I use vesktop, a heavily customisable and privacy friendly Discord app for this exact reason.
I literally want to video chat my friends for D&D and the occasional Minecraft and get one of the most tedious and bloated pieces of software in existence. Why does my calling program have mini games, paid emotes and lag like a truck? I genuinely don’t believe I have a hope in hell getting my friends off it, so that’s my compromise.
Discord being used like a wiki or forum can die though. Who thought a chat log was a good place to have guides and news, and how the hell has that not died long ago?
That’s news to me. I’m not overly cautious with privacy so I’m not expert. My general ethos isn’t to maximise privacy but to minimise advertising, and get as much customisability as possible.
Often that ends up with me using privacy focussed software by chance, and I may have applied that here, but looking at desktop, it blocks discord telemetry and limits system access, which is at least something.
No, you don’t see some things are more important than your own personal convenience.
I’ve dropped people I’ve known for years over this. People I thought were better. But no, they, like you, like everyone else, don’t care about the lives of other people so long as you’re comfortable.
How is somebody using discord “contributing to fascism” to any meaningful degree? At that point you might as well kill yourself since buying food also contributes, since in most places the only options are all shitty companies that are way worse than discord.
You’ll need to provide sources for any of those claims. Ofc we should be skeptical of anything a corporation says, but Discord explicitly said they don’t use messages for age verification: https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-is-building-safer-experiences-for-teens. I’d be hard-pressed to believe that if that weren’t true there would be leaks.
If there ever is an alternative that is also free to use, has (almost) the same features or more and has a at least halfway decent UI & UX, I’m more than willing to switch. But the only software I found that was pretty much on the same level as Discord (besides popularity) got bought and killed shortly afterwards by Roblox.
Edit: Thanks for all the suggestions, I now have my own Fluxer instance up and running. And also sorry for basically using Cunningham’s Law on you all lol
Last time I used Stoat it still had the old name (can’t remember what it was) and it was miles behind discord. No idea how much changed since the rebranding tho.
Fluxer on the other hand sounds pretty promising, I’ll look into it.
Stoat has been working well so far, they have gotten even the mobile version usable (for chatting). The problem is just the same old - nobody else will stop using Discord. It is pretty hard, to use a communication platform, without anyone to communicate with…
Apparently if you self host you can have everything be free. Its just on their own instance that has the premium which I think is a good way to fund the project
Yeah, and you have to pay for the hardware, for the stuff you need for the maintenance, etc., and it comes again to my point: if not everyone can pay for software or for a better hardware, then not everyone can pay for self-host either.
While I don’t know what the restrictions are on the official fluxer instance, I do think it’s worth noting that if you self host everyone on your instance gets everything for free and you can set the limits for file upload and similar stuff to whatever you want, plus self hosting was pretty easy compared to when I tried it with matrix.
Stop using Discord.
My dnd group plays on discord, they ain’t switching and I’m not gonna just stop one of the few joys I have in life
I use vesktop, a heavily customisable and privacy friendly Discord app for this exact reason.
I literally want to video chat my friends for D&D and the occasional Minecraft and get one of the most tedious and bloated pieces of software in existence. Why does my calling program have mini games, paid emotes and lag like a truck? I genuinely don’t believe I have a hope in hell getting my friends off it, so that’s my compromise.
Discord being used like a wiki or forum can die though. Who thought a chat log was a good place to have guides and news, and how the hell has that not died long ago?
I miss being able to find good guides on forums.
Vesktop is not privacy focused.
That’s news to me. I’m not overly cautious with privacy so I’m not expert. My general ethos isn’t to maximise privacy but to minimise advertising, and get as much customisability as possible.
Often that ends up with me using privacy focussed software by chance, and I may have applied that here, but looking at desktop, it blocks discord telemetry and limits system access, which is at least something.
Yes, but it can’t block AI message scanning. And the developers don’t seem too motivated to work against Discord’s privacy violating bot.
Your D&D group can get fucked. So can you if you use that as an excuse to stay on a platform actively participating in fascism.
I can see why you don’t struggle with the network effect.
No, you don’t see some things are more important than your own personal convenience.
I’ve dropped people I’ve known for years over this. People I thought were better. But no, they, like you, like everyone else, don’t care about the lives of other people so long as you’re comfortable.
How is somebody using discord “contributing to fascism” to any meaningful degree? At that point you might as well kill yourself since buying food also contributes, since in most places the only options are all shitty companies that are way worse than discord.
The AI used for determining your age scans your messages and sends that data to training centres of which the data is used by ICE.
You’ll need to provide sources for any of those claims. Ofc we should be skeptical of anything a corporation says, but Discord explicitly said they don’t use messages for age verification: https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-is-building-safer-experiences-for-teens. I’d be hard-pressed to believe that if that weren’t true there would be leaks.
There were leaks. That’s how I know.
Sucks to be you taking the word of a for profit service. Seems like nothing gets learned.
If there ever is an alternative that is also free to use, has (almost) the same features or more and has a at least halfway decent UI & UX, I’m more than willing to switch. But the only software I found that was pretty much on the same level as Discord (besides popularity) got bought and killed shortly afterwards by Roblox.
Edit: Thanks for all the suggestions, I now have my own Fluxer instance up and running. And also sorry for basically using Cunningham’s Law on you all lol
Matrix, use the sable (2.0) client
Sable Next >>
The upstream Sable is slop.
Fluxer and Stoat
Last time I used Stoat it still had the old name (can’t remember what it was) and it was miles behind discord. No idea how much changed since the rebranding tho.
Fluxer on the other hand sounds pretty promising, I’ll look into it.
Fluxer is primarily what I use. Iirc Stoat is more libre
Fluxer will get Federation and E2EE early next year.
Stoat’s also working on federation, using maybe Polyproto.
That is fanstastic
Stoat has been working well so far, they have gotten even the mobile version usable (for chatting). The problem is just the same old - nobody else will stop using Discord. It is pretty hard, to use a communication platform, without anyone to communicate with…
Fluxer is shit as it’s not-so-Libre and also asks you to pay for stuff that should be basic and free.
Apparently if you self host you can have everything be free. Its just on their own instance that has the premium which I think is a good way to fund the project
Yeah, and you have to pay for the hardware, for the stuff you need for the maintenance, etc., and it comes again to my point: if not everyone can pay for software or for a better hardware, then not everyone can pay for self-host either.
While I don’t know what the restrictions are on the official fluxer instance, I do think it’s worth noting that if you self host everyone on your instance gets everything for free and you can set the limits for file upload and similar stuff to whatever you want, plus self hosting was pretty easy compared to when I tried it with matrix.
There is. There are.
Matrix with either Sable or Cinny.
Matrix using Sable Next or Cinny, or Extera Next, or Nheko Reborn.
Or Stoat.
Have you tried Kallisti?