Yeah, I know a couple of mods whose servers are in a bit of an uproar.

The “unofficial” Arch Linux discord server is inviting/encouraging their members to move to their Fluxer instance. Hopefully that’s a trend that will start.

Fluxer has been an adequate replacement for Discord for my TTRPG group. Been using it since March and it has gotten better every month.

I have no illusions that they may one day become as shitty, but for now it works. And the fact that it’s open source and self host able gives me some hope.

Ngl the fact it cannot be found on F-droid is very suss. Beta on mobile is Google Play only…

The mobile app has been their main focus past month or so. It just came to the app store beta literally yesterday, before that you had to download the apk from their github. It’s come a looong way and is extremely usable.

Since it is opensource and self-hostable, there will always be some non-shitty fork around once it gets popular. At least it is very likely.

Part of me thinks is this just performative nonsense that will always have enormous holes in it, like Prohibition.

Scanning “your” face to prove your age is really just scanning a face.

But I also worry about successive noose tightening.

Part of me agrees and the other part thinks it’s going to go the way of the automobile.

Everyone needs a license, issued from big brother, to use the public service.

Or else!

People using Discord badly are very unlikely to kill random bystanders.

We could go back and forth all day on this, but just watch out for the government trying to claim “you need an ID for this because the anonymous people online can hurt you”.

They’ll find a way to justify it, by some string of twisted logic that makes it equivalent to killing someone in an accident.

It’ll probably be about protecting the kids, it’s always about protecting the kids. Oh well I think we’re on the same side here. I joined the EFF!

“The government”, because only the US exists and matters…

Ah so europe is under anarchy, that explains so much i never knew that!

It’s even worse here in the EU, which plans to completely ban entire websites if you don’t submit a police ID. So yeah, the government. It’s been happening everywhere.

But they might see something a Christian might not like, which is worse to some people

Very likely to leak military vehicle and aircraft documents though

Nah. They want to be an essential service for games.
Verified users of appropriate age.
Integrated game chat.
Integrated game VoIP.
All appropriate-for-age.

Can’t develop your own moderation? Just pay discord.

So many companies will pay massive sums to outsource chat/VoIP/age-verification/moderation to discord.
And discord is already the “goto” gaming community provider.

Oh, and shop stuff.
Gift (buy) a friend a cool cosmetic through discord. Already has the community connections. Just needs the reason for games to tightly integrate it (moderation, chat, VoIP, age verification).

It is absolutely a positioning move

Forums were also outsourced to reddit. Riot did it with league of legends. Why moderate a forum when you have unpaid reddit mods doing it for you?

My country was getting age verification before the others but yesterday it just stopped for me, no idea why

Shout out to Fluxer.

Still don’t think its quite ready but its chugging along and its been fun following the progress. I know they have some big updates inbound. Hopefully people actually give it a shot and flip over to Fluxer.

I’d also add that the “Proton” subscrition equivalent - “Plutonium”, is a better value proposition. But I will admit, they still need to clear a few hurdles before even I feel completely comfortable ditching Discord.

But its Open Source and it has a self-hosting option, along with the Quality of Life you expect from Discord in terms of the app layout, screen sharing, etc.

I’ve been eyeing Fluxer for quite a while now. Once they roll out the update where they want to overhaul and streamline the selfhosting part, my friends and I are going to switch

Open source is the way. It always amuses me when people move from one proprietary system to a different one, since the new one always ends up having the same issues.

The new one usually won’t have the same issues at first, but they’ll have the same opportunities and motivations that lead to the issues. People will see a different provider and say they’re not doing the bad things, and they’ll be correct for a few years maybe, but then it becomes a struggle to get them to switch to the next thing. This whole problem would mostly be solved with open-source alternatives instead.

The thing with age verification is that it’s a legal requirement, so they’re all going to have to do it.

Running an online service with a lot of users is very expensive, too. All these proprietary services eventually realise that they need revenue in order to continue operating. That’s one of the reasons why decentralized, federated services are the way to go - everyone runs their own small community, so there’s no one company or person that has to cover an enormous bill.

That’s because privatized companies spend money to promote their products while open source largely grows through word of mouth. The average person doesn’t know about the issues of proprietary software nor the existence of an open source alternative, they just use whatever everyone else uses and everyone else ends up using whatever gets successfully marketed.

That’s why I think we should start teaching FOSS Linux as the first operating systems Kids are exposed to. It’s neutral ground in the sense that no one company owns and controls it, and the things they learn will help them understand why things are the way they are, not just what the latest marketing-hype “feature” is.

Someone I know went to a university that ran off Linux and I’m jealous of the comprehensive Linux 101 they got. It took me years to learn some of that stuff.

It’s a slop project.

Is this substantiated?

At this point for many projects it’s now depressingly, a matter of degree.

Look at the git and tell me. One guy, contributing 1.5m lines of code is not human made. It’s a matter of time before it falls apart and becomes unmaintainable.

It’s not, people are objectively being retarded about this. They merged in the actual prod code base from the closed private repo that had the entire small team working on it for months. Into the open source public repo when as the first major refactor and functionally went from preview build to first real public beta.

A few million lines of code from a small team and a number of one of contributors over months of work on a brand new project is perfectly god damn normal.

The repo went from elevator pitch to real product in one go cause the work had been done else where.

Two commits today, presumably after this merge you talk about, +12k, -27k. In one day. You think humans can do that? Yesterday, 22 commits and I opened a random one: +15k, -9k. Just put this supposed human effort into an actual standard like Matrix instead of vibing your own.

No.
ALTaltr

hmm I thought they leaned relatively against AI slop. Wouldn’t this be because they were working on it privately or something for quite some time?

It's 11 million lines of fucking code. 11 MILLION LINES.

This commit was the refactor commit from the private dev flow to the open source repo. The process basically added a lot of files and deleted a bunch as well. it was long overdue but I wouldn’t expect constant 11m line code changes

You really don't understand what 11m lines of code is. Only a collective of humans over many years can create 11m lines of code. It is an absolute batshit insane amout of code.

yea 11m changes is quite a bit at once but, I wouldn’t expect a constant change like that. After all, the monorepo itself is a little over 3m lines, 1.37m of it being lang/locale files for every language for its front end, 600k of it is comments, and 1.5m is the rest of it.

Wow, I thought the actual functional part was around 1m. I am going to check the loc to see if it makes sense in my second language, LLMs are pretty consistent on their translation errors.

It’s obviously some kind of code reorganization, restructuring or reformating, don’t be paranoid

A refactoring would have a relatively similar number of subtractions as additions. This is almost entirely additions. This is not just refactoring.

Not necessarily. Huge additions without matching deletions often happen during restructurings like vendorizing dependencies, importing external packages, generating bindings, or migrating private repos into a monorepo. In these cases new code canbbe introduced to repository and there will be no corresponding deletions in commit history.

I’ve did similar restructurings myself, eg. Making automatically generated resources static

Yeah, some projects also ditch external dependencies to make their own

You have no idea what 11 million likes of code is do you? LibreOffice is 11m, Android is 12m, MySQL is 10m. Those projects took years to code not 9 months. I am going to have to ask you to stay in your lane, and I pray that is not Software Engineering.

I’m not sure why you’re being so hostile, but you’re fundamentally confusing a codebase’s hand-written LoC with Git commit additions.

Nobody is saying someone authored 11M lines. Commit fa3e8525 was a workspace reconciliation - importing external repository code, dependencies, and assets into the public repo for the first time, so exactly the type of thing I was talking about. Git counts all imported lines as additions.

Before asking others to “stay in their lane”, maybe make sure you understand how Git history handles repository imports and dependency tracking. Have a good day.

Holy fuck!

What’s this supposed to mean? I’ve done similar things when restructuring my code. Git tries it’s best to keep track of files changing directories but sometimes you just go fuck it and abandon the history because Git is being a git.

I’d be more concerned about consistent 10k+ changes per day or something

10 million LOC addition in one month is not a red flag to you?

Meh. I’ve seen (and done) worse, honestly. Again would be more concerning if they kept it up

… What?

I’m incredibly productive, and have had the joy of working on productive teams. And unless they are working with hundreds of full time, high performing, engineers. You ain’t changing 10 million lines in a month.

With AI, it’s technically possible, but I can only imagine the slop. It’s likely incomprehensible at this point.

Just speaking from personal experience. Here’s a story.

One time I did a massive refactor, basically touching every function in the software. For background, this was a massive enterprise application. The backend was about 10 million lines of code, the front end was… probably triple that, I didn’t bother counting. Yes, building the code took more than an hour, even on extremely beefy machines.

The reason for this refactor was there was a huge amount of tech debt that finally caught up to us. You know, putting it off for years, using deprecated functions and old methods, feature flags, even forking software and modifying it to be compatible. Just years of finding creative solutions, until finally things said “enough” and there was no more bandaids. I was given the green light to fix up everything at once. Programmer’s wet dream, at least for me; I was so happy.

Anyway, in this project, we did rebase not merge. So, after 3 months of working diligently in a branch; I had to rebase the whole fucking thing because my coworkers obviously weren’t idle that whole time. This part I didn’t enjoy so much.

It took 2 weeks to rebase all the merge conflicts. It took so long, I had to rebase again. Multiple times. Each rebase getting closer and closer to being able to finally merge into master.

Finally I did it. I told everyone else to just relax and take the day off, while I merge into master and fix all the problems. There was many problems of course. But the final commit was tens of millions of lines of code changed, all by myself. This was before LLMs. But I have the type of brain that can sit there for 9 hours straight every day and tidy up code and enjoy it.

Edit: just to clarify, “rebase” makes it look like all those changes happened at once instead of spread out over months, and would make a huge spike like that. Also just because LLM wasn’t a thing didn’t mean I did it all manually… I heavily used find-and-replace, upgrade scripts, codemod, and many other automation tools. I think I even wrote a few manual codemod scripts to get it done.

Yeah, there are some occasions that justifies tones of lines of code.

Our ex tech lead had bitbucket going “nope” with a PR that was too big

Not when it’s a fucking private to public merge. Why the fuck would a tiny public repo that was basically a elevator pitch in code base form send up red flags when you merge in the actual product that includes the better part of half a year worth of development from a team of people?

Are you allergic to context and critical thinking? Or do you enjoy just being paranoid?

Shout out to Matrix, which is federated, self hostable, open source, and supports end to end encryption.

Matrix is a bit of a shit show and also isn’t a discord alternative to begin with.

Matrix is a bit of a shit show

How so?

and also isn’t a discord alternative to begin with

It absolutely is. A “Space” is the equivalent to a Discord “server”. It’s not perfect and polished, but it does the job. I’ve been using it rather than Discord with my gaming group for a year now.

I’ve been using Matrix for over a decade now. How is it a shitshow?

The entire concept of it is a shit show. It’s the prime example of anti user design.

It’s a functional system, with the entire concept of user friendly design and non power user being ignored.

It’s made by power users and engineers for power users and engineers. It’s fantastic for what it is.

I wouldn’t call it a shit show, they were first in E2E encrypted collaborative messaging platforms and get all the hits. Moderation turned out to be incompatible with E2E encryption. People kicked out of channels can still decrypt because keys revocation hasn’t been made.

Matrix server is a resource hog and a mess, and the protocol has never took off to spark alternative implementations.

Encryption doesn’t scale well for big channels.

They got many things right, but got crippled by many things they couldn’t possibly predict.

I had never used Matrix outside direct messaging so I was unaware of the lack of key revocation.

Matrix is a Discord alternative, but not a Discord clone

Isn’t this their third attempt?

The way age verification is being pushed feels more like wanting to setting up checkpoints on the edge of a city versus just checking Id’s before going into a specific establishment.

I just don’t see how this isn’t a national login system trying to masquerade itself in a poorly fitting “think of the children!” sheep’s skin.

I recommend Stoat, it can be selfhosted, open source, there is no shady company behind it, and it works well. There even is top-notch noise filtering, which I found very important for voice calls.

Do they have voice calls now?

Um, they answered that in the second sentence of their comment.

I tried to express surprise about that, I failed spectacularly

isnt stoat russian?

So what? It is open source and you can self host it. I don’t think open source software developed by Russian people is worse than open source software developed by Americans.

I do. Open source software controlled by people in auth regimes isnt safe.

ok person in the imperial core who live on top of the bones of the people they genocided

Very accurate instance name

I have a hard time assigning countries to open source projects since anyone can contribute. No idea whether the core devs are russian. Their online communication and documentation is completely in english and their domains are american.

Have they got push-to-talk yet? Very big reason why I stopped using it unfortunately

For some reason still no, sadly.

Stoats bigger problem is that it’s been spinning it’s wheels for years has basically gotten no where and has a fraction of the features people want out of a discord clone.

It’s ok, but it need to actually start taking progressing it’s feature set seriously before anyone will start taking it seriously.

Yet the entire software community depends on it for everything

I really don’t understand how a chat app for gamers became so big in the software development community. It’s such a poor choice, especially for support. Nothing is indexed in search engines, and people can’t see messages unless they join. I’ve even seen some projects use Discord for bug tracking. It’s woefully inadequate for that.

It annoys me that a lot of Actual Budget stuff is on their Discord. Thankfully they have documentation on github and their website.

Because it has a lot of good tools for finding what you need on an intuitive platform focused around communities similar to Reddit.

Let’s be real Discord is popular because it does a lot of things really well.

it has a lot of good tools for finding what you need

As a moderator and the primary troubleshooter for a 12k member discord server, no the fuck it does not.

new user joins

Hey, how do I X?

It’s in pins.

new user joins

Hey, how do I Y?

It’s in pins.

new user joins

Hey, how do I Z?

It’s in pins.

Kill me. Or bring back old-school forums. One of the two.

What your talking about has nothing to do with the tools and everything to do with stupid users never reading or using resources available.

I would posit that if the tools don’t make the resources readily available and obvious (like a pinned forum thread that you literally have to scroll past to make a new thread), then the tools aren’t good.

The users found the Discord because they searched for their problem and the result was a recommendation to join the Discord.

If the answer had been indexable by search engines, the search engine would have found the answer and given it to the user. No need to even log in.

you search and go through the results. read a long one 3 screen lengths down the scroll and it was useless. go back to the search and it’s back at the top again. scroll more and question if they are even in the same order.

go to the pins and even though you saw it there yesterday its gone. look again later and it turns out sometimes it just takes loger to load them.

go to read the rules but then find out that sometimes they cant be viewed on android and you have to go to desktop to do it. epecially when the server has a bunch of things to click in acknowledgment before the channels show up.

Kill me. Or bring back old-school forums. One of the two.

A common thing you could read in old-school forums was “have you tried the search”, so I guess that leaves us with one option.

Intuitive?

Are you mad?

My impression—I don’t use it myself and my few experiences touching it have not impressed me—is that the major selling point is that it provided several different forms of communication that gamers wanted to use in a single package. Like, instant messaging, VoIP, video calls, chat, etc.

You could set up all of these individually, but this was free and all-in-one, is managed, and it didn’t require much technical expertise to use. Any user with an account has access to all the components.

And it didn’t cost anything to set up.

If I were going to set up, say, a VoIP server, I’d probably use, oh, Mumble. I’d get my own VPS for it, which would cost something. I’d only have VoIP at the end of that. If I wanted to use say, text-based communication or have some mechanism for sharing files, I’d have to go cobble something together from other components.

Take a look at this absurdly long list of apps. How many have been created at this point and half of them have overlap with a quarter of the list. And yet, from my experience, every single one finds a unique way to fall short of the basic functionality I expect from Discord. And I’m definitely not counting anything available through Nitro.

All of the ones that claim to be full Discord replacements have had incredibly difficult and multi-layered setups that don’t follow any regard for the ability to easily remove if it doesn’t work for you. Their instructions will start with ordering a VPS or will assume that you want to host on the public internet first or do wacky stuff like setup their own reverse proxy without me asking.

Mattermost was almost there. It even has voice and video sharing. But they don’t have voice lobbies. (Not counting the janky plugin) They all just find something that makes my friends not want to use it. Many of these projects are like 2-3 features away from being able to convince my friends to use them but until that day comes, the Dicksword will win.

before Discord there was Teamspeak 3, Ventrilo and mIRC. Discord at the time brought file sharing, video calls and more polished UI at the time when all of it was not found on TS, but Skype and facebook messenger was around. Me and my friends used TS, but jumped to Discord because it was better almost in every way (apart from sound codecs). If TS devs had not been so oblivious and inovated fast enough, we would have stayed

It’s way better than slack lol that’s how, i mean slack is straight garbage so it’s not saying much

At work we’re migrating from Google Chat to Slack, and there’s a bunch of things I already miss. There’s a lot of strange UI issues in Slack that aren’t an issue in any other competing products.

uses face of teddy bear to bypass age recognition

Those people might be unhappy, but most of them will still refuse to move from the platform.

Yep, I opted for different alternatives like Stoat or matrix but without results. Only one friends switched to Stoat.

I’m not moving because there’s too many people I regularly talk to on it

That’s what I said about facebook, then Zuck fucked it with his algorithms until I only saw ads and crap, then I left — after giving away some level of information to dipshit.

because if most people aren’t significantly inconvenienced they won’t join a different platform, and if there aren’t your friends on a different platform it’s really hard to leave.

Anyone looking for a lightweight self hosted alternative to discord might want to check out sharkord. Its less about large communities and more about a private space to chat with friends, that you have complete privacy and control with.

I’ve finally gotten off my ass and set up matrix and jabber to pilot with my friend and family. I’ve threatened everyone with IRC, but I really wouldn’t mind going back to hosting IRC servers…

The same day I saw Discord’s age verifying message, I uninstalled the app and moved to Matrix (to be fair, I was already on Matrix)

It shouldn’t be up to discord or any other internet entity to verify the age of its users.

Parents. Parents should be monitoring their child’s Internet usage.

Say it one more time for the dumbasses in the back row!

Listen we can’t have people thinking they can have some sort of responsibility to function in the world. That might give them the bright idea that they can start judging for themselves the state of the world and to demand some kind of accountability. They might even clue in to the problems that the tech monopolies are purposely causing, along with the social ills that come with it.

We can’t have that at all.

The internet will become ID verified to protect the kids or terrorism or what ever other reason they feel like. It won’t solve the problems it is claimed to help. But if you have unauthorized opinions against government backed genocides then you are marked as a terrorist.

National security. 🫪

They should, but they’re exhausted and they can’t even be bothered to read or help with homework so this will go badly. The only ones winning are the predators.

Eh?

And who’s fault is that they’re so tired?

Btw, has discord ever done anything to help a minor asking for help?

And how about known predators actually getting jailed?

they’re exhausted and they can’t even be bothered to read or help with homework

The only ones winning are the predators

Have you ever thought that maybe these two things are linked somehow?

I’ve been using Fluxer and self hosting Fluxcord to sync my discord server with Fluxer, it’s going great.

fluxer.app

What’s Fluxcord?

It’s an open source D*scord alternative. It looks very very similar, and I much prefer it.

Goddamm…all these services just to replace “a phone” (in an oversimplistic sense).

And how exactly were we expecting it to go? ‘Kind of bad’? 🤣

For those interested you can find alternatives to Discord and any other software on AlternativeTo.net But here are some of the standouts I have found:

• Armada https://armada.buzz/: End to End Encrypted Messaging with Discord Import and similar UI, comms for gaming, Voice and Video Calling, and App and Desktop Streaming at full capability. No Phone # or Email required. Can be self hosted and is Open Source. Win/Linux/Mobile versions Ready to go now.
• Fluxer https://fluxer.app/: As the webpage states “Free and open source chat for friends, groups, and communities, with text, voice, video, screen sharing, and self-hosting.” and while functional, they have ramped up development to add guides for self hosting and mobile clients that aren’t released yet, and have an ambitious roadmap on their blog. You have to use 3rd party bridging apps for importing Discord Servers.
• Stoat (Formally Revolt) https://stoat.chat/: Another Open Source alternative that you can host your own, but at this time servers aren’t connected and they want to do it through Federation, or in other words like email servers, so users can browse public servers. They are early days on the desktop and video sharing as well but they users like it so much and development team is so reachable that donations more than pay for the community service and development. Uses an open web app so anywhere you can get a modern browser to work has access.
• VoltChat https://voltagechat.app/: A platform similar to the previously mentioned Armada, but using its own decentralized federated platform.

I don’t want to sound like a downer, but I’m skeptical about Armada: never heard of it before, repo created last June, tons of features implemented in that short span and already “ready to go”… Seems like it has been heavily vibe-coded.

Or it could be a dedicated team of coders using AI to generate code for them to review based on already existing encryption and platform packages. At this point only time will tell. I just put it out as an example… I can no more defend its security or the codebase of it or any other of the alternatives I listed. These just stood out to me from the others on AlternativeTo.net.

Going to add one more: Steam.

Steam has a built-in voice chat and chat channels for your friends.

It depends on what you are using Discord for and replacing. While Steam has Video Sharing and voice and text chat, that is only part of what I use Discord for and it would be lacking for me, not to mention it isn’t all available in one place in the UI. For others all they did with discord was make a text channel and a voice channel and used it and then Steam would be a drop in replacement that they already have.

XMPP is still alive peeps, movim even works on the browser