Every alternative I have tried has a few “big” communities that were active for about four days before completely collapsing on themselves. It’s not that there isn’t a viable alternative, it’s that there is literally no alternative it seems like.
I’ve been tempted for the last year to begin work on designing an experience like IRC, but which includes voice chat and screen sharing capabilities. That’s my dream is a melding of a nostalgic chat protocol, with modern services.
From my understanding IRC’s biggest flaw is that it requires the recipient to be online in order to receive messages, and any software that includes voice, video, screen sharing, and proper servers would by necessity have very little resemblance to it.
I suppose I mean the resemblance to IRC would be mostly in the user experience. However, I personally don’t want to add persisted server-side messaging either. The novelty for me is that it’s a “here, now” social experience.
The problem with non-persistent messaging is that for most things people use Discord for it is a non-starter. Most people who are doing more than just socializing really don’t want to spend half their time repeating things to people who were at work, asleep, or in a different time zone when the discussion came it. Any serious Discord competitor would need to focus on practically and low barriers to entery, which tend to be directly opposed to novelty.
@sonori the problem is that Discord tried to mix social media with Instant Messaging. This is not something that’s working well. On one of them, you just talk to people, ask them about stuff and whatnot (this is why it is also called *direct* messaging). On other, you want to have stuff that is rather more easily accessible and has various other social functions - and it is also designed around it.
You also have a place where you can centralize all discussion (i.e. the feed) so you can at least get an idea of what is going on.
Discord (as a messaging app, primarily) is totally unfit for these tasks.
Every alternative I have tried has a few “big” communities that were active for about four days before completely collapsing on themselves. It’s not that there isn’t a viable alternative, it’s that there is literally no alternative it seems like.
I’ve been tempted for the last year to begin work on designing an experience like IRC, but which includes voice chat and screen sharing capabilities. That’s my dream is a melding of a nostalgic chat protocol, with modern services.
From my understanding IRC’s biggest flaw is that it requires the recipient to be online in order to receive messages, and any software that includes voice, video, screen sharing, and proper servers would by necessity have very little resemblance to it.
I suppose I mean the resemblance to IRC would be mostly in the user experience. However, I personally don’t want to add persisted server-side messaging either. The novelty for me is that it’s a “here, now” social experience.
The problem with non-persistent messaging is that for most things people use Discord for it is a non-starter. Most people who are doing more than just socializing really don’t want to spend half their time repeating things to people who were at work, asleep, or in a different time zone when the discussion came it. Any serious Discord competitor would need to focus on practically and low barriers to entery, which tend to be directly opposed to novelty.
@sonori the problem is that Discord tried to mix social media with Instant Messaging. This is not something that’s working well. On one of them, you just talk to people, ask them about stuff and whatnot (this is why it is also called *direct* messaging). On other, you want to have stuff that is rather more easily accessible and has various other social functions - and it is also designed around it.
You also have a place where you can centralize all discussion (i.e. the feed) so you can at least get an idea of what is going on.
Discord (as a messaging app, primarily) is totally unfit for these tasks.
@wesker
Or “How Signal is closer in functionality to WhatsApp by the day, because it turns out people like the functionality of WhatsApp.”
So Matrix protocol?