They supposedly can be disabled in settings- but we all know that won’t last. They’re going full Microsoft Skype mode and it’s only a matter of time.
Discord keeps getting used for things it shouldn’t be used for like tech support. I will be glad when it dies. Don’t hide your support behind a platform that can’t be searched from the web. It’s not a replacement for forums and issue trackers.
I couldn’t agree more. I hate that some open source projects are using discord for communicating.
I especially hate that it’s being used as a login for some things. Goddammit, let me just use my fucking email address.
I completely agree, fuck discord
I’ve grown with ICQ, MSN Messenger, TeamSpeak, Skype, several local chat apps, then people obsessed with Facebook Messenger, then Snapchat… I just know any particular chatting app is a temporary fad that will eventually end, it’s just their cycle. Don’t get attached to them.
Same here. I’m just surprised at how well Signal is holding up.
Unfortunately it’s difficult to get people to switch to it
And they didn’t make it any easier by removing SMS support from the mobile app.
It was pretty easy to get a couple of my friends to switch by saying it’s just another SMS client that also supports highly encrypted messaging with other people that use Signal. Now that it’s standalone, nobody will even fucking touch it.
which is weird, I don’t know any other country that still uses SMS other than the usa, for chatting.
it’s for 2FA from banks (which are now switching to authenticator apps) and bulk scams mostly that I can see.
Canada. Now you know two! Granted, we are basically the 51st state at this point…
America’s hat/touk!
I use sms quite a lot when network conditions are bad… with poor service (rural areas) or heavy congestion (sport events) SMS messages piggybacking on voice channels often stand a better chance of getting through than anything that requires an Internet data connection on 4G. That said I do have unusual use cases, the other 99% of the time normal messaging apps work fine.
I think it’s because texting became essentially free in North America long before it did in Europe. That, combined with the fact that it came preinstalled on EVERY phone (Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Palm, you name it), gave it enough inertia to stay dominant decades later.
“preinstalled”. lol.
Yeah, I know it’s probably not the right word for this context, but downloading an app and creating an account is factually a huge barrier for entry, because people are lazy.
Yeah I got rid of Signal when they got rid of SMS because literally nobody I’ve ever met uses it and they’re not gonna switch.
It’s unfortunate, I had just gotten a few people to take it up… but that progress is lost. People prefer convenience over all else and having to use 2 different primary message apps sucks.
If only they had functional data backup and export on non-Android platforms…
I miss MSN Messenger… it was part of my childhood.
door opening sound knock knock
I can still sometimes “hear” ICQ, and that’s going on almost 30 years ago now?
I can still recite my ICQ number off the top of my head
Mine is 6 digits long and I remember it too. The whiteboard function was particularly fun.
63094052 add me A/S/L?
And then you wonder WTF you want my age, sex, and location.
Oh yeah, I’ve been through the same. Discord was nice while it lasted.
TS and Matrix will hopefully be the replacements I use if I can get people to switch. A lot of discord communities are heavily entrenched though, which I’m sure they’re banking on to maintain momentum as the service quality continues to degrade.
A lot of discord communities are heavily entrenched though,
Entrenchment enables Enshittification, unfortunately.
Well, that’s what you get for letting a private company replace and open protocol with a proprietary solution because it’s easier to use and has some cute emojis.
I dono what people expected. Discord costs money to develop and run. It was always just a matter of time before it cost money.
Considering it is free to use, with streaming, voice/video calling , it surprises me that the enshitification didn’t start earlier.
Deffo waiting for lots of people to be on it before turning up that dial.
Seems to be the standard silicon valley business model these days. The old “drug dealer outside school giving away free samples to get you hooked” we all heard about but never saw.
They tried their best to make Nitro succeed first before turning to other methods of making money.
The paradoxical demand of ever growing profits made this unavoidable anyways.
To a degree, yes. But a non-public company doesn’t usually have that “obligation” for ever-growing profit. Unfortunately, Discord’s goal does seem to be to eventually get an IPO.
Been happily off discord ever since the CEO’s disastrous, anti-encryption speech at the “Protecting Children Online” hearing. Evil little dude, that guy is.
At least it is not “Enshittification Continues: Lemmy to begin showing advertisements on it’s fediverse platform”
… and open source projects continue to list discord as a community option to discuss items about their project.
Remember the emails from 2015? The plan was to have a platform, that just works. No bullshit, no issues, just functional features.
Even when Nitro was originally added, it was 5 bucks to optional support, if you’d like to help the company. Now the same sub is 10 a month, and half of the client is unusable without it.
Not to mention all the paid account banners and borders they’re selling for an egregious amount of money
Everyone is optimistically altruistic until the corporate greed comes a-knockin’
I’m down to distributed social networks and irc.
I still need to backup and cleanse Reddit but I’m just old man declaring everything turned to shit, yelling at clouds nowadays it seems.
I heavily decreased my usage of Discord when I was lowkey doxxed by a user on a server that I never posted a single ounce of personal information to.
I never ever understood and still doesn’t understand why people like Discord. It’s not indexed, it’s a constant background noise. It’s absolutely not user-friendly. You can do better with IRC.
Discord is remarkable. It has seamless video streaming from your desktop or apps to any number of watchers, with multiple peopld being able to stream at once. Paired with voice chat, it’s perfect for group gaming sessions, movie showings, desktop troubleshooting, video chat, etc. Besides some issues with input devices, it’s always worked flawlessly for me. Plus, obviously, a persistent server for chat.
And the fact that it’s fast, resource-light, and free are just the icing on the cake.
Some people are downvoting you but you’re right. No other application is this all in one package. My only issues with input devices have been Windows’ fault, too. I don’t like Discord’s closed ecosystem and data privacy concerns, but the feature set is unmatched, especially at the amount of polish they have and their price.
Side note, people please stop using it as an alternative to a proper forum.
Thanks for the point about the forums. I get why people use Discord: the things it is designed for it does reasonably well. The problem is people using it in ways it isn’t made for, like forums or wikis. If your documentation, issue tracking, or patch notes are done via Discord, please stop for fuck’s sake. There are much better options for this and you can even webhook them into Discord if you insist on it, but stop using Discord to replace forums.
Quests will show up tastefully in Discord where you can opt-in to stream your game to friends and win rewards for playing.
Every day, we inch closer to “drink a verification can” reality.
Between a corpo job only using teams and email and international folks all using WhatsApp I kinda want to just go back to irc and stay there forever. Everything that came after it has just been worse.
What is up with WhatsApp all over the place? It’s a demonstrably inferior experience to damn near any alternative at this point.
It was one of the first and now no one wants to move, quite simple.
Several messaging services that started on PCs already had mobile apps when Whatsapp got big so there must be a bit more to it than that. AIM, Skype, and several others were viable options with existing userbases.
there must be a bit more to it than that. AIM, Skype, and several others were viable options with existing userbases.
Once upon a time in a messenger landscape far far away there lived a king called XMPP. It had a lot of powerful children, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google+, and even Skype amongst them. And they all worked together in a big federation towards the commonwealth of all, freely sharing their metadata. But then some of the children grew greedy, jealously guarding their own gardens behind higher and higher walls, breaking down the federation. And thus the era of the warring messengers began. But prophecy foretells of a prince to unite all the disparate standards in one big Matrix again, completing yet another revolution of the XKCD 972 wheel of time.
For real though it was phone numbers. WhatsApp always worked based off of phone numbers, which is an identity confirmation method that was immediately familiar to most people at the time, even more so than email.
But all those you listed weren’t available internationally I believe. Atleast in the US, ask anyone who came to work how they keep in touch with people back home, and they’ll likely say whatsapp.
Skype certainly was. It would make an interesting case study - what drove adoption when there were established competitors with more resources?
Phone numbers, phone apps and the international market. Skype was in a lot of places only popular for business, Whatsapp was everyone’s very first doorway into a modern messenger app.
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