Twitter, Reddit and Discord are simultaneously going to shit - because enshittification is what happens when suddenly money isn’t free any more and borrowing carries an interest rate
The fediverse is not very well connected suburbs, good for what it is but doesn’t do the same job
bsky is gonna do its own fediverse (with beer and shitcoins) and it’s fun right now as a single instance with good users, but the staff are the sort of barely-crypto-reactionary free speech warriors who will never block the nazi instances
[youth pastor voice] you know, there’s someone else who talked about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall
EDIT: to clarify: Discord is ticking along for now, but they hired some ex-Facebook execs, employees are in revolt and the org is hollowing out. hence (a) bad decisions (b) glitching https://archive.is/fI3hq
I was a wee bit surprised (but not really, I guess) when just before the Reddit blackout everyone on Reddit was spamming their relevant Discord links for the relevant subreddit.
I could only think, “That’s no better!!”
We’ll see if that changes.
To add to that, Discord is an entirely different kind of interaction. Fine if that’s what you want, but not fine if you want something a bit more…static.
Discord is flat out garbage as a forum. Once you pass say even 15 people, it becomes a total mess of posts burying other posts, you can never find anything. I have no idea why everyone wants to use it for something it was never meant to be.
I’m glad someone else is saying it too because my lord I cannot for the life of me understand why people are so persistent on promoting discord as a social media platform
Seems like a kids thing really. I agree it is stupid and going form one corporate owned entity to another is no better. I think FOSS community run solutions while rough around the edges will have the last laugh. If they can sustain the current numbers. I’d also like to see more youtubers etc promote the fediverse and explain how it works as there seems to be a lot of confusion out there. Ultimately its exciting and healthy for the Internet and society as a whole
Yup, I agree wholeheartedly! It’s just not my thing.
I use it for gaming with friend groups, but would gladly get off it if my friends would too. Sadly that is a near impossibility. lol
Yeah, for certain kinds of live conversations while involved in a group activity, it works fine. But only for that, in my opinion.
Yep. It’s a replacement for something like whatsapp, not a forum.
Relevant old thread on hackernews
Agreed! Discord is a stream of thought conversational platform. Even while there may be “topics”, they’re moreso just to categorize the (mostly) noise of the platform. It’s similar to twitter in that regard, but very dissimilar from other social media in that it prioritizes direct one-to-one interaction over the broad dissemination of information.
I hope Discord gets their shit together, but as is, I’d have left already if it wasn’t for social ties.
Honestly I think a lot of people were just feeling afraid of losing contact with people who belong to their communities on Reddit. I know I was guilty of the same…all misty-eyed, imagining people I’ve come to really like being around and sharing with over the years just scattered in the wind ahhh
But I’m feeling better now. I’ve accepted that I have to delete my Reddit accounts. I’m pretty much over it. I feel committed to helping build up new communities in places like this, etc.
But yeah discord has been good for some things over the years….but seeing what is going on there I fully expect it to go the way of everything else—to shit.
I can’t handle discord. It’s far too chatty for me.
Agreed! Definitely not my thing.
I know this doesn’t really fall into “tech news” or anything, but the take seemed insightful enough to be worthy of sharing imo, so forgib me pls ❤️
Discord employees are in revolt? First I’ve heard of it
Um. The only drama I’ve seen about Discord is the name change crap. Unfortunately that was a necessary change because of their own original stupidity with usernames and capitalization.
Evilcoleslaw#1234
EvilColeslaw#1234
evilcoleslaw#1234
Every permutation of capitalization can be a unique username under their original format, and for the low low price of Nitro you can change your discriminator at will to impersonate someone quite convincingly.
I tried setting up discord once for a project. I use a whitelist firewall on my workstation for a few reasons. Discord is the most sketchy nonsense I have ever encountered. At least when I tried a few years ago, discord tries to make a cascade of connections to what appears to be random raw IP addresses on weird ports. I started punching a few holes to let it through but after a half dozen raw IP addresses and it still didn’t work I said forget this nonsense. I’m probably just too dumb to understand what is going on, but I’m not willing to trust any proprietary service like that, especially when I really can’t tell how they are remotely financially viable. Maybe someone here knows why they operate like this on raw IP addresses and ports. I didn’t find any explanation on their website.
How does discord make money? It’s always concerned me what data they’re harvesting.
Back when I was still using it, so over 6 years ago, I had the same question and their apparently serious response was to sell merch like stickers.
I agree that there’s a currenct hard push for massive enshittification, so I think we’d better be ready and able to 1) embrace federation, 2) advance it to a degree that BigTech can’t keep up with (FTL speed), 3) pay actual money for it ourselves to ourselves, and 4) do what we must to enshrine anti-enshittification systems into the fabric of this new direction of online society.
One could say there’s… discord at Discord 😉
