It’s better. Not good. Better than other tools, at least in the eyes of the many people using it. But as I stated at another post, to me this speaks to the fact that we need better FOSS alternatives for whatever purposes discord is used. I don’t like Discord either, don’t get me wrong! But so many people using it means something’s missing and I don’t think it cab solely be explained by the lack of knowledge of existing solutions but at least partly by the existence itself.
It needs to be a big wave of migration, rather than convincing one individual at a time. Discord needs to shit the bed while there’s a tolerable/better alternative we can all agree on.
Tbh I don’t see that happening with matrix anyway. Even with discord going to shit.
Every platform that needs a guide is too complicated for the common folk.
This goes also for Lemmy. The users on Reddit that stayed either didn’t care about the whole API stuff or didnt understand the issue.
Hell even I use it sometimes because the content here is sparse and I don’t have any meaningful to contribute as a post (not even a repost lol)
We are the exception and putting up with reading a bit and then deciding where to start the camp.
Discord, FAANG, streaming sites. All of them and more are simply to register, login and then use. At best you will set up 2FA.
Most of the folks I know (even my boss of an IT company) do not register 2FA and if only because they are forced to (Google and MS/O365 does it for example).
I probably see another (commercial) platform rising before Matrix will become popular.
It’s harder for regular folk to move and they may not (yet) have an issue with what we may see, but regular folk would tolerate anything and tolerate it forever? They just have a different line which companies cannot cross.
I think (and admittedly, I hope) every proprietary software is destined to shit the bed due to the irresistible temptation to make the user’s experience worse for increased profit. If there’s no alternative then users have no choice but luckily many of us will even create useful software just as a passion. You may be right that we just have not created software aimed at them because it’s other tech people who give feedback/contribute.
the ironic thing is that basically the only thing that needs to happen for matrix to have that moment is some startup company to host a server much like discord, and then create a front end.
It’s literally something they’re capable of doing, and it would totally work. The ENTIRE backend is already done, they can even help contribute to matrix as well. The value is the customer base, not the open source code, so it’s not like it’s going anywhere.
It’s terrible for secure/private communications, it requires hacks that violate the TOS and EULA to modify the client to get rid of ads and change themes, it’s not FOSS, and it locks features behind a paywall…
But it does what skype already did, so I’m glad we all have to migrate to the new fad site that strips even more of our dignity and privacy every 10 years that’ll die anyway because it offers nothing and has a terrible business model.
People act like the alternatives are any better but they really aren’t. Sure don’t get me wrong it sucks that you typically have to scroll through useless info to find what you’re looking for, but I put that on the server owner, you see the same issue on most forums too. Discord brings huge audiences that you wouldn’t normally see in small communities. It’s free, easy to setup and access, has a mobile app with toggle-notifications(and maybe just my settings but I’ve never gotten an ad notification or anything I haven’t purposely toggled). People here are acting like you have to start using it as your primary messaging app and that you can’t just take your messaging to another platform if your worried about chat logs.
It’s bloated, filled with features no one needs for straight-forward work, has a somewhat obtuse UI and is buggy as hell. I don’t like Matrix much more than Discord. But even it has far fewer problems. I don’t know in which universe Discord is considered as ‘good’.
You may remember Hilaria from such controversies as “how do you say in English, cu–cucumber?”. Born Hillary Lynn Hayward-Thomas in Boston, she somehow developed a Spanish accent once her parents retired to Spain in 2011.
Is this a thing? In MMA, a pro fighter from America called Mackenzie Dern married a Brazilian and adopted both the accent and the need for an English translator. There is also an English football manager called Steve McClaren that managed in the Netherlands, and infamously did an interview in broken English because “he thought locals would understand better”.
Mostly it’s not a real thing. Most people who speak multiple languages don’t get worse at one of them. Europe is full of multilingual people who speak like native speakers in their first language, and then near native in a bunch of other ones. There are times when you can’t tell what someone’s first language is.
On the other hand, it can happen a bit if you never use your native language, especially in the first few minutes of trying to switch. One famous example of that is Arnold Schwarzenegger who has spent so long in the US speaking English exclusively that his German has a slight American accent (though mostly it’s a heavy Styrian Austrian accent). Also, it is true that you can temporarily forget words, even in your native language. It’s not so much that you’re forgetting the word, just that your brain insists the object is a “pepino” (the Spanish word for cucumber) and for a moment you can’t say “ok, yeah, I know it’s pepino in Spanish, but what is it in English?”
But, “code switching” is a real thing. If an American moves to Australia, it’s really helpful to adopt some Australian pronunciations just to get by. If you ask for a “wah-der” in Australia, they’ll have to think for a second, if you ask for a “whoa-tah” they get what you want right away. Someone who speaks English fluently but is always among Brazilians who only speak a bit of English might use a subset of English to talk to them, use local phrasing that isn’t proper English but is Portuguese idioms or expressions moved into English word for word, and use Brazilian pronunciations so they’re understood more easily, even if those are mispronunciations under most English accents. But, it would be surprising if they couldn’t revert to normal English in an English-only setting.
Does anyone else have the thought that maybe it’s time to just replace these 30+ year old ancient protocols? Seems like the entire networking stack is held together with string and duct tape and unnecessarily complicated.
A lot of the decisions made sense somewhat in the 80s and 90s, but seems ridiculous in this day and age lmao
I definitely would love to see a rework of the network stack at large but idk how you'd do it without an insane amount of cooperation among tech giants which seems sort of impossible
Seems like the entire networking stack is held together with string and duct tape and unnecessarily complicated.
The more you learn about network technology the more you realize how cobbled together it all is. Old, temporary fixes become permanent standards as new fixes are written on top of them. Apache, which was the most widely used web server for a long time, is literally named that because it was “a patchy” server. It’s amazing that any of it works at all. It’s even more amazing that it’s been developed to the point where people with no technical training can use it.
The open nature of IP is what allows such a varied conglomerate of devices to share information with each other, but it also allows for very haphazard connections. The first modems were just an abuse of the existing voice phone network. The internet is a functional example of building the airplane while you’re flying it. We try to revise the standards as we go, but we can’t shut the whole thing down and rebuild it from scratch. There are no green fields.
It has always been so. It must be so. It will continue to be so.
Same unfortunately goes for a big chunk of the law on a global scale… Constant progress, new possibilities and technologies, changes in general are really outpacing some dusted and constantly abused solutions. Every second goes by and any “somehow still holding” relic is under more pressure. As a species we can have some really great ideas but the long-term planning or future-proofing is still not our strongest suit.
I may be waaaay off here, but the internet as it exists is pretty much built on DNS, isn’t it? I mean, the whole idea of DARPANet back in the 60s and 70s was to build a robust, redundant, and self-healing network to survive nuclear armageddon, and except when humans f it up (intentional or otherwise), it generally does what it says on the tin.
Now, there’s arguments to beade about securing the protocol, but to rip and replace the routing protocols, I think you’d have to call it something other than the Internet.
I don’t know of any either and I’m on like 40+ servers probably. I’ve run our weekly dnd on it for years without issue after trying the other options. Get that it’s not good for tracking and documentation in any official capacity but it’s pretty damn good for active niche interest communities.
The music production servers I’m on are a perfect use of the platform IMO. There’s a server run by a guy who manufactures an open source tracker device, and there’s channels where people post works in progress, get help from others, there’s streaming events where people can submit songs they’ve made using the device, etc. There’s a bunch of people popular in the music scene who regularly help noobs. Always ongoing active discussions, everyone is polite, there’s a lot of knowledge shared in real time.
So when people are like “Discord sucks use my favorite platform instead,” I’m just like I don’t even care about the platform I just wanna be where some cool shit is happening and your platforms are fucking boring. Show me the cool servers on your platform then so I actually want to use it. It’s the idea of these platforms people like, and I like it too, my close social group uses a privately hosted Matrix service which I use every day, but I’ve never found a comparable community on these services outside of this use case.
The one I referenced there was the Dirtywave discord, highly recommend checking it out, and I think they have a channel for partner servers. The lines forum is also a great community if you’re in that musical space. I couldn’t name a good music discord for lets say traditional genres or general production, the thing I like about what I’ve found is it’s niche. Like once I posted a work in progress and someone active in a scene for the genre I was going for messaged me and we chatted about our approaches and traded some instrument and project files we’d built on the device, all though discord.
So to me I want that type of community, what platform it’s on isn’t really something I care about all that much.
Enforcing two factor because of suspicious indicators isn’t bad on it’s own though, it’s privacy concerns about Discord preceding this which makes it a bad thing in this context.
Using phone numbers as second factor authentication is neither secure, nor is it in good faith. Force the customer to use something more anonymous and secure - like Fido keys or even TOTPs. Sneaking in ways to force the customer to reveal their personal details, in the name of security is a sinister dark pattern.
Phone number is the weakest form of 2FA but it’s still an improvement. I’ve never had to use my phone in Discord though, I don’t how Discord would even verify someone’s phone number as legitimate. But like I said I have a couple Discord accounts with different emails, probably on 30-40 servers, and have never run in to this. So if they’re collecting personal details in this really granular and specific manner, it seems like they’re not doing a very good job at it.
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