I don't think discord is going anywhere. Not that I like or support them, but the waves of people leaving anything are always overblown. Look at Reddit after the API switch up.
The reason my friends and I moved to Discord in late 2015 or early 2016 was because it blew the competition out of the water at the time. The audio was so much better. I think screen share and face cams may not have been supported at the time, but it later was and was higher quality and a better experience than Skype or Teamspeak, IMO.
Now though, that might just be table stakes for a new service now that WebRTC is standard and the codecs have gotten better too. I'm rooting for any sort of truly solid decentralized chat (text, video, and audio) to take off. Right now, all of them have notable flaws. I also think many of them try to compete with the community aspect of Discord, which I personally don't use and thus and am a bad judge of quality. Just a way to chat with people I already know.
I think discord will stick around, yeah, but it's competitors will also grow a lot more until someday, maybe in 5-10 years, Discord finds itself withering away in favor of some new app.
The thing is Discord isn't finished with upsetting people - it still has to do a lot more stuff to get more net income for their IPO. How they will do that without seriously annoying users is hard to say. The more they annoy their users the more the users flee, boosting the value of the competition.
Discord does have some user capture, but nothing like twitter's - where followers & networks are valuable and can take a long time to aquire - and twitter's competition was able to scoop up a huge number of outraged users despite even that. Granted - I think Twitter's changes annoyed people much more than Discord's.
I don't think Discord is going anywhere, but people always vastly overestimate the power of market leaders. Reddit didn't see a big change in MAUs but it did see massive declines in the amount of time spent on reddit per user and posting activity.
I could see Discord going the same way - declining interest from users while they keep it around for the few 'essential' communities/friends on the platform, but very little tethering them to it if a disruptive competitor comes along.
We get these articles everytime there is some controversy. We had articles about how Gitlab was crushed under the load of new users after Github was acquired by Microsoft, and yet Gitlab is further from being the market leader today than it was back then.
It's clear age verification is coming from a changing legal environment around the world. Discord may be preemptively moving, but any competitor service is eventually going to have to age verify users before they access adult content.
Wow Teamspeak is still around and looks like they are succeeding again. Teamspeak and Ventrilo used to be such a mainstay of the video game community. I was curious why so many younger people were getting Discords instead of starting up Vent or Teamspeak servers like we used to. It does look like Teamspeak has taken a note out of discord and slacks notebook and have gotten more advanced chat room options now.
1. To DeDoS a Teamspeak server, it's enough to DeDoS a single server. You may not even need to do that, it may be enough to be such a nuisance that their host kicks them out. To DeDoS a Discord server, it's necessary to DeDoS the entirety of Discord, which is much, much harder, and also much more likely to put you in legal hot water. Discord is the Cloudflare of gaming.
2. Discord servers aren't real servers, they're tenants in an application, effectively "rows in an SQL table", not standalone containers requiring their own tech stack. This means they can be offered for free. You also can't abuse them for E.G. crypto mining, like you can with a VPS where a Teamspeak server can be hosted. Free increases adoption, which makes people a lot more likely to pay for extra features. It's the standard "the rich subsidize the poor" model, common to so many web applications.
3. No technical expertise necessary to set a server up. Bus factor is basically equal to infinity.
4. One service, one account, one interface, many servers, many groups, many people. There's no weird workspace switching and per-workspace DMs like in Slack (not sure how TS does this). If you log in once on a new device, all your server memberships are there, and everything just works. You may be in dozens of servers, and they're all behind the same single login.
Those 4 features are table stakes now, like it or not. If you want to be a real, long-term Discord competitor and attract real users, you have to figure out how to get those 4.
> I was curious why so many younger people were getting Discords instead of starting up Vent or Teamspeak servers like we used to.
Discord did a great job of making it easy and free to get all of your friends into a group together. Everything just works. You don’t need to have an IT person in the group to set up the server and walk everyone through connecting.
In the early days of gaming it seemed like every gaming group had at least one person who worked in tech and didn’t mind setting up a server. Now gaming is mainstream and the average gaming group doesn’t have a person who can host a server for them. Even when they do, that person would rather spend their gaming time on playing the games instead of playing the IT person for the group.
Yeah and even some of us IT people weren't enough into video games to care about hosting voice chat. Like I ran the middle school Minecraft server but not a Teamspeak for it.
As that IT person I’ve set up a few alternatives over the years (and they’re still up, certs and all). Matrix stuck with a decent group of people, but the group I hung out on Discord with refused to move. I definitively bailed after the ID news but the guys didn’t follow (to Matrix, or Jitsi, or TeamSpeak, or Mumble).
I’m kind of salty about making a fruitless effort I’ll admit, but I feel like unless there’s an effortless, perfect, free program that replicates the (voice) channel functionality and screen sharing features people are not going to leave Discord. Even if it does treat its users like shit.
I miss those guys but I refuse to take part in that abuse, and I’m angry about it.
Discord offered more features. Voice chat was part of the initial sell for the platform, but these days most users don't even use the voice functionality and instead use it for long-running hypermedia chats with retained history.
It looks like Teamspeak covers the "group of friends who voice chat each other" use case (Discord DM groups) but not the "IRC replacement" use case (Discord servers). As far as I can tell, the licensing for Teamspeak 6 (the version that tries to be competitive with Discord) is set up such that anybody who joins the server (as opposed to anybody actively using it) uses up a slot, so the licensing fees for larger servers would be cost prohibitive. Additionally, the text chat functionality is way worse than on Discord. There's no way to just have a chat channel, you can only view and use the text chat when you're in a voice call in a voice channel.
Because a Discord server is very easy and free to set up, and has nice features like screensharing that weren't commonly handled well at the time. Before that, we used Skype or AIM or iChat if we even wanted audio at all; Teamspeak was more for "serious gamers."
Yeah, I'm 39 years old, I don't need to flee age verification. I just am not interested in having an account on a chat service that would do this. I don't want my driver's license and biometric information to be stored in servers who-knows-where in a country with weak privacy regulations.
I spun up a self hosted teamspeak server last weekend for my friends and I using their docker container.
Its going to take some getting used to. Seems weird that they have a hard cap on 10MB file upload sizes if its self hosted. Also the screen sharing wasn't working quite right
Maybe a good opportunity to reduce screensharing (unless pure video content). A lot of people are sharing webpages through video. That's subpar (except for the shared pointer)
Discord has the momentum but overall I just find the experience awful. It would be nice to use anything else at this point. Joining a server with greater than a handful of people is just a nightmare and practically unusable.
Isn't this usually cause the admin went overboard? Like a server of 10 people has 30 channels, one of which is a lobby you have to clear first, and 10 bots telling you that you leveled up or whatever.
The hardest part about joining a new-but-small-but-not-that-small Discord server is convincing the server admin to turn off the stupid "click this button to spam the channel with a gigantic dancing emoji to welcome newcomers".
It kills any ongoing conversation, and imo, convinces newcomers that people don't so much chat in that Discord as they just press shiny buttons.
I think it depends on how the servers are setup. Chat channels with 1000s people participating are typically worthless as the signal to noise ratio ruins it.
But when the majority of conversations are happening in forums/thread style channels then it works well. You can still have some more niche chat style sections where typically 2-10 people participate
Chat channels are also fine for lots of people when its not about conversations but more just about sharing things. Like a "Share what you build" or "memes" channel work well as tons of messages are fine as you only care to see a few anyway.
Also limited size voice channels can be good aswell 5 people max.
My thought is that it just doesn't make sense to have a product which serves both communities of 1,000+ people and a small group of <50 friends. You end up making far too many compromises.
I used to just engage with my friends. Now it feels like a really noisy reddit. Sure I could leave all of them, but that is kind of my point. There is an identity crises for the product.
A well known path....bluesky saw it with twitter. Reddit with digg. /. with digg are the ones that come to mind. Interesting to see if this works out better.
Is there really no open source version of these that people can selfhost?
There are multiple free providers for AI moderation models (openai and xai), you can get a vps with 1tb of storage for pretty cheap, just setup an image optimizer/downscaler with Go or Rust so its fast and you can handle probably 10,000 people pretty easily.
I guess the main reason that discord is good is because of the centralization as it allows all your servers in one place and super easy link sharing and signup.
Decentralized social and chat should be present in this new era, clawbot showed that people are willing to spinup and selfhost useful things even if they are not overly technical. I think we could see a new wave of similar things happening for things like social media and chat.
I think you overestimate the capability and willingness of the average Discord user to go through that. Majority are not technical, they have no idea what self hosting is, what a VPS is, etc.
Also self hosting creates an issue of balkanization. Everybody will have to join everybody else’s server. Too much effort. The closest we can probably get is the Mastodon model.
Normally I'm a lurker here but I gotta put in a good word for this project: https://sharkord.com/
It's still super early in development but it's already been amazing to have a self-hosted 3rd space for my friends and myself. The "living room not a convention center" focus is exactly what I find missing in most of the other options.
There is Mumble for a free software option similar to TS. Works well in my experience. I've hosted a server for friends for around a decade now I think.
It's decentralized but still has central servers that can be overwhelmed?
Yes, the self hosted servers register with a centralized server to check for a license and to optionally list that server in the centralized list of public servers. Teamspeak can be hosted for free but has client restrictions that can be overcome with a license.
On a related note, Mumble self hosted servers can also register with a centralized server if the server owner wishes to have it listed for public use. This is optional as the server owner can also just advertise the connection details on a website and/or in Discord. Mumble [1] has no concept of a license to operate however. There is a light-weight version of the Mumble server called uMurmur that can run on a Linux router or RasPi but the channel configuration is statically defined ahead of time on uMurmur. The full blown version is just called Murmur and by default uses sqlite but it can also use a database like MySQL or MariaDB for storing persistent data like user registrations, channels, bans, and server configuration.
.
Mumble is fantastic for voice chat. Its text features are very basic, though, so people fleeing Discord would probably want something additional to handle that. Maybe Matrix.
A single location is a good selling point. Being able to jump into a voice chat, and still post things in a shared text chat is a good feature. Mumble should work a bit on that.
> Like so many things from history, this is all Britain’s fault. The farcical UK Online Safety Act is forcing all social media platforms and adult-oriented websites to require age verification checks before its citizens can access them
I guess no other US state or country has demanded age checks, great journalism from kotaku...
The things in politics have a habit of spreading outside of country's borders, as politicians in other countries just go "huh, that's nice kind of oppresion, and their population didn't totally revolt so maybe we should try"
Lots of people support these age checks. The many tech companies delivering too much filth to young audiences with no easy controls shot themselves in the foot on this one.
That same Peter Thiel-tied verification that Discord is using, Persona, is also used by many other services right? Anyone know who else uses them so I can avoid them?
I don't think discord is going anywhere. Not that I like or support them, but the waves of people leaving anything are always overblown. Look at Reddit after the API switch up.
The reason my friends and I moved to Discord in late 2015 or early 2016 was because it blew the competition out of the water at the time. The audio was so much better. I think screen share and face cams may not have been supported at the time, but it later was and was higher quality and a better experience than Skype or Teamspeak, IMO.
Now though, that might just be table stakes for a new service now that WebRTC is standard and the codecs have gotten better too. I'm rooting for any sort of truly solid decentralized chat (text, video, and audio) to take off. Right now, all of them have notable flaws. I also think many of them try to compete with the community aspect of Discord, which I personally don't use and thus and am a bad judge of quality. Just a way to chat with people I already know.
> Not that I like or support them, but the waves of people leaving anything are always overblown
There can be 2 things.
It can be fantastic for small players to get an influx of customers from a major player thats listing. Its good and healthy for the market.
That doesnt mean that Salesforce/Microsoft/Reddit/Discord is actually going anywhere. But these are still great numbers for the little guys.
>I'm rooting for any sort of truly solid decentralized chat
That would be great. I remember cryptocat was pretty good. But IIRC it died.
I think discord will stick around, yeah, but it's competitors will also grow a lot more until someday, maybe in 5-10 years, Discord finds itself withering away in favor of some new app.
The thing is Discord isn't finished with upsetting people - it still has to do a lot more stuff to get more net income for their IPO. How they will do that without seriously annoying users is hard to say. The more they annoy their users the more the users flee, boosting the value of the competition.
Discord does have some user capture, but nothing like twitter's - where followers & networks are valuable and can take a long time to aquire - and twitter's competition was able to scoop up a huge number of outraged users despite even that. Granted - I think Twitter's changes annoyed people much more than Discord's.
I don't think Discord is going anywhere, but people always vastly overestimate the power of market leaders. Reddit didn't see a big change in MAUs but it did see massive declines in the amount of time spent on reddit per user and posting activity.
I could see Discord going the same way - declining interest from users while they keep it around for the few 'essential' communities/friends on the platform, but very little tethering them to it if a disruptive competitor comes along.
We get these articles everytime there is some controversy. We had articles about how Gitlab was crushed under the load of new users after Github was acquired by Microsoft, and yet Gitlab is further from being the market leader today than it was back then.
It's clear age verification is coming from a changing legal environment around the world. Discord may be preemptively moving, but any competitor service is eventually going to have to age verify users before they access adult content.
>the waves of people leaving anything are always overblown
Digg, MySpace and Vine?
Wow Teamspeak is still around and looks like they are succeeding again. Teamspeak and Ventrilo used to be such a mainstay of the video game community. I was curious why so many younger people were getting Discords instead of starting up Vent or Teamspeak servers like we used to. It does look like Teamspeak has taken a note out of discord and slacks notebook and have gotten more advanced chat room options now.
Many reasons:
1. To DeDoS a Teamspeak server, it's enough to DeDoS a single server. You may not even need to do that, it may be enough to be such a nuisance that their host kicks them out. To DeDoS a Discord server, it's necessary to DeDoS the entirety of Discord, which is much, much harder, and also much more likely to put you in legal hot water. Discord is the Cloudflare of gaming.
2. Discord servers aren't real servers, they're tenants in an application, effectively "rows in an SQL table", not standalone containers requiring their own tech stack. This means they can be offered for free. You also can't abuse them for E.G. crypto mining, like you can with a VPS where a Teamspeak server can be hosted. Free increases adoption, which makes people a lot more likely to pay for extra features. It's the standard "the rich subsidize the poor" model, common to so many web applications.
3. No technical expertise necessary to set a server up. Bus factor is basically equal to infinity.
4. One service, one account, one interface, many servers, many groups, many people. There's no weird workspace switching and per-workspace DMs like in Slack (not sure how TS does this). If you log in once on a new device, all your server memberships are there, and everything just works. You may be in dozens of servers, and they're all behind the same single login.
Those 4 features are table stakes now, like it or not. If you want to be a real, long-term Discord competitor and attract real users, you have to figure out how to get those 4.
It's DDoS. No e.
Isn’t solving cost effective voice hosting the only issue here? I’d compete if I could affordably scale rooms.
> I was curious why so many younger people were getting Discords instead of starting up Vent or Teamspeak servers like we used to.
Discord did a great job of making it easy and free to get all of your friends into a group together. Everything just works. You don’t need to have an IT person in the group to set up the server and walk everyone through connecting.
In the early days of gaming it seemed like every gaming group had at least one person who worked in tech and didn’t mind setting up a server. Now gaming is mainstream and the average gaming group doesn’t have a person who can host a server for them. Even when they do, that person would rather spend their gaming time on playing the games instead of playing the IT person for the group.
Yeah and even some of us IT people weren't enough into video games to care about hosting voice chat. Like I ran the middle school Minecraft server but not a Teamspeak for it.
As that IT person I’ve set up a few alternatives over the years (and they’re still up, certs and all). Matrix stuck with a decent group of people, but the group I hung out on Discord with refused to move. I definitively bailed after the ID news but the guys didn’t follow (to Matrix, or Jitsi, or TeamSpeak, or Mumble).
I’m kind of salty about making a fruitless effort I’ll admit, but I feel like unless there’s an effortless, perfect, free program that replicates the (voice) channel functionality and screen sharing features people are not going to leave Discord. Even if it does treat its users like shit.
I miss those guys but I refuse to take part in that abuse, and I’m angry about it.
Discord offered more features. Voice chat was part of the initial sell for the platform, but these days most users don't even use the voice functionality and instead use it for long-running hypermedia chats with retained history.
It looks like Teamspeak covers the "group of friends who voice chat each other" use case (Discord DM groups) but not the "IRC replacement" use case (Discord servers). As far as I can tell, the licensing for Teamspeak 6 (the version that tries to be competitive with Discord) is set up such that anybody who joins the server (as opposed to anybody actively using it) uses up a slot, so the licensing fees for larger servers would be cost prohibitive. Additionally, the text chat functionality is way worse than on Discord. There's no way to just have a chat channel, you can only view and use the text chat when you're in a voice call in a voice channel.
I think the main reason was Discord basically doumping free server hosting with VC money to eliminate competition.
Now that money has finally run out, it looks like things are reverting back to normal.
Has the money run out? I still have yet to spend a single dollar on discord.
Because a Discord server is very easy and free to set up, and has nice features like screensharing that weren't commonly handled well at the time. Before that, we used Skype or AIM or iChat if we even wanted audio at all; Teamspeak was more for "serious gamers."
It's frustrating how often 'journalism' assumes good faith and uses the language and arguments of corporations.
Rather than "fleeing age-verification" myself, and I largely assume others, are "fleeing surveillance state data harvesting".
Yeah, I'm 39 years old, I don't need to flee age verification. I just am not interested in having an account on a chat service that would do this. I don't want my driver's license and biometric information to be stored in servers who-knows-where in a country with weak privacy regulations.
This is an extremely rational position.
I spun up a self hosted teamspeak server last weekend for my friends and I using their docker container.
Its going to take some getting used to. Seems weird that they have a hard cap on 10MB file upload sizes if its self hosted. Also the screen sharing wasn't working quite right
Otherwise, voice and text chat is there
It would be a bit of work, but if their repo is solid you could just modify that hardcoded value and build the docker image locally.
Edit: Just realized they may not have a public repo. If that's the case, then sounds like a way to try to get people to pay for the service.
10MB seems like a vestige of old code. What used to be reasonable no longer is. Cameras have too many pixels now for that low of a limit.
Maybe a good opportunity to reduce screensharing (unless pure video content). A lot of people are sharing webpages through video. That's subpar (except for the shared pointer)
The answer to 'I want to share my screen' is not 'have you considered not wanting to do that?
Doesn’t text chat still have a weird thing where you can’t see the texts unless you’re in a voice call in that channel?
Discord has the momentum but overall I just find the experience awful. It would be nice to use anything else at this point. Joining a server with greater than a handful of people is just a nightmare and practically unusable.
Isn't this usually cause the admin went overboard? Like a server of 10 people has 30 channels, one of which is a lobby you have to clear first, and 10 bots telling you that you leveled up or whatever.
The hardest part about joining a new-but-small-but-not-that-small Discord server is convincing the server admin to turn off the stupid "click this button to spam the channel with a gigantic dancing emoji to welcome newcomers".
It kills any ongoing conversation, and imo, convinces newcomers that people don't so much chat in that Discord as they just press shiny buttons.
I think it depends on how the servers are setup. Chat channels with 1000s people participating are typically worthless as the signal to noise ratio ruins it.
But when the majority of conversations are happening in forums/thread style channels then it works well. You can still have some more niche chat style sections where typically 2-10 people participate
Chat channels are also fine for lots of people when its not about conversations but more just about sharing things. Like a "Share what you build" or "memes" channel work well as tons of messages are fine as you only care to see a few anyway.
Also limited size voice channels can be good aswell 5 people max.
My thought is that it just doesn't make sense to have a product which serves both communities of 1,000+ people and a small group of <50 friends. You end up making far too many compromises.
I used to just engage with my friends. Now it feels like a really noisy reddit. Sure I could leave all of them, but that is kind of my point. There is an identity crises for the product.
Well teamspeak is voice chat only, so I don't see how it's a rival for gaming communities that do ongoing text chats and voice only for group play...
Not anymore. There is text chat and screen sharing for years now
A well known path....bluesky saw it with twitter. Reddit with digg. /. with digg are the ones that come to mind. Interesting to see if this works out better.
Fark, somehow still holding strong.
A name I hear about once a year and still somehow surprised. I was a totalfarker back in like ~2000. was a great place.
Florida is still a state.
Is there really no open source version of these that people can selfhost?
There are multiple free providers for AI moderation models (openai and xai), you can get a vps with 1tb of storage for pretty cheap, just setup an image optimizer/downscaler with Go or Rust so its fast and you can handle probably 10,000 people pretty easily.
I guess the main reason that discord is good is because of the centralization as it allows all your servers in one place and super easy link sharing and signup.
Decentralized social and chat should be present in this new era, clawbot showed that people are willing to spinup and selfhost useful things even if they are not overly technical. I think we could see a new wave of similar things happening for things like social media and chat.
I think you overestimate the capability and willingness of the average Discord user to go through that. Majority are not technical, they have no idea what self hosting is, what a VPS is, etc.
Also self hosting creates an issue of balkanization. Everybody will have to join everybody else’s server. Too much effort. The closest we can probably get is the Mastodon model.
Normally I'm a lurker here but I gotta put in a good word for this project: https://sharkord.com/
It's still super early in development but it's already been amazing to have a self-hosted 3rd space for my friends and myself. The "living room not a convention center" focus is exactly what I find missing in most of the other options.
There is Mumble for a free software option similar to TS. Works well in my experience. I've hosted a server for friends for around a decade now I think.
It's decentralized but still has central servers that can be overwhelmed?
It's decentralized but still has central servers that can be overwhelmed?
Yes, the self hosted servers register with a centralized server to check for a license and to optionally list that server in the centralized list of public servers. Teamspeak can be hosted for free but has client restrictions that can be overcome with a license.
On a related note, Mumble self hosted servers can also register with a centralized server if the server owner wishes to have it listed for public use. This is optional as the server owner can also just advertise the connection details on a website and/or in Discord. Mumble [1] has no concept of a license to operate however. There is a light-weight version of the Mumble server called uMurmur that can run on a Linux router or RasPi but the channel configuration is statically defined ahead of time on uMurmur. The full blown version is just called Murmur and by default uses sqlite but it can also use a database like MySQL or MariaDB for storing persistent data like user registrations, channels, bans, and server configuration. .
https://www.mumble.info/
Mumble would be my bigger recommendation for a truly open source Discord alternative, though I'm personally more invested in XMPP as an alternative.
Mumble is fantastic for voice chat. Its text features are very basic, though, so people fleeing Discord would probably want something additional to handle that. Maybe Matrix.
A single location is a good selling point. Being able to jump into a voice chat, and still post things in a shared text chat is a good feature. Mumble should work a bit on that.
> Mumble should work a bit on that.
Mumble is a labor of love, not a commercial product. I expect they would appreciate your help.
It's decentralized because you can run a server yourself, but they also offer hosting services.
> Like so many things from history, this is all Britain’s fault. The farcical UK Online Safety Act is forcing all social media platforms and adult-oriented websites to require age verification checks before its citizens can access them
I guess no other US state or country has demanded age checks, great journalism from kotaku...
The things in politics have a habit of spreading outside of country's borders, as politicians in other countries just go "huh, that's nice kind of oppresion, and their population didn't totally revolt so maybe we should try"
Also technically US is fault of UK too
Lots of people support these age checks. The many tech companies delivering too much filth to young audiences with no easy controls shot themselves in the foot on this one.
Sometimes manufacturing consent is a little easier than other times.
turns out convenience loses when you start asking for face scans.
I haven't gamed for years, but decades ago TS was the solution for team play.
Such fond memories of playing in a team of people scattered all over the world.
Matrix is the only solution ready with all the features necessary. My community made the leap months ago and its been worth it.
All features? Where are the custom emojis?
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/issues/1...
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/195...
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/254...
It's certainly on people's radar.
They are not fleeing age verification, but surveillance capitalism of the evil kind.
That same Peter Thiel-tied verification that Discord is using, Persona, is also used by many other services right? Anyone know who else uses them so I can avoid them?
I did a quick search and it looks like A LOT of business use it (not 100% on the source,but it gives an idea ). Also looking at Persona's website, that includes OpenAI: `OpenAI uses Persona to screen millions of users each month with zero friction` [1] https://data.landbase.com/technology/persona/ [2] https://withpersona.com/customers/openai [3] https://withpersona.com/customers