The problem with leaving Discord is convincing anybody else to join you, let alone an entire social circle. There are dozens of “better” messaging platforms I’ve signed up for where I never sent or received a single message because I had nobody to add.
This is a case where you don’t actually need to “social!convince” anyone. It’s piracy, you are aiming for people who already want to go where the links are. You put the pirate stuff over IRC, people will go to the IRC. You put it on a Discourse forum, people will go to the Discourse forum. You put a catgirl to weigh their souls beforehand to check they are human, they’ll praise the catgirl.
This is why we need it to be socially unfashionable to use discord. I coined the term “Discord bro” to refer to people who love and use discord exclusively. I entourage using that language when talking about the problem online and not being understanding or compassionate towards people. Convenience is a big reason for people using it. Stigma is a reason to switch.
Some people can have a fatigue where they’re tired of just moving platform to platform. Communicating platforms is heavily saturated to where, nobody would feel that grand of a difference going from Discord to that platform when they can still do the basics. People still wouldn’t leave Facebook, even, despite that platform having largely corroded over the years.
Until Discord is like charging people to use it, people aren’t going to budge. In a world where your privacy is circumvented whether you know it or not, a lot of people just shrug their shoulders at you when you present alternatives all like “ehh, cool” before just resuming what they’re already using.
This very post showcases one of the ways it’s crappy.
Centralised control inevitably leads to enshittification (lemmy isn’t immune to that either, but at least the damage will be contained to a single instance; the only way to avoid that is a fully distributed service, or at least the ability to fork communities with their whole comment history like you would a git repository.
More importantly, though, while it might be passable as a chat app if it weren’t for the aforementioned centralisation bullshit (though IRC was completely fine in that regard and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel, much less to put a clamp on it), it’s being used to replace forums and wikis despite not being designed to or adequate for the job, locking up information that should be freely accessible and searchable into an unsearchable account-locked black hole, violating the founding principles of the world wide web and becoming a parasitic cancerous growth upon it. When a seemingly interesting project tells me to go fuck myself, sorry, to go to their discord for information instead of pointing me to their forum or wiki or even FAQ page, what I’m reading is that they couldn’t give less of a flying fuck about their users, that they’ll embrace enshittification as soon as possible, and that I should look for a better alternative.
Also, as others have already pointed out, it’s a web page wrapped in electron bloatware to maximise bloating. If you’re embarrassed that your “app” is merely a web page, either deal with it, close it, or make a proper native app, but hiding it under a locked down browser in a trenchcoat doesn’t make you any favours, it just highlights how little you think of your users, which just corroborates the previous points.
TL;DR: It’s malware all the way through, and was always designed to be, and it’s actively harmful to a free web. Kill it with fire.
That’s kind of by far the most important class of problem though. I could complain about the complexity of its notifications system, or how all the ‘servers’ are represented with image icons and it sucks to navigate and find the one you’re thinking of if you add a lot of them, but it’s all small potatoes compared to being run by an enshittifying company complying (often in advance) with terrible laws and moving to use their accumulated leverage against their users. By developing a reliance on their service you put them in charge of you, but they cannot be trusted with that.
it’s all small potatoes compared to being run by an enshittifying company complying (often in advance) with terrible laws and moving to use their accumulated leverage against their users
I don’t disagree there! That’s why I was specific in referring only to their software quality.
It was, but I made it explicitly clear that I was referring to software quality only. They’re free to clarify if they actually mean the company instead of the software.
The problem with electron apps are that they’re literally just browser windows, which require a lot of overhead that you wouldn’t need with a native application. What you’re recommending has no benefit.
The issue is that Electron apps are an acceleration of Wirth’s Law.
Still calling BS on ‘multi-GB’. Runs on mine in a few hundred MB. Not to mention you’re using the wrong terminology if you’re referring to memory usage and not storage space.
Yet another reason to leave Discord.
The problem with leaving Discord is convincing anybody else to join you, let alone an entire social circle. There are dozens of “better” messaging platforms I’ve signed up for where I never sent or received a single message because I had nobody to add.
This is a case where you don’t actually need to “social!convince” anyone. It’s piracy, you are aiming for people who already want to go where the links are. You put the pirate stuff over IRC, people will go to the IRC. You put it on a Discourse forum, people will go to the Discourse forum. You put a catgirl to weigh their souls beforehand to check they are human, they’ll praise the catgirl.
This is why we need it to be socially unfashionable to use discord. I coined the term “Discord bro” to refer to people who love and use discord exclusively. I entourage using that language when talking about the problem online and not being understanding or compassionate towards people. Convenience is a big reason for people using it. Stigma is a reason to switch.
Some people can have a fatigue where they’re tired of just moving platform to platform. Communicating platforms is heavily saturated to where, nobody would feel that grand of a difference going from Discord to that platform when they can still do the basics. People still wouldn’t leave Facebook, even, despite that platform having largely corroded over the years.
Until Discord is like charging people to use it, people aren’t going to budge. In a world where your privacy is circumvented whether you know it or not, a lot of people just shrug their shoulders at you when you present alternatives all like “ehh, cool” before just resuming what they’re already using.
Right?
I used Discord for about 15 minutes (OK, 6 months) before I could no longer tolerate it’s crappiness.
How is it crappy? Company policies aside, the software is reasonably decent.
Edit: Highly controversial and downvoted, yet the only reply is misinformation. Way to go lemmy, we’re catching up to reddit quick.
This very post showcases one of the ways it’s crappy.
Centralised control inevitably leads to enshittification (lemmy isn’t immune to that either, but at least the damage will be contained to a single instance; the only way to avoid that is a fully distributed service, or at least the ability to fork communities with their whole comment history like you would a git repository.
More importantly, though, while it might be passable as a chat app if it weren’t for the aforementioned centralisation bullshit (though IRC was completely fine in that regard and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel, much less to put a clamp on it), it’s being used to replace forums and wikis despite not being designed to or adequate for the job, locking up information that should be freely accessible and searchable into an unsearchable account-locked black hole, violating the founding principles of the world wide web and becoming a parasitic cancerous growth upon it. When a seemingly interesting project tells me to go fuck myself, sorry, to go to their discord for information instead of pointing me to their forum or wiki or even FAQ page, what I’m reading is that they couldn’t give less of a flying fuck about their users, that they’ll embrace enshittification as soon as possible, and that I should look for a better alternative.
Also, as others have already pointed out, it’s a web page wrapped in electron bloatware to maximise bloating. If you’re embarrassed that your “app” is merely a web page, either deal with it, close it, or make a proper native app, but hiding it under a locked down browser in a trenchcoat doesn’t make you any favours, it just highlights how little you think of your users, which just corroborates the previous points.
TL;DR: It’s malware all the way through, and was always designed to be, and it’s actively harmful to a free web. Kill it with fire.
That’s kind of by far the most important class of problem though. I could complain about the complexity of its notifications system, or how all the ‘servers’ are represented with image icons and it sucks to navigate and find the one you’re thinking of if you add a lot of them, but it’s all small potatoes compared to being run by an enshittifying company complying (often in advance) with terrible laws and moving to use their accumulated leverage against their users. By developing a reliance on their service you put them in charge of you, but they cannot be trusted with that.
I don’t disagree there! That’s why I was specific in referring only to their software quality.
That’s your own addition though, it isn’t entirely clear that the person you questioned was talking about issues separate from its power structure.
It was, but I made it explicitly clear that I was referring to software quality only. They’re free to clarify if they actually mean the company instead of the software.
A multi-gigabyte Electron app should not be a requirement for chat, even with voice and video, for one.
someone should reverse engineer it. i bet its full of spyware
I don’t know what you’re installing, but it takes 255MB on my phone. If you’re on a desktop, use your browser. Not that it should be much different.
The problem with electron apps are that they’re literally just browser windows, which require a lot of overhead that you wouldn’t need with a native application. What you’re recommending has no benefit.
The issue is that Electron apps are an acceleration of Wirth’s Law.
deleted by creator
You are familiar with the concept of RAM, yes?
Still calling BS on ‘multi-GB’. Runs on mine in a few hundred MB. Not to mention you’re using the wrong terminology if you’re referring to memory usage and not storage space.
Must be a windows problem. Discord is neither larger than 500mb in size, and never uses more than a gig of ram on my machine.
There’s a million good reasons to not like discord. Age verification, the advertising, the paid nitro for emojis. Why lie?
OpenSuse Slowroll using the Flatpak shows it at 1.1 GB of RAM doing nothing. Screen sharing pushes it close to 2 GB.
Because hive mind absolutism. Discord bad, everything about it must be bad.
well it isnt? just open the website in a browser.
Websites still use RAM.
You can’t be serious
and join fluxer