Comment by Bender | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bender | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone tracking all these open source Discord clones? I ask because I have seen about a dozen of them advertised by Youtube influencers. New chat clients seem to be showing up almost daily. I think it would be interesting to have a table that shows features, OS/phone support, E2EE, federation, scale how many clients per server per resources, etc...

As bob1029 said, making apps is easy especially now but getting friend groups to move is the real challenge so I think a column in the table should include a score for how easy it is to import Discord server history, chat history, invite friends and so on. I think there would have to be next to no friction or risks. If self hosted then backups would have to be encrypted and automated so that the servers can be treated as mostly ephemeral. Operating and maintaining Discord takes a rather large team so these open source alternatives would have to be able to show they have automated most tasks in a secure and fault tolerant manor that is hard to get wrong.

Beside the point: I still don't get why anyone wants to keep conversation history.

Are we reliving particularly nice interactions with loved ones?

Photos and home videos I totally get. But even going back a day in a conversation history can be a significant chore if I didn't 'save the link' or remember a date or whatever. I couldn't imagine ever trawling through all that text unless by necessity.

The argument changes slightly if someone wants to recreate a friend by throwing conversation into the model or context or whatever, but I find that creepy and it's a relatively new thing.

Maybe I'm just sentimental via pictures. I love conversing in text, but I'm just not sentimental for it in any way. Other people are allowed to be, but I don't understand it.

I still don't get why anyone wants to keep conversation history.

I personally agree but I think you and I are outliers in that most feedback I get is people want scroll-back history so they can see what they missed when they were offline. My preference is to treat chat as ephemeral and instead have my own forums, chan servers, sftp servers for longer term storage people can link to but it is rare I meet anyone that operates the same way. There are web front-ends to IRC for example but the moment someone ventures down that path the cost to scale up the chat server climbs exponentially due to the bloated web framework, message queues, database, etc... not that most people would really need to scale up for their small circles of friends.

so they can see what they missed when they were offline.

Can't think of a worse chore. I'd rather do laundry, it's at least productive. Life can go on without our presence occasionally. That's "normal". It's not possible, nor healthy to try, to be everywhere all at once. I think I may have had notions in that direction when I was younger, but living life won instead. And for that I'm thankful.

Having ranted all that, here I am conversing on HN at 1am :\

I'm sorry you think interacting with people is a chore, but the primary way I interact with most of my friends is online through Discord. While I don't respond to each and every message, I read them, and look forward to doing so because they're my friends.

Not what I said, more that I've just got too much to do (not a complaint, it's by conscious choice) so if I'm not presently online for the conversation, and I have to go to the effort of scrolling backwards through a conversation it's just never going to be worth it. If there's anything worthwhile it'll come up again. And if it doesn't, I'll be none the wiser anyway, which is fine with me - there is all sorts of awesomeness going on in the world that I'm not part of.

When we catch up in person the awesome stuff generally gets relived, which is good enough for me.

I think for Discord the case that if you join a hobby / gaming etc channel, with a particular interest question in mind, you may want to look for answers in the history.

Also some people do go back and reread texts from personal history for sentimental reasons. I don’t, but I know those who do

fwiw I occasionally like to read back through chat histories from months/years prior. I brings me right back to that time and reminds me of things I thought I'd forgotten. It's like the nostalgia from an old scent.

Use case: my partner and I have a discord server just for us. That's something I'd like to keep a backup of for the future. Both for day to day communication that's searchable (what was this logistics thing?) and for nostalgia (where did we do that silly date? Can we do it again?)

And yes, a place for pictures between friends is handy, even if in running immich.

I find Discord's search functionality to be severely limited compared to that of other platforms (for example, Slack). It's slow, the search results are relegated to a tiny sidebar, date filters are clunky, you can't search across all DMs at once, and perhaps worst of all, it's severely rate limited: After clicking through somewhere around 25 pages, it will fail and also force you to re-send the search query, and then navigate back to whatever page you were on.

> Is anyone tracking all these open source Discord clones?

https://discord-alternative-tracker.pages.dev/

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