Enshittification Continues: Discord to begin showing advertisements on it's free platform

Hopefully those FOSS projects will gain some sense as discord becomes more shit and will leave. One can hope.

ideally such changes to advertising and the ToS arbitration clause removing consumer rights will help give a lot of the open-source communities a gentle push to get off of discord. It's become far too central to too many communities and is impossible to search for knowledge.

I've only ever used it in browser to limit what it can see on my machine. I was told by one of my coding professors that one of the signs of a virus is if it monitors what apps you're running, I've been cautious ever since of anything that does that (obviously it isn't the only sign and isn't instant virus bin, like I have an app that monitors GPU usage and throttles apps to keep from cooking my machine)

Don't forget that it saves even your deleted DMs for as long as you have an account!

People will move away, sure, but to another proprietary service that'll do the same thing in a year or two.

Hope we get some comparable options yet, I only know of matrix and that one allegedly has tons of security and performance issues.

It's often not the cost of the software, but the hosting costs, especially on a growing platform.

While I don’t disagree with the sentiment, the Discord Nitro subscription has been around for a long while. From what I’ve seen using the platform it seems relatively popular. I’d guess adding ads to the free tier is as much about enticing people onto the subscription (which presumably won’t have ads).

I've been using Discord almost since launch, and in that time, not a single feature did I find as an important addition to the program. It is now much more bloated with unnecessary stuff, stuff for which they paid those talented devs you mention.

I would have been perfectly content with a one-time payment to use it and it would have worked perfectly well for them with that model if they didn't get greedy and want to stuff it with random junk to justify a subscription.

I don't mind paying as long as it's not a subscription scam for no reason at all.

Does IRC do voice nowadays? I think that is the main reason people use Discord

Compared to Matrix, or any E2EE chat, this doesn't sound good:

we take your privacy very seriously. And with end-to-end encryption coming to DMs and group chats soon

Compared to Discord, or other established voice chat systems like Mumble, this doesn't sound great either:

We are currently rebuilding the client and the voice server from scratch. The old voice should work in most cases, but it may inexplicably not connect in some scenarios and / or exhibit weird behaviour.

The "app" on Android seems to be just the webapp running in a standalone window.

I'll concede them the OpenSource and self-hosted factors, and it does look like Discord, but it doesn't seem like a suitable replacement for average users... yet. Then again, the ads might push them over.

Guess it's worth to keep an eye on it.

Oh, this looks great. Honestly, I am very happy when closed-source apps become worse, these are all just opportunities for open source to move in and take over.

so this Revolt project is open source, which is nice, but still seems to rely on centralized servers. Does it use P2P for voice+video+fileshare so that the original devs aren't on the hook for insane bandwidth requirements? I can't see anything about their networking systems in the FAQ or info pages.

I may consider getting my friends to switch sooner or later if it's more P2P based. But I don't really want something that runs ALL traffic through central servers, because the bandwidth costs will inevitably just lead to the same situation that Discord is now in.

What made you choose revolt chat over matrix? Just curious.

Oh cool there's an Android app, that's gonna make it so much easier to recommend!

Edit: I just read about how it's centralized and not encrypted, I'm not sure how this can become anything but Discord except open source and less popular. Matrix + Element seems to cover my use case for a project a bit better, I'll give that a try.

usually at first you can do such, and later on, when a ceo wants more money, you then can buy that together with the new "pro" features actually nobody needs nor wants.

maybe better look for more stable solutions before they start acting like a broadcom ;-)

Sure, but you really expect that option to stay available for very long after 90% of users turn it off and ruin it's profitability?

For now. I'm quite sure that option will disappear at some point in the not too distant future.

This is the definition of late-stage capitalism. Capitalism starts out by finding useful things that improve lives for at least some people (potentially by ruining it for others). For instance, it invents assembly lines to make manufactured goods cheaper but in so doing makes the worker's job dull, repetitive, stressful, and robs him of his agency. This is early stage capitalism. Things are getting worse for some people but broadly better for many.

But then later on capitalism runs out of things to improve. You can only invent the assembly line once. You only get that boost when you implement it. So you have to come up with something else. Maybe you computerize things. But eventually you can't wring any more profits out of production and profits must go up, so you have to take them out of the customers. You roll up all the competing firms into a monopoly and then start jacking up the price, slashing the quality, etc. This is late-stage. It becomes more and more parasitic and the snake eats its own tail.

For the lazy

Did you memorize that number? 😮

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why activity pub? I don't think it is designed to do group chats.