What I don't like is the way they used to sell Nitro before they came up with the flashy cosmetics, restricting features that used to be free. And how they used a third party service for UK age verification that ended up hacked. And their security record in general. And being closed source with no official export tools.
I guess its all subjective.
There actually is technically an official method to request a copy of your own data (think Google Takeout): https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004027692-R...
I've used it once. It worked to recover some messages from DMs that were far enough down in my history they were no longer shown in the web/desktop UI. However, it only included my own messages in each DM/channel, without the context of whoever I was talking to.
Chat room is fine though.
it's a super low-friction text, voice & screenshare program with support for your whole WoW guild (or whatever communities) and you have "genuinely zero idea" why people use it?
how could anyone possible enjoy x mainstream thing, i only use y hyper niche thing that signals my status to tech nerds.
queue the guy talking about the most obscure linux distro you can possibly imagine.
Really though, I do think people often equate popularity with being a healthy default solution for society.
A lot of people enjoy mcdonalds, and hell even I cave and buy it once in a while, but popular does not mean it is a healthy default for society.
The corpos are incentivized to addict you and trap you. Not to give you the best solution.
If one actually does research beyond "but all my friends use it" they would see Discord is objectively one of the worst things to happen to sovereign and privacy preserving communication on the internet in a long time. Tech communities using it should know better.
Whenever I see an open source project that says "Join my Discord" without any alternatives, I close the tab. If a technical project cannot find an hour to figure out how to setup a chat with their community without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product, our goals are already too far apart.
Sooooooo what is your solution?
You just described every single, non-E2E communication product, because they are all indexed and used by surveillance capitalism, including governments and corporations.
Your problem isn't the tools, it's the internet.
OTR supports IRC, but in practice either solution beats the privacy of Discord, which requires all traffic to be sent in plain text to their corporate owned databases.
The functionality that should matter to free software projects is... freedom. I can forgive laypeople for not knowing any better, but it is pretty hard to overlook FOSS devs that should know better that -still- endorse Discord for FOSS development.
They want a service, not software.
If you'd like to build a clone or even a better version? I'd love to see it! I might use it!
Is a piece of shit with awful UX.
You do realize there are like a dozen clients for Matrix right? You can literally have any UX you want or even ask your favorite LLM to make a Discord UX clone that uses matrix protocol under the hood. That is how open networks work.
The design sucks. The clients suck.
I'm sure a lot of very well meaning people worked very hard at it! But from an end user and server operator POV, it's ass.
Whatever issues you are experiencing will not get better if you are unable to describe them in words more detailed than "sucks."
1. I spent 15 minutes last month helping my business partner sign onto ElementX on his second phone. He's signed on his PC and his primary phone, but the second phone was very difficult. Basically type username and password, but now you have to verify with emoji. How do you do that? Well, sometimes it pops up on your other clients that a new client needs verification. Sometimes the popup never shows, and there's no way to find it. But we found it eventually. Verify via emoji. Great! Let's do it. Oops, it timed out before he could finish. Apparently it has a super short timer that even I struggle with it. Eventually we gave up and used the recovery key, which worked, but you know many people are going to lose that key since it's not a password they can just memorize. Most other messengers, it's just username, password, and then click the email confirmation link. Boom, easy.
2. Audio/Video calling/conferencing. There are apparently 3(?) different technologies in Element alone, depending on which version of Element (desktop, web, mobile). The "old" one is jitsi. The new p2p one appears to be only available to clients that aren't Element? Or you can only create conference rooms in those other clients (commet?), but you can join them from any client. But then those new rooms are sometimes not join-able from Element clients. They just don't appear in the room list at all. Even clicking a link to the room says it's the wrong "room version", but it's a freshly-created room. So I delete the room and make another new one. But now it's a Jitsi room and it doesn't work in this other Element client (all first-party actual Element clients, and all broken in slightly different ways!). So... it's working now, but only after lots of trial and error and lots of cussing from my business partner. And I have to somehow justify that this is better than using Slack/Discord/whatever corporate thing.
3. The official client is fragmented. On mobile, there is Element (classic) and ElementX. You're _supposed_ to use ElementX, since it's the new one, but ElementX does not have all the features of Element (classic), so you might need the Element (classic) client for those things. But Element (classic) is not getting updated, so you're left in the cold as far as updates and the new features (meaning you might not even be able to cross-verify your clients, or join video calls, spaces, etc.)
4. The official matrix server (synapse) is pretty slow. I hosted a couple small communities (~100 people or so?), and synapse somehow kept getting overloaded and crashing. Maybe it needed more than 4GiB, but that seems kind of silly. There are decent 3rd-party clients (continuwuity is my current favorite), but there's no migration path from one server to another without wiping your entire database and starting fresh. So.... my main homeserver is kind of stuck on synapse.
5. Bridges. Yes, you can bridge anything to anything, but have you actually tried it? Interface is super clunky. You have to run a separate bridge service, make sure it swaps keys with the matrix server via a yaml configuration dance, then talk to the bridge's bot in a dedicated matrix channel with special commands that may or may not get your bridge working. I've used signal, discord, telegram, and irc bridges, and they're all a mess in one way or another. My most recent attempt was with the signal bridge. I made the mistake of enabling end-to-end encryption. One day, the bridge server restarted and lost all its encryption keys. Cool, now all the bridged rooms are dead. So naturally, I delete the bridge service and re-configure it from scratch. Now it doesn't work because its bridge bot username was already taken by the previous instance with the lost encryption keys. And I can't just delete that bridge bot user because _matrix does not allow deleting users ever!_. So now I have broken signal bridge rooms and broken signal bot users that I can't ever delete, even with the admin panel. So naturally I open up a postgresql client and delete them manually. Oops, now my matrix database is broken in ways I cannot even begin to comprehend. Because deleting users is not allowed. So now I just can't have a signal bridge. _maybe_ there's a way to make it work, but I've been programming and sys-admin'ing for over 20 years, and it's just beyond me. I'm going to have to (again!) wipe out my homeserver and start over, losing all my messages and contacts (again!). XMPP had very nice transport services, and Psi+ had a very nice UI for configuring and organizing them.
6. Multi-identity support is lacking in all the official and most community clients. If I have a work account and a personal account, I need to start two separate Element clients. Each one is a hefty electron app, and they all have the same systray icon, so I need to trial+error every time to open the right one to message someone. So far, there's only one client I tried that had proper multi-account, and I think it was commet. It was ok, but I hated that it was a flutter desktop app where every click felt super unresponsive. So I went back to Element. Most XMPP clients have multi-identity built-in. I'm not going to use my work identity for personal chat, just like I'm not going to use my hackernews account to message co-workers.
7. No message auto-deletion. Many people like to claim that Element is more secure than Signal. It is not. If you live in an oppressive country where things you say can easily result in prison or torture, you need more than E2E encryption. You need messages to be gone. You can't trust that your device or your friend's device won't get confiscated and forced to reveal your password. Even the United States has forced device unlocking at the borders. Signal (and Confide, and even Telegram) have automatically deleting messages, so even with the keys, there's nothing to see. Matrix stores messages forever. Aside from some complicated server-side setting, there's no way to automatically delete them. You have to right-click and manually delete EVERY message if you want future privacy. Nobody's going to do that. And I tried enabling the synapse settings for auto-deleting messages, but they didn't work. It seems that feature isn't really tested, or it's documented poorly.
8. The spam/CSAM problem when running a public community. The admin tools are a bit lacking, so without some considerable expertise, it's often not worth even having a community matrix server. So folks just make a discord instead, which has actual moderation tools builtin. Yes, I know there are external moderation tools you can install, but why should that be required?
9. The protocol is too complex to make full-featured 3rd-party clients. This isn't IRC where you can make a basic client in 3 lines of perl. You'll notice that the 3rd-party clients are all lacking in some features of Element, the official client. Even the official ElementX client lacks features of Element Classic. Most folks are stuck on the official electron-based Element client, which has a fairly clunky UX (try explaining to your grandma how to cross-verify clients).
This list is just off the top of my head. I could probably write a whole book on the problems with the matrix ecosystem. But again, matrix is the best we have. IRCv3 hasn't really caught on, and the need for an IRC bouncer to receive offline messages isn't commonly excepted in 2026. XMPP was/is ok, but it hasn't been commonly used since Google Hangouts pulled the bait+switch on us 10+. I keep thinking I should really just go back to XMPP, or start using delta.chat since "everyone" has an email address.
I often can't even get fairly technical folks (who write code by hand, etc) to use Element, even if I do all the server setup and just hand them the keys. It's too hard for most folk. It's too hard for me, and I've been maintaining my own matrix servers for 7+ years. I maintain 3 matrix servers right now. One synapse, and two continuwuity. NixOS makes it pretty easy to maintain servers, actually, as long as they're not open to the public.
And if anyone asks me "what should we use instead?", I'd probably say XMPP or IRC. And we know neither of those is perfect, either, and nothing open source and federated is as easy to onboard like Discord, Signal, or Slack.
But even though Element/Matrix sucks, it still works well enough for me to use it as my main communication. At least until I finish my own multi-protocol messenger. Which I started about 6 years ago and haven't had time to work on.
Disclosure: I wrote some of the code on Confide's backend back in 2021. I do not currently work at that company and am not promoting or un-promoting the app in any way.
As someone who was an irc operator, I can assure you, everything from IRC was funneled into ever place it was ordered to be...
That is the beauty of open systems. One can choose an operator that reflects their values.
But people use it to store all information about some games - effectively replacing a wiki. And it is AWFUL for that. Everything about Discord makes it bad for that
- Can't be found in search engines
- Abysmal search functionality
- Abysmal discoverability
Can't search for or with symbols. Lots of search engines have this issue. Just ignores them. Want to search for instances of ":3"? You're actually searching for instances of "3". Not much else to say on this other than it's annoying.
Why would they have left their userbase in the same lackluster search situation for so many years… maybe genuinely massive backlog and improved search won’t improve their numbers like $otherPriority?
And weirdly, I then understood that there's no real global platform for a quick chat that everyone knows and CAN actively use. In universities we use Teams, but beyond that people are never active there...
But I also don't understand Twitter or Mastodon. It feels like there's so much better ways to both post stuff and reach people.
is the key here
the same reason WhatsApp and Telegram won on their markets
I think there is a whole generation of people that have very fond memories of discord and everyone outside that window does not have that connection at all.
An addendum to that might be that other people have used other services before discord even existed that had better (?) feature sets but didn't win out and that can create confusion because neither group of people understands what the other group is talking about because there is no shared experience.
But half the good is that they are not some wide-open, forever-indexed forum like reddit.
The fact that it also scales up to handle hundreds or thousands of concurrent users made it work for pretty much everyone. Suddenly you had one place you could go where there were thousands of other people all interested in the same thing you were interested in, and could meet new people or new friend groups over that said shared interest.
It also absolutely needed:
- persistent, non-disappearing text chats that last forever*
- Free image uploads (and thus meme sharing)
- voice chat & screen sharing, proxied (so no DDOS attacks after a malicious person grabs your IP in a public voice chat)
- role-based access control, so you could have an announcements chat for your server where only admins can say things, you can appoint certain people as moderators, etc
- a mobile app with push notifications (to mimic the text message paradigm of being always available to chat with your friends)
- Discord building out the ability to connect custom bots so early
*: No word yet on if they'll ever start cleaning up old messages and attachments. There must be hundreds of petabytes of attachments stored in multi-AZ google cloud buckets that will never be accessed ever again.
Most are software related, or why not genealogy or mesh networking?
I never started using discord for gaming, I just find its everywhere.
- Remember to gift Nitro to your friends!
- Have you played any Quests to get any Orbs?
- Did you know about Discord Nitro?
- Did you know there are server tags now?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Subscribe to Nitro to use these emojis! (Every time you open the emoji picker)
- Did you know there are username styles now?
- Subscribe to Nitro to use animated avatars!
- Did you know there are per-server profiles now? (If you subscribe to Nitro!)
- Boost this server! (With Nitro)
- Here's a GIFs button that is forever part of the textbox buttons.
- Here's a Stickers button that is forever part of the textbox buttons.
- Here's an Apps button that is forever part of the textbox buttons. Just kidding, now it forever sits next to the textbox!
(A third of your horizontal screen estate is now textbox buttons)
- Here's a dedicated Gift button so you can buy Nitro for your friends too! In the textbox buttons.
- We have polls! Not in the textbox buttons though. It's in the same submenu as opening the file picker! Oh, did we mention you need an extra click to open the file picker now? (Why would we put it in the textbox buttons when we only put things there that upsell Nitro?)
- Did you know our new noise suppression is sponsored by Krisp? (Plasters Krisp logo everywhere)
- Have you played this game in Roblox yet?
- Verify your phone number to keep using Discord.
- Verify your ID to keep using Discord.
- Did you know which of your friends are playing games right now? (You can't turn this off)
- Earn Orbs by joining your friend in this sponsored game!
- Subscribe to Nitro for increased stream resolution!
- Did you know Nitro subscribers get 3 months of Xbox Game Pass free?
- Did you know Nitro subscribers get 1 month of Xbox Game Pass free?
- Did you know Xbox Game Pass subscribers get 3 months of Discord Nitro free??
- Did you know you can get a longer message length limit with Nitro?
I say this as someone who's used Discord basically daily since 2016. They are so much more bloated than they were, it's insane. And a lot of these are things nobody wants, not just stuff I personally didn't ask for.
Fuck the Halloween sound pack. I didn’t want it.
Bonus points that Discord intentionally knows they abuse and gaslight users with the popups and notifications; one point they hovered a “DIDNT ASK” over the X button to dismiss some of their stunts.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040843952-K...
Also is slack free? I remember some debacle about their free tier being pretty poor.
Yes. The UI is so bad I wouldn't call it "zero friction". But it's just my opinion.
Most of the forums I can read when not signed in, with Discord I need to:
1) sign in to Discord
2) join to specific server
3) read and accepts all its rules, tems and conditions
4) optionally leave the server after I got all the information
i did not claim it is "lower friction for text-only searches than forums" or anything of that sort.
For me, it also helps that all of my favorite communities are on it.
but still probably the best signal/noise community experience out there. and great customizations.
better than slack, or any competitors.
and if you say IRC i quit.
Then we went to separate game specific voice chat platforms which were inconsistent, but meant you struggled to find a way to chat with mates outside of something like Skype at the time.
Discord was one of the first platforms that was firstly free and allowed you one place to chat with friends and communities about games AND had very good quality audio.
People use it for all sorts of things, however I use it fairly minimally and only to be able to voice chat with friends either when gaming together or playing separate games. I don't get understand some peoples problems with it, it works better than anything else out there for what I use it for.
Why? Its primary use for me is having small, private communities of people who aren't entirely anonymous to eachother and isn't scraped (too much), commodified and filtered through an algorithm like most of the open internet. I would hate it if suddenly it became like reddit or facebook.
The open web really went down a bad path well over a decade ago and I think its time to hard-turn away from it until things get better. The benefits of everyone abandoning the open web are considerable.
Some people are annoyed because discord doesn't have the archival capacity of an old fasioned message board, and if that's your problem with it you're right, but I think the benefits of fluid accessibility and relative privacy outweigh the problems at the moment.
Reddit outside of some niche subs still largely deals with global thought policing.
You also can't call anyone or anything fascist, or say anything that an LLM can twist into being a call for violence. For a while they were banning anyone who said the word "Luigi".
in any case, i dont think the "hunter biden laptop" discord group is opting into this feature.
But I do see, generally young, people join niche discords that don't necessarily see 24/7 activity say something like "Hey anyone here?" then a few minutes later "lol dead server". I think it's because for a lot of younger people they mostly want the socialization aspect over just a place to share about a hobby. They go on discord when they want to talk to people.
The most popular servers are for AI companies, and video games.
Which is not too surprising for a platform heavily designed around supporting video gaming.
The themes are pretty clear, and having a political discussion does not appear prominent.
It means I can put half-finished story summaries there, without spoilering or alerting potential future readers to the plot ideas, that sort of thing.
A hierarchy of privacy levels is necessary in order for people to speak as they like.
This was a feature.
This was desired.
This was welcomed by all actors involved.
(You're not an actor but a spectator, unless you own a Discord server)
These are just network effects.
Nobody owns Discord servers except Discord's server admins. I don't mean the glorified mods of glorified channel groups, I mean the real admins of the real servers!