It’s really frustrating to see the discourse surrounding this when libre software that does what Discord does exists and has for a long time but it’s “a pain” to migrate to or it does not have 100% feature parity so let’s phone our representatives (email…Discord support?) instead of just ripping the bandage off and using already-existing software that works and respects you. The stakes of digital life are raising in this era and it’s time to start acting like it. It isn’t going to be easy and I’m sorry, but I do not know what else to say to it anymore. We have the tools to resist this. It will be difficult at first, and then it won’t be.
What is to be done, then? You can accept the corporate product that does this or the alternatives that exist today, and anything else is…unhelpful. Nothing I’ve said is false. You can do everything Discord does with libre tools; where it gets to the “feature parity” point is an all-in-one package, in which case Discord has a significant decade and several billion dollar venture capital advantage, and not even that will always be the case. What are these critical features available only to Discord that we cannot live without? How did we live without them before 2016? This is just nonsense.
It was mostly Teamspeak, Ventrello, and Skype before discord took over. And the first reason Discord took over was that paying for a TS or Vent server was becoming a bit unviable, partly because the people who were paying for it was also paying for a server to host a forum, and a domain name for said forum, and all that together was pretty expensive, and partly because the shadows of the 08 recession was (and I’d argue still is) still being felt. Another reason was that Skype was shitting the bed so much that when Discord came around it did everything Skype was doing and more, and doing it significantly better than Skype.
Also the barrier to entry is significantly lower than your average traditional forum, and TS/Vent server that was most likely ran by like one guy, and if he went the whole community came crashing down.
Hell if you really want to get into it, Skype did everything every little instant messager did better, and more when it came about.
we can literally live without them but there are communities that were able to exist because of discord’s feature set. We can live without third places but none of the replacements of those are actually adequate.
you’re not doing a vey good job considering sociology and UX.
It’s really frustrating to see the discourse surrounding this when libre software that does what Discord does exists and has for a long time but it’s “a pain” to migrate to or it does not have 100% feature parity so let’s phone our representatives (email…Discord support?) instead of just ripping the bandage off and using already-existing software that works and respects you. The stakes of digital life are raising in this era and it’s time to start acting like it. It isn’t going to be easy and I’m sorry, but I do not know what else to say to it anymore. We have the tools to resist this. It will be difficult at first, and then it won’t be.
each of those features you blithely dismiss is critical to someone and people have broad networks that might include multiple of those use-cases.
you literally said we do not have the tools to resist because there is not feature parity
What is to be done, then? You can accept the corporate product that does this or the alternatives that exist today, and anything else is…unhelpful. Nothing I’ve said is false. You can do everything Discord does with libre tools; where it gets to the “feature parity” point is an all-in-one package, in which case Discord has a significant decade and several billion dollar venture capital advantage, and not even that will always be the case. What are these critical features available only to Discord that we cannot live without? How did we live without them before 2016? This is just nonsense.
It was mostly Teamspeak, Ventrello, and Skype before discord took over. And the first reason Discord took over was that paying for a TS or Vent server was becoming a bit unviable, partly because the people who were paying for it was also paying for a server to host a forum, and a domain name for said forum, and all that together was pretty expensive, and partly because the shadows of the 08 recession was (and I’d argue still is) still being felt. Another reason was that Skype was shitting the bed so much that when Discord came around it did everything Skype was doing and more, and doing it significantly better than Skype.
Also the barrier to entry is significantly lower than your average traditional forum, and TS/Vent server that was most likely ran by like one guy, and if he went the whole community came crashing down.
Hell if you really want to get into it, Skype did everything every little instant messager did better, and more when it came about.
we can literally live without them but there are communities that were able to exist because of discord’s feature set. We can live without third places but none of the replacements of those are actually adequate.
you’re not doing a vey good job considering sociology and UX.
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