’s original intended use of like realtime conversation is fine, but yeah the clients are garbage and as a replacement for reddit/lemmy/other forum software, it’s just choosing the wrong tool for the job. Even for the use cases it does have, it’s been a solved problem since the 90’s, but those solutions didn’t allow for some tech bros or VCs to make a bunch of money. It’s always been amazing to me that either Discord or Slack even have a business model.
Oh, and personally I find Discord in particular atrociously designed, and Slack not much better. How either handle threading are enough to make me not want to bother with threading, for example. Discord is fantastically ugly also imo.
Discord is an absolute piece of garbage, it’s not a good messaging app, definitely not a good place to host a community (seriously, I don’t understand why some communities saw Discord as an alternative after the Reddit API changes), and most importantly, it’s spyware. The company doesn’t have a business model and it was founded by a guy who is notorious for creating random shit that’s not economically sustainable at all. I don’t understand why anyone would use this shit. This video outlines everything that’s wrong with Discord: https://youtube.com/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU
What part of Matrix is proprietary? It’s not an app, instead, it’s an open protocol that can be used by anyone to build a messaging app or host a server.
Matrix isn’t proprietary, but effectively controlled by a single VC funded startup. We don’t need a bloated re-invention of existing internet standards anyways. They should just make a better XMPP client.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
it’s a good message app, it’s how I stay in contact with the person I asked for commission artwork. So you are wrong
The problem is convincing other people to switch as well. There’s no point in me using Matrix if all of the people I want to communicate with only want to use Discord.
I don’t understand why Revolt decided to reinvent the wheel and not use Matrix. They could’ve been a great alternative server and/or UI.
Why don’t you ask the Matrix team why they decided to re-invent XMPP and add a stupid HTTP API?
Because they didn’t reinvent xmpp, they reinvented Google Wave.
A lot of Matrix.org is inspired by what Wave could have been - although we are running late with threading (but some work is happening currently there). From our perspective, one of the biggest gaps was the lack of bridging in Wave to other existing comms interfaces (eg email) - as well as the quirky UX.
Sadly, can’t get my server to make the jump. Doesn’t help that Revolt is missing a few features and Matrix just… Doesn’t work at all for the flow of the server
Right now a bridge bot does heavy lifting for when Discord does piss off enough users to cause everybody to jump over
