Discord’s secret weapon against open source competitors (it’s PluralKit)
Discord’s secret weapon against open source competitors (it’s PluralKit)
Why are FOSS platforms like Matrix having such a hard time getting users to migrate from Discord? Because of PluralKit.
This seems like a rather really hyeprspecific use case than "the reason platforms like Matrix don't get as much traction as Discord".
Preach
(a) network effects (b) inertia (c) Matrix is still kind of a pain in the ass
Are all easily more capable to explain it (d) all the users are otherkin
Plurality is a lot more common than most people think. The existence of pluralkit exposed a LOT of people to the idea of plurality and got them realising they were already plural. Myself included.
It's kind of like how a lot of lesbians didn't understand their own identities until they heard Katy Perry sing "I kissed a girl".
Furthermore, imagine you're on a server with 500 active members, and there are 5 systems who use pluralkit. That server has probably had the "why are you a bot" "I'm using pluralkit" conversation dozens of times. All 500 people know how important pluralkit is. On Discord, there are dozens of allies for every one system.
It mostly seems like your personal experiences and server choices might be giving you the wrong idea. It might be the reason your communities don't make the switch, but the wider userbase doesn't really know about any this at all.
If it was as prevalent and the big reason, plurality would be more common in general servers or those dedicated to some other topic. It's my, and probably a sizeable portion of people's, first time hearing about PluralKit. Even knowing about plurality and systems prior to this. I'm in a bunch of servers with indescribable amounts of people and this really hasn't come up at all.
If you were to ask a random discord user/mod/server owner why they don't switch to Matrix, they most likely won't answer "It doesn't have PluralKit and I/my friends use it", but "What's Matrix?/What's PluralKit?/How so you use it?/Discord's fine/But why?/IDC"
Like, all power to you, this shows an important missing feature for your community in Matrix, but I don't think this is it.
With federation between different Matrix servers, what’s the holdup? Why aren’t people leaving Discord?
Poor usability, confusing to get started on, your instance may just vanish at some point, annoying encryption system you have to verify new devices on, feels slow on both browser and in app, lack of features (ie; no low latency game streaming, rich presence, easily joinable voice rooms).
It also shares the same issue as Mastodon, where if your instance vanishes you can't just log in with your account on another one and have everything ready to go, because the account is tied specifically to that original instance.
Overall as a fairly techy type user I still find Matrix, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc all pretty frustrating to use.
I'm a techy, linux-driving, self-hosting guy. I'm using Discord for my club chat because there's no other practical options. People who harp about moving off Discord seem like they've never considered user-friendliness in their considerations.
I'm sorry, but no. PluralKit only really impacts a tiny minority of the userbase to begin with. It isn't enough to cause people outside that group to choose the platform, nor is it enough for people outside of that minority to avoid moving to whatever the next big thing is.
No, I definitely have friends who are allies and who care about accessibility for their friends.
Sure, but that doesn't mean Discord's "secret weapon" has anything to do with PluralKit specifically.
Discord is popular compared to both commercial competitors and eg. FOSS projects like Matrix because of a variety of different factors, usability being one of the biggest ones. Accessibility may well be a factor (even a big one), but attributing all of that to just PluralKit honestly seems a bit short-sighted
You are certainly not wrong, but I think even if you add up all people with multiple personalities + their friends willing to stick with Discord due to Pluralkit, I would be very surprised if you'd be within less than 4 digits after the comma percentage-wise.
I think @Kangie was mostly responding to the clickbaity title of it being Discord's "secret weapon" to keep everyone on the platform when no, it just would not matter. It's like Mastodon and Twitter. The people who really, truly care are already on Mastodon and the rest is where the biggest community is.
As far as I'm aware, there's nothing preventing a PluralKit equivalent from being made for other platforms. In fact, a quick search turned up a WIP Matrix port on github.
So no, I don't think this is true. Lack of PluralKit isn't what's preventing people from switching en masse. It's the opposite—lack of people switching means there's a lack of demand for a PluralKit port in the first place, so even though there is a port people don't know it exists and thus it doesn't get as much dev attention.
It comes down to network effects, ultimately, and just plain inertia. If you're already on Discord, and all your friends are on Discord, it's hard to convince you to switch. And being more familiar with the Discord bot ecosystem (like PluralKit) is just one more thing that adds to the inertia.
But Discord has cultivated a queer membership by serving a different need than those platforms: privacy.
Yeah, gonna stop reading right there. Discord is absolutely selling your data. Nothing against inclusivity features though.
Discord became ubiquitous because it works well, and is free. Take VC money, run at loss, get tons of users, enshittify, die because something better becomes good enough. It’s just another one of those speed runs, which will happen over and over again until the end of humanity.
The difference:
Like, if there was a stalker wanting to attack you in particular... neither is good, but one is worse than the other.
How matrix with its end to end encryption giving my data to everyone????
Right, you do have to understand that either way, if you put something on the public internet, it is gone.
I don’t want a company to sell my data, making money off of me, then having the audacity to ask me for MORE money on top (nitro). It feels gross.
I don’t mind sharing bits of myself online otherwise.
The owners of federated instances can also just start selling your data too at any point. And as you said, advertisers will also just scrape public data trivially. Basically, the internet and world is a terrible place.
Lemmy is not enriching the data you put on it with data that Lemmy purchases from third parties, in order to create a user-product to sell to advertisers. Meta and Discord are (obviously Meta much moreso). That's why advertisers buy from them instead of just scraping your posts themselves.
which will happen over and over again until the end of
humanitycapitalism.
I fixed it for you.
I think you should keep reading for 10 more words. I elaborated on exactly what you're talking about in the 10 words after that quote.
Literally never heard of it let alone know anyone who cares...
That's really strange, this seems like the sort of Lemmy instance where people would care about accessibility the minute they heard about the issue
I'm a Discord-using LGBT ally, and I don't know anybody who uses this (nor had I heard about it until now). You may be overestimating it's reach / appeal.
You're responding to someone from a different instance. Lemmy is not Discord, it's federated 😉
So, let me see if i understand the argument: Discord, a piece of closed source software which is very popular at the moment because they hit first (user inertia) and haven't yet ramped up the enshittification (but sooner or later will because they already announced the intention to go the IPO route), wins over free software alternatives because of a 100% unofficial bot designed to help with one tiny niche user case most users of the platform haven't even heard about, which is itself free software and therefore could be migrated and/or adapted to other free software?
I'm not sure the argument is very solid
This bot detects messages with certain tags associated with a profile, then replaces that message under a "pseudo-account" of that profile using webhooks. This is useful for multiple people sharing one body (aka "systems"), people who wish to roleplay as different characters without having several accounts, or anyone else who may want to post messages as a different person from the same account.
Yeah, that seems incredibly niche. Never heard or thought of necessity of it.
Discord gained popularity and maintains it, in spite of the many reasons to avoid it, because of usability and feature richness. Slack, Teams, Matrix, Telegram, they are miles ahead of everyone else in the live-chat space, when it comes to user experience.
This was an interesting article about some tech I've never heard of before, but it has little to nothing to do with Discord's overall success.
I did this for the dumbest of reasons, but I’ve been testing Guilded for a week now. My friends and I bought each other discord nitro for a few months over Xmas and when it ran out we were bummed. But we all agree nitro is not worth it unless discord is a part of your income stream like a Streamer or somekind of media relation for a company that hosts a discord for feedback and engagement.
Found someone mentioning guilded randomly on a lemmy comment. Turns out you get higher quality voice, large amounts of emoji and a few features not in discord. Currently no soundboard or stickers. Haven’t tested a stream yet, but I don’t think you are limited there either by default like discord.
Is it the discord killer? Probably not. The discord killer will be the IPO or company that buys them and has to actually make a profit on the platform. Once people get ads in their chat, some will bail. But for now, I think we are in an era of jumping from “growth phase” platform to “growth phase” platform. If data privacy isn’t your primary concern, doing this lets you enjoy features for mainly free until a platform has to monetize.
Advantage of moving on services like discord is it’s feasible for some of us. I have a small group of friends we use discord for and get together to game. So as long as I make a good use case and we like the new platform, jumping to guilded will be similar to when we jumped from mumble to discord.
As someone who is very much inside the queer bubble, and who thinks pluralkit is an essential tool to have in any discord server that considers itsself accessible or queer friendly: I strongly disagree that its the feature preventing FOSS alternatives from taking off. It could be a small factor in a sea of small factors, but I'd wager over 50% of discord users have never even seen PluralKit.
Interesting argument. I'd be curious if you know roughly how many plural people there are (let's say headcounts as there's only one body) compared to Discord's user base. (150 million active users per month according to random half-assed google search)
No, I don't know.
But your point was that this is actively keeping people on Discord? By extension, that must mean that a significant bulk of those 150M users are kept on Discord because it has PluralKit. How do you reconcile that with the group of plurals being, apparently, quite small? To the point where even on Beehaw/Lemmy almost nobody seems to even have heard of it.
Very interesting indeed.
I guess a usecase like this easily slips past most developers due to lack of exposure :?
Is the need to respond as a separate entity so frequent that separate accounts for each entity would not be enough or is the user switching process too much friction?
I once knew a system with 400 members. That's not common, but it is a thing. Systems of around 10 people are very common. Discord only allows up to 5 accounts. And only up to 1 account on mobile. And besides, having to maintain separate email accounts, even for a small system, is a burden. What about walk-ins and dormancies? What about new members who are still figuring themselves out and might want a change of name later? Pluralkit makes it all simple.
Matrix allows up to ∞ accounts, changing the display name, and user icon at any time, plus true E2E encryption (if enabled). Also allows only sending to cryptographically verified accounts, to curb impostors.
There is a list of several clients with multi-account support if you filter by "Featuresv Multi-account": https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
It's a pity the reference client doesn't have the support, and some of are in beta, but still seems like PluralKit is kind of a clumsy workaround for an artificial limitation imposed by Discord's monetization goals.
Interesting article! I can't tell from the post, though, is this due to a limitation on bots in Matrix or that no one has invested to make a similar bot for Matrix?
I don't know. Maybe one day I'll look into the Matrix API and see if it's possible. Theoretically it should be easy as long as webhooks are in place. The hard part is hosting. Pluralkit is huge compared to most discord bots. They used to have lots of downtime, but now they run it across a lot of shards.
I don't see the point of PluralKit, you can just use multiple accounts.
I don't know shit about plural systems and have no idea about PluralKit but I can already forsee two issues that regular user accounts would have:
As far as I understand it, PluralKit is more of a hack for acting as multiple pseudo-accounts with the convenience of a single (platform-) account. Given that Matrix, Element and the like are FOSS, it ought to be possible to build such a convenient single-"user" multi-account mechanisms into the clients or even protocol themselves rather than relying on hacky 3rd party add-ons.
Especially given that the user base of Matrix is far more likely to come into contact with plural systems than the general population is. (In the communities I frequent, I know of at least one and would not be surprised if there were quite a few more.)
I mean Revolt has the capability for per message profiles, it just doesn't have the ui for it yet
I have no real hope left for Revolt anyway though so meh
why no hope for Revolt? I had looked into it self hosting wise, but when I realized they had made it really difficult, I lost interest and haven't been following it since.
Pretty much this plus a bit more
They're honestly low-key hostile towards anyone trying to host another instance
They're clearly going for profit, they've said it before, and I can only see it going shittier from here because of it