With the recent news about discord asking for face or ID scan, what other alternatives are there that we can recommend to our less tech-savvy friends?
With the recent news about discord asking for face or ID scan, what other alternatives are there that we can recommend to our less tech-savvy friends?
Like 90% of users, I care about voice chatting with my friends, having persistent chat sessions, being able to share videos and links, being able to share files, being able to share screens, and stream to my friends.
Yes. ALL of these features are important. Not “oh but you can chat using this app, and share files with this app, and stream with this other app”. No. All those features listed. In a single app.
Until an alternative pops up that offers all of that, I refuse to accept the other “alternatives” listed as viable. They are not. There is a reason people moved from things like mumble and teamspeak to discord. Because discord offered more services at a higher level of convenience. I despise what discord is doing, but pretending like having to use multiple different programs to try and poorly accomplish what discord offers on its own would somehow be appealing to the majority of users is insane.
“Oh but these are decentraliz-” I. Do. Not. Give. A. Shit. Nor do the vast majority of discord users. Decentralization is fine and good, but it is so far down the list of priorities that it’s worthless to talk about.
This attitude is exactly why you and most people will be continuing to repeate this cycle of enshittification every 5 years or so.
You went from using multiple apps to a big clunky web browser that only connects to one service and you trust that service not to screw you over one day.
This is why we cant have nice things.
Man, people really prioritize convenience over all else, huh? We are fucking doomed.
Dont some of these alternatives check all of those boxes? Eg Stoat and Matrix have persistent chat, file sharing, screensharing, and streaming dont they?
stoat aims for that but isn’t stable. matrix needs jitsi for screen sharing and streaming, that’s not like the smooth experience with discord. also i’m unsure about persistent chat in the long term, i’ve used matrix for a while and the rooms tend to not last for long amd get ‘upgraded’ or something (had to click on some button that said something around ‘this chatroom has moved’… and couldn’t search from the old chatlog properly)