this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The "enshittification" continues

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Matrix has always been a great alternative. Any service that is owned by a corporation will eventually be monetized. I never liked discord in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Matrix rules, but I can’t get my friends to leave Discord because that’s where all their friends are, they run servers, etc. it sucks.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Getting friends to leave facebook messenger for discord 8 years ago already, never underestimate how much the average person can ignore. For the time being I'm on discord, but if they start cracking down on small servers I'll be spinning up alternatives overnight

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

My instance is discord bridged. When discord user wants to voice chat, I fire up discord just for that.

But my discord text chats and servers? All in matrix baby.

Makes it a lot easier to convice friends to swap, too. Especially when I show them that telegram and whatsapp can be bridged, too.

Everything in one app.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

The trick is to not have friends sucka

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I really need to get on Matrix, but I haven't put the time to learn it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The Element app for it works pretty well. There are some edges to smooth, but it functions.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Exclusive memes" this is hell.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's an exotic synonym for "dank."

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Discord. God I hated how I was one of my friends that got everyone to switch, and now I'm the first one out. I don't think they have added a feature that hasn't been an annoyance for a while, and after a year of no mobile notifications working and their staff being incompetent (especially if you are a free user) I'm just over it.

Everyone worshipping it is kind of a turn off too. It's a service y'all, I've had everything from AIM to Slack and I'm sure there will be a million others. Worshipping a corp is gross.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (4 children)

A question I was asked interviewing for my only marketing position: W"1hat's a brand you admire?" I would have turned right the fuck around were I not supporting stepkids and looking at a 50% raise.

I don't understand the ability to have an emotional connection to a corporation.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Omg I would have absolutely no script for that. They would get the blankest expression and something snarky like "it was impressive how Nestle was able to get market share on water and baby formula in the African market" but knowing my luck I'd probably get unironicly hired with that line when I was trying to be sarcastic. 😭

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Learning the truth about Nestle made finding out about Santa seem tame.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've set up matrix and element to replace discord. I even bridged discord so my users can even still talk to people they have on there.

But damn, does it feel good to self host shit again like in the days of TS3 and Mumble.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I honestly don't mind this. This is really useful for small creators in not needing to do workarounds for Patreon or Patreon roles and this makes it easier by being baked into Discord itself. I get the worry of stuff being paywalled but since it is entirely set by the server owner/creator, it would be something to take up with them instead. The 10% cut is a bit rough but I know other platforms also take a cut, but I'm not too sure if 10% is high or low. That would be my own biggest concern since it only makes sense if it is comparable or lower than other platforms like Patreon.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is essentially where I am with it. I get the outrage but for now I don’t have an issue. But likely as with many things lately, we should maybe pursue the federated option.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I created a Matrix account as Plan B now that the link is back in the sidebar. I was very active on Discord a few years back, but a week before joining Beehaw, I was ready to ditch it, since I can chat with my college roommate on Steam and I no longer DM with anyone else (also, all my servers from then are now dead).

I don't think I'm the target audience for Discord, so other than a few longstanding UI gripes, I'm kinda content to let them do whatever. Monetization won't hit me until you have to pay to be able to send text messages.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

The 10% cut is a bit rough but I know other platforms also take a cut, but I’m not too sure if 10% is high or low.

I have a Patreon and their cut is about 3% there (at least for me, it varies depending on what services you use through Patreon). This is a very easy pass and the only people I see utilizing it are creators like Twitch streamers who already have a large Discord server/presence to build off of. It's a bad deal though 10% is real rough imo.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (31 children)

Good. Discord is the cancer of the free searchable internet.

If you really need communication, use XMPP or Matrix.

And for everything else use stuff like forums and Lemmy and mastodon reddit Twitter whatever. But not closed walled gardens that are not searchable on the net. It's astonishing that so many people gatekeep content behind this Discord crap.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

It sucks that Discord is being used for a bunch of large communities that would be better served by a forum for future access, but for just groups of friends, it's way easier to use than anything fediverse. And if I'm chatting with my friends, I don't NEED my shitposting to be easily searchable on Google.

I'm not against using Matrix, but I could only get select people to join me. Discord is where all the more tech-illiterate gamers live and sometimes I wanna hang out with them too. It's not the same as Lemmy, where I want to talk to complete strangers, so it doesn't matter too much if more than half a community is lost by migrating from reddit to lemmy.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m going to take a rather controversial stance on this. I don’t see this as such a bad Thing

First of all, running a discord server, especially a large one is not easy and discord mods deserve to be paid for their time just as much as anyone else.

While I will say that I’m not a huge fan of discord’s new focus on massive servers, it’s clear that that’s what brings in the big dough for them.

If this helps discord keep the lights on, and keep small servers running that’s good for me as much as it is good for them.

Also, I’d much rather this than ads ngl

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

Discord has been making a lot of bad decisions lately but imo this isn't one of them. It's not like they're forcing every server to setup paid channels.

Currently, many creators have Patreons setup and allow varying levels of access to their Discord servers based on Patreon tiers. Literally all this change does is give creators the option to do this entirely through Discord rather than using Patreon.

This is nothing new. Just a slightly different way to handle monetization.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Lol pay for exclusive memes, I'm out guys

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

So it's just an expansion of what can be monetized within a server. I see nothing wrong with this. It even gives small indie devs like me a chance at a small revenue stream.

If you don't like the things a specific server is doing, leave. It's pretty simple.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have no problem paying for a service or an app if it is good and fits my needs. It's the microtrans and battle passes that people generally have issues with. Paying for every little thing like a meme.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You seem to be forgetting that it is the server owner who decides these things. If you're on a server that is monetizing memes and you don't like it, leave.

Monetizing memes was given as an example. A stupid example Yes but only an example.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Gonna leave this here for the inevitable dissenters: https://element.io/

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Give Revolt a try if you want something that feels like Discord without all the bloat.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

I misread this as "give Reddit a try" and thought you were insane.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Oh god, here you go the next "enshitification" victim... Matrix isn't really that good of a replacement, I wonder what we will end up with.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (19 children)

I never understood why everyone moved to discord. Regardless of this, it actually just sucks and is hard to use. Discord really gives me hope that the fediverse will succeed, just because the UI sucks so fucking much.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I actually discovered Matrix through the comments on here and am now using Element. I'm really glad about it. I knew there was something fishy with discord suddenly being so intrusive about their super long "birthday celebration" (with annoying unread notification needing me to click on their gift reveals ugh) and making activities free or whatever lol.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (7 children)

This is the classic tactic of make a product free and run it at a loss until you have full market share then you can extort users for whatever.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Or as Cory Doctorow calls it - "Enshittification". They're now in the second stage - open the gates for other companies to market to Discord users:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Now that I've started playing around with my own lemmy instance I guess it's fitting for possibly my last beehaw post to reflect my first.

I see discord’s business model is still burning cash trying to be the next ~~slack steam zoom reddit~~ patreon

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As long as daily usage is not affected, I don't think this should be a problem.

Maybe this could be used as a way to pay mods/admins for their work as well.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm still using discord for basic party chat functions for my small group of friends. As long as that continues to work, I don't care at all about paid memes.

I generally hate that I have to go into other servers because indie games confuse a discord as being a replacement for forums and a wiki

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Those flashy animated reactions are just incredibly annoying. Wish I could disable them, but of course Discord would never allow you to turn off the monetization.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As long as I can still use all the current free functionality then I don't mind these things. It's when these things become the only option ala Reddit killing 3rd party apps that it becomes a problem.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Did that fucknugget ruining Twitter cause EVERYONE to have the same hair brained idea?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I won't pay for anything that discord offers. I understand that companies are there to make money but they do not have anything of actual value to sell me. I don't care about emojis or Nitro or whatever. I just want a chat client that allows me to communicate with people I play certain games with. In-game chat can do this as well and I will simply go back to that if the monetization of discord gets to be too big of a problem. It's less convenient and sometimes sucks when folks are on different platforms but it's free.

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