The disturbing Discord trend

[Lyberta]

Yes, especially considering how difficult VPS maintenance is. I've just got a bill for entire month of VPS usage that runs nothing because I can't configure it and I'm not gonna pay 200$-300$ for a freelance administrator to configure it either. Servers are extremely user-unfriendly.

[Julius]

It's really the same as command line Linux. Not that difficult once you got the basics.

But there are plenty of hosted services that give you preconfigured images for you VPS or don't expose you to the command line interface at all by using Plesk or similar software.

Of course these will be more limited than a full VPS, but plenty can be done with a cheap 1.50€/month php shared host that's fully GUI driven.

@Lyberta join us on XMPP and I can maybe give you some tips how to configure your VPS.

[Jastiv]

Servers are extremely user-unfriendly.

considering that my game (Wograld) is client server and uses an outdated Java to compile the editor, it is fairly easy to run, and set up the server oh, after a long page of steps...
I would love to make it a one click noob install, but I don't happen to know anyone who would be interested in doing that.... and I don't know where to find such a person.

[Wuzzy]

If I understand correctly, Discord basically has it's built-in bouncer?

I read that FreeNode COULD install their own bouncer, but they didn't. Why not? Would that solve the problem?

[Julius]

Discord isn't IRC, so the concept of bouncer doesn't apply. But yeah, something similar in principle.

Yes Freenode could install their own bouncer, especially now that they switched to Kiwi IRC as their web-chat, which has excellent ZNC bouncer support. But I suspect they don't want to because it gets more involved with hosting and data-storage. Right now the only thing that gets stored on their servers are the NICKSERV user accounts I believe.

[charlie]

Possible with a IRC Bouncer and on XMPP as well

Edit: IMHO that might be what led to the downfall of IRC. All these advanced features users want are available to power users in a very convenient way, so none felt like they would need to change anything about it, while non power users were not even aware these features exist.

I wouldn't say it is very convenient to set up an IRC Bouncer, even for a power user.

Possible, yes. Convenient, no.

That's the problem.

[Lyberta]

https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-i ... -projects/

[Lyberta]

Ok, so I finally had the reason to accept their draconian anti-humanity rules to speak to people but now they ask me for phone number.

Nope.

I would never use a service that requires phone number unless they already got my legal identity such as when doing banking.

[Vandar]

I'm on Discord since a while ... back then when I registered they didn't ask for a phone number. Must be something new?

I feel uncertain what to say here. So many services want a phone number these days, so it doesn't look particularly evil to me. But IRC definitely is a way more free and if you want to, anonymous ecosystem.

For the initial question, why so many people move to Discord - I think it just does a very good job at being a chat platform. Particularly the ease to share images and the fact that the chat history of a channel is available for new people makes it a nice choice for communities that don't care much about the question if it's free or not. Well, it's free of cost, which is surprising enough given the service they provide.

Sourceforge closed down many services and I kinda lost a lot of documentation that I had written for my projects when they closed the wiki platform. Well it was offered as download, but I didn't want to deal with the problem to import that into another wiki. From that point of view, if Discord should close, I'll not lose more than I lost when Sourceforge closed the wiki services. Admitted, archiving Discord content is ha
harder.

[Jastiv]

Discord is basically irc with persistent chat for when you are offline, so you don't need to leave your computer on 24/7 just to keep track of the conversation, ( and sharing images as you also pointed out) and also a built in option for voice chat as well. It runs in the browser so there isn't any software to install. If we AS A FREEDOM RESPECTING SOFTWARE COMMUNITY could duplicate that we would could get rid of Discord.

[Lyberta]

So many services want a phone number these days, so it doesn't look particularly evil to me.

Oh yeah, if everyone is evil it somehow stops being evil. Right.

[Jastiv]

So many services want a phone number these days, so it doesn't look particularly evil to me.

Oh yeah, if everyone is evil it somehow stops being evil. Right.

Yeah, Discord = Evil

and Discord is not to be confused with Discourse, the Javascript based freedom respecting forum software. Discourse source code is available under a free software license. Also, lots of communities I am a huge part of use it.

One more comment about Javascript while I am here. Javascript seems to have replaced flash and proprietary crap like that. It runs on free operating systems, so while Javascript can still have freedom issues, non-free software isn't a precondition for using it.

[Lyberta]

Aside from proprietary JavaScript that gets downloaded and executed without consent on people's browsers, my other problem with it is that it is really bad programming language in general. I've started learning it, and about 30 minutes in the tutorial I was like "holy F, this is insane, how do ppl program in this?". Thankfully, WebAssembly is slowly fixing that.

Wait a sec, this has nothing to do with Discord.

[Evropi]

Ok, so I finally had the reason to accept their draconian anti-humanity rules to speak to people but now they ask me for phone number.

Nope.

I would never use a service that requires phone number unless they already got my legal identity such as when doing banking.

FWIW, this was most likely imposed by the individual server admin as an anti-spam measure.

Back in late 2015, early 2016, I had a long-running gaming group. Due to constant issues with Mumble and alternatives (I got everyone on Mumble at least, give me some cred...) my co-host found Discord. I must admit that it was a dream by comparison and we always got better quality and no weird bugs that took forever to resolve, etc.

We eventually made it a 'general server' and it now has 15,000+ members. This means we are under spam attack. Admittedly Discord is very good with these, but you do get one every week or two that sneaks past. Honestly, it's more common to have a very salty and toxic member who keeps rejoining just to send people notifications, post gore, hardcore pornography, harass and threaten people, that kind of thing.

I imagine ANY large server like mine has a long delay before entering (we put it on 10 minutes until you can speak). There is a final setting though which needs you to enter a phone number to ensure you're not a bot. We turn it on mostly for the salty uses I mentioned above and in the rare bot attack (usually not targeted), the longest period we had it on for was 3.5 weeks I believe. Screenshot for illustration:


PS: server is just Discord's teminology, essentially it means community. Sadly Matrix doesn't replicate this feature yet. It's a long way away from being a replacement but I have faith it should be ready in 2022 for our requirements. Main thing people like us need is a sophisticated roles/permissions system and distinct communities within a (real) server.

[Wuzzy]

For people searching for more reasons not to use Discord, here's an article about Discord from the Spyware Watchdog:

https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord.html