It’s almost impossible for them to compete with discord at this point. Discord is so good it has raised the bar far beyond what foss developers can make in their free time.
I don't know how the commenters below you miss your point consistently. Discord is featureful and each feature is only a couple of clicks away, and every nitty-gritty is nicely abstracted away under the UI. Surely it was a bit of time to get the hang of their UX, but I can't seriously see _any_ FOSS software to do audio, video, screen sharing, IM with groups and users, all packed into a nice consistent package. For one, Discord must have a serious backend and constant support to back this all up. The other thing is that joining is like zero effort. You click on an invite link, it only asks you a handle, and bam, you land on the server, ready to go. And you have several ways to "upgrade", you can register your handle, download and use the desktop app. With a buttery smooth transition to both.
I can see FOSS software outperform Discord, if you pick an aspect, like "low latency audio". But if someone wants to make FOSS successful, they better focus on the user experience. People sacrifice a good bit of everything else, just to get a better UX, and the more developers realize this, the more potential their projects have to succeed.
Yeah everyone here bashing Discord doesn't understand that the voice chat aspect is like 5% of what makes it appealing.
You can build actual _communities_ on Discord, it's not just about the voice chat. It brings the people together in a way they can share rich content in one space.
If you're on voice chat you will very often want to interact with them by sending images, videos or links back and forth, and can do this seamlessly by using Ctrl-V.
This is why IRC pales in comparison to modern chat solutions, and proponents will start rambling about open protocols or whatever stuff the end user doesn't care about. Can you paste a screenshot into the chat? Thought so.
I agree with your sentiment. For FOSS to be successful, it needs to focus on UX, and beyond that, on what users expect from a product. It can perform better, be more secure, be absolutely more ethical etc but masses don't choose software like this, it's a means to an end at most.
On the other hand, IRC could easily be just used as an IM backend to a hypothetical FOSS discord alternative. You would press CTRL+V in the client, it would upload your clipboard image to the server, return you an URL, and that would be pasted into the chat box, which would then embed the image. GitHub's editor does this for example and it's a smooth experience, and perfectly compatible with a text-only protocol.
Color me skeptical that being able to have a video or an image show up in the chat is what makes a community.
It can be nice to see videos and images, and it can be annoying. Quite often videos and images dumb down the conversation as people post memes instead of saying anything meaningful.
It can also be handy to see the image right there and not have to click on a link to open it in your web browser to see it, but that just makes the experience a bit more seamless and convenient, and is not something that is going to make or break a community.
Plenty of communities have formed on IRC.. big and small, even without inline images and video.
This sounds like you're limiting the idea of a "community" to something akin to niche FOSS projects, not generalized interests like Discord is more commonly used for. IRC is way less intuitive for building such things, especially for the vast majority of users - who don't even know what IRC is.
What about Jitsi or BigBlueButton? They're as easy to use a Discord if not easier and are entirely free-software you can selfhost. Plus if you don't want to selfhost it's super easy to find a host for those solutions.
Please do! Only problem is you can't use them through the Tor network, but if that's not a requirement for you (and it's anyway not possible with discord either to my knowledge) then these solutions will probably make you very happy.
The last version of BBB released a few weeks ago apparently reduced resource-usage by up to two thirds server-side and brought in long-awaited features. Or so i heard from friendly hosting collectives, who definitely recommend to give it a go.
As an occasional user of discord I cannot understand that at all. It is one of the most confusing UIs I have ever used, everything from finding the settings to joining or telling what channel you are connected to is done in a "unique UI paradigm". Quality of calls is good but the app is mental
In my experience, discord was better than the previous options for a few reasons.
A) it's free, as opposed to a vent or TS server, which while they are not expensive, it's still a barrier to setting one up.
B) the free tier has quite a lot of functionality without paying for servers, even for a lot of players (like a World of Warcraft guild).
C) it merged voice Comms with a community hub where people could communicate and share things relevant to their game (to use the WoW scenario again, raid organising, upcoming patch discussion, guides and other helpful information) in an organised and central location.
I recognise there is a bunch of issues with discord, I've had it have complete melt downs when the voice systems have broken, it can be a real resource hog, and don't get me started on the security and privacy (it's not great), however because of the additional functionality I still think it's a great bit of software.
I'm so glad I don't have to be in Warcraft guild Facebook groups anymore!
These three points are all well and good but they don't contradict my original points: Discord's UI is exceptionally confusing and requires specific knowledge to operate it. This isn't a field with brilliant UI either: eg it's often confusing whether you're muted or unmuted on most videoconferencing programs. Even so, Discord is definitely the most confusing videoconferencing UI I can remember using. I'm sure that harms adoption greatly, even if it is still very popular.
My purpose was not to suggest you were wrong, just present my experience and thoughts about why it's become so widely used _despite_ the issues you've raised.
I think people overcome the awkward UI because of the perceived benefits of the platform verses alternatives. That has certainly been my experience, which I appreciate is a single data point.
> I think people overcome the awkward UI because of the perceived benefits of the platform verses alternatives.
I'm sure you're right! The robustness of Discord's call quality definitely seems to be much better than average (though a lot of this comes down to people's local networking hardware).
Discord is quite easy to use for dozens of people I know, most of whom aren't programmers or heavy PC users. It just works and it's great, especially the noise cancelling.
You are quite literally the first person I've seen say the UI in Discord is confusing. For everything Discord gets wrong, I would never put the UI on that list.
Somewhat unrelated, but can you explain to me why every small youtuber or github project seems to have a discord server nowadays? Do people really need to talk all the time, with every group of people they interact with?
My main problem with Discord is that I can't get logs out of it.
I want to archive all the channels I'm in, so I can search the archives offline using regular text search tools. But as far as I know there's no way to do that. (The closest I've come is copying and pasting text out of it, screen by screen, which is a very long and tedious process.)
The Discord client has rudimentary search capability but you have to be online and connected to the Discord server you want to search to use it, and there's no guarantee it'll continue to work indefinitely, and if you ever leave that server your ability to search it is gone.
Scrolling through chat history is also incredibly slow (especially if you have to scroll more than a little, as it slows down significantly when you scroll back a certain amount and it has to load the chat history from the server).
The Discord client is a resource hog too, and on my old slow laptop I dread playing a game and having Discord open at the same time as this combination will often slow down the game to the point that it's unplayable.
None of these problems exist with IRC.
With IRC you own your own data, and if you want to log and search offline it's super easy to do. IRC clients like weechat are super lightweight so don't cause any problems when running along with other apps, and scrolling back through chat history is lightning fast.
The main thing that Discord has going for it as an IRC replacement is that it can show images and videos inline in the chat, and it has a nice looking client. But having your data locked away and at the whims of a corporation and having to suffer through all the other annoyances and inconveniences of the Discord client makes it a poor replacement for IRC for me.
From a creator perspective it makes a great place to build a stronger community, as you are on more equal ground with your followers and all your followers now have a place to talk about what they follow. Hard to be "equals" on twitter or on youtube. For github projects it depends, but it is usually tech support, but one where more often than not other users/followers will be helping other users/followers, which leaves the creator with less support work.
From a follower perspective, it is a place that usually garners like minded individuals, meaning you can often find friends/people to do stuff with.
It is also a very good way to hear news about whatever you are following, a lot of server have a ton of users but little activity because most people are there for the news.
The reason why people don't just create forum websites is mostly because it costs money and secondly because going to a website is more cumbersome than opening an app that holds all these "forums".
Certainly possible to be better than Discord. I tried Discord once for a friend’s virtual party. Horrible sound quality, horrible connection issues both on Windows client and iOS app - not to speak of fully pegging the CPUs for a video chat app. The experience was far worse than a Zoom or Teams call.
Maybe for 24/7 gamers who have tweaked it until they found the right setup, Discord “just works”, but for me it seemed unfit for purpose.
A friend and I both got really nice microphones but when in a discord call you can not tell the difference between them and an above average wireless headset microphone (these are usually much worse than their wired equivalent).
Recording the audio in windows you can easily tell the difference between them, but not over discord. Even tried upping the bitrate but it made no noticeable difference.
No, I have been hanging around in Discord for a while now and I've run quite often into issues with connection issues for specific servers (I guess some clusters going down) and them being OOO for a while.
Mumble on the other hand tends to be pretty reliable and comes back up in a few seconds anyway whenever it fails.
I've had the exact opposite experience with Discord, personally. Flawless streaming of 1080p60 games, screens, voice & video chat. Text chat/channels are intuitive. Embeds just work.
Teams on the other hand has a terrible UI for text chat, but the voice/video meetings are fine.
We all take turns streaming the driver POV in sim racing for multiple hours in driver swapped endurance. I think there's a whole category of esports coming only made possible by discord. Works flawlessly.
I use Discord to stay in touch with a group of friends who use potatoes as PCs and the worst version of cable internet (cox). The voice quality is always flawless, even though in games we often run into game connectivity issues, the voice comes through loud and clear.
I regularly take part in programming groups, paper reading groups, and book reading groups with Discord. It works flawlessly without any problem. Screen-sharing, video chat, voice all work properly as expected.
I also admin several servers, some of which are completely unrelated to tech and non-tech people find it seamless to use.
And their noise suppression just works. I have only seen better video quality in Google Duo, and better voice quality in 4G VoLTE calls.
Only three issues I have with Discord-
1. It requires high speed internet connection. How high? People with 3 MBPS reported seamless use.
2. The clients are resource hogs. The mobile clients drop the battery too quick, and takes too much RAM in PCs. Although the latter has improved with updates.
3. I am concerned about privacy. Discord is as close-sourced as it gets.
Discord is good but has some infuriating issues such as not recording device IDs when mapping buttons - eg for muting or swapping PTT/voice activated. Eg. press `\\usb2\button1` - and it will be triggered by ANY USB device with a `button1`.
It's a recorded (sorry) issue, they don't seem to care. My use case is simracing with a couple of button boxes in addition to those on the wheel; the outcomes of this issue can be incredibly random (and frustrating) mid race.
Also (especially applicable if you host a small community) to get high quality streams you must put a staggering amount of nitro dollars in on a monthly basis.
Nah it just isn't good. Or especially bad. Like I said, Discord is just There. The only reason to use it is because others are already using it. But nothing about the product design jumps out as "good."
As someone who runs a discord community closing in on 7k I can tell you that discord is far easier to manage. More features, built in statistics, good role setups, plenty of bots and a easy API. The open source alternatives are light-years behind unfortunately.
Can you give an example of something especially good in comparison? Examples of things especially bad in comparison include essentially everything I can think of that attempts to address the same niche.
i dont understand the point where it competes in the same space ? mumble does not have ads, does not sell your data, and certainly does not need to run ontop of Electron.
