Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing
US group has sought to broaden its appeal to a mass audience
How about Mumble? It's free, open sourced, encrypted, and with temporary chats with the ability to share images with ease.
Mumble is a terrific VOIP program. It's audio quality and reliability are WAY better than discord. But it does not nearly have enough features to be a good replacement. It's missing features like being able to stream in-app, share videos, keep and pin messages in different channels, pinging system for people and groups... The list goes on. These are features that groups and communities have come to rely on.
An analogy would be like comparing an incredibly good tent to a shitty house. While the tent is probably comfier to sleep in, eventually you're going to want things like outlets, kitchen appliances, toilets, and showers which make the shitty house the better long-term choice.
Doesn’t have a cup holder either! Why does ever alternative need to have every feature or it can’t be called an alternative? Does your VoIP app need the ability to send videos? Can you not use something else in tandem to do the more social side? Sometimes it’s better to focus on one thing & do it well—especially under-resourced like free software often is. You could argue just as easily these other features as bloat if you don’t want or use them.
The enshittification of Discord will soon accelerate!
And at that moment, I cancel my subscription and instead give that money for some Matrix instance.
Bad idea. Matrix is incredibly costly to run by design. The eventual consistency model replicates everything to all servers which is wasteful, slow, & isn’t going to scale. Many medium-sized servers have shut down for storage & CPU+RAM costs—which causes refugees to seek more centralized nodes. Hell, we saw it a couple weeks ago Matrix begging for money since they can’t even afford to run their own servers anymore. You should put your money into a protocol that doesn’t treat chat like a blockchain & is efficient enough to reasonably self-host.
If you data wasn't being stolen and sold up until now, it 100% will be after this lol. I wonder how much worse they can make discord. Speed run anyone?
Sigh. Guess that means it's time to start looking for a new platform. Not that Discord has been excellent in a while, but products always go to shit when they're beholden to shareholders.
I just hope the devs behind BetterDiscord are quick to hop over.
Matrix and Revolt do exist. Revolt being the "spiritual" successor of Discord.
Anybody remember xfire?