“can you recommend an alternative?” no. that’s why I’m so fucking angry. we fucked it. we’re no longer capable of making online chat protocols or web browsers or discussion forum software that people actually want to use. it’s all shit. every choice is either proprietary and exploitative or awful open source garbage sucking all the air out of all alternatives and forks, operated by fucking terrible people. we let this happen.
you want there to be an alternative so you can skip being angry too.
a few people have come here to advertise for their own projects. I don’t usually reply either because I’m already keeping tabs on their work or I feel nothing for it and can’t muster a reply.
some jackass came in here to advertise for a grift that’s very coy about how it requires you to spend ethereum to make a full-fledged account. the docs try to hide this and also say there’s non-cryptocurrency alternatives and that isn’t true.
don’t fucking try to grift people in this thread.
anyway the thread got its first “if you don’t like an open source project you’re not allowed to call it garbage instead of contributing” asshole I hadn’t already blocked yet and their codeberg is almost empty and that’s fucking hilarious
RE: https://mas.to/@zzt/116045651572809856
As angry as OP is, I don't think they're nearly as angry as they could be. Allow me to stoke the fire a little bit.
I have used damn near every single mainstream communications medium on the Internet since about the early 2000's. You know how Discord managed to establish dominance?
By being the *least fucking awful*.
By *giving a shit about the user experience*.
By not having their contributors/community shit all over things users like and refuse to implement because they personally don't want color, bold, italic, or underlines, in _their_ text, and adding options to turn those off just for them would just be _too hard_. So as a result, users still get those things by abusing Unicode characters (esp. for math), which produces a usability fucking nightmare for screen readers, which prompts other assholes to say "well the screen readers need to adapt and start trying to read text like that as normal text" when the entire point of having special characters is they have dedicated semantic meaning.
By having the first voice chat I've experienced reliably working basically every single time I click it. For me, Skype was never that good. The closest/best other thing for voice chat was fucking IParty.
By doing the logical thing and putting all the various big groups you might want to communicate in into one window, and by holding onto transcripts and making them searchable in-app so I don't have to (1) worry about whether my backups are okay and (2) `grep` through a bunch of big-ass files for the one thing I need to remember.
I've seen criticisms about something being an "everything app" or "not everything should be in one place" but what those criticisms UNIVERSALLY fail to address is that this one place beats every. single. other. *specific.* place. on their *home. fucking. turf.* In practically every way that matters.
And that's how we fucking got here.
@zzt@mas.to this is because discord shouldn't exist as a concept. Merging instant messaging, group VoIP, and forums is a bad idea.
SimpleX for IM,
Zulip + Jitsi Meet for groups
PHPbb or Lemmy communities for forums.
This isn't hard.
@magic_smoke go ahead and tell all of discord’s users that they’re wrong for knowing what they want and instead they should migrate to a bunch of services that fucking suck to use
yes I’ve used all of them. they’re all godawful. jitsi is criminally fucking terrible and you should feel bad about exposing other people to it. phpbb and lemmy fucking suck to administrate and use (I would know) and are only in use because everything else is worse.
why in fuck are you advocating for garbage?
@magic_smoke “hey lemmy instance admin have you considered lemmy” yes every time it runs out of memory and crashes. fuck you
@zzt Reading this on the fediverse while nodding vigorously.
@davidgerard Weirdos of the World, Unite @matthew @zzt
@zzt I said similar to friends earlier today.
"I'm just pissed. There's no real alternative to this. XMPP is a fine protocol layered in utterly shit clients, bound to OMEMO so it makes everything ten times harder than it has to be. Instant messengers are fine but not meant for large scale group chats. Matrix is a *fucking joke* that failed at E2EE, leaks metadata like a sieve, and capitulates to fascists (including ICE).
It would take just one project to fix this. One where people stopped being dicks and just doubled down on usability and ease of access. But that costs money and is *boring*. UX design isn't "sexy" nowadays unless it's RustNodeElectron ver. BleedingEdge.0.1(a) and so nobody wants to take on the work when they could just go make a new shitty, shiny thing instead."
That was about chat clients specifically but it's a cancer all the way down.
"Why write stable software when Docker exists and you can just trash it and start over with a handful of commands?"
"Well, there's gotta be a reason they're all doing it so I have to as well."
"Why should we work on polishing existing software when I have The Next Big Idea and can work on that instead?"
We won't ever be able to reclaim anything if everyone wants to abandon the "boring" parts in favor of the next shiny thing, leaving half finished projects to rot eternally in /home/fuckit.
@kitkat @Arthfach it failed completely at e2ee twice: https://furry.engineer/@soatok/116055556402436098 and previously https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-olm-library/. mistaking fandom for security is a dangerous fucking game.
@zzt Are we not in the alternative right now?
It can be built but can we steer lemmings to use it?
@joegaffey @zzt maybe it starts by not comparing your users (the 95%+ of humanity that doesn't have an inexplicable boner for arcane computer nonsense) to lemmings
@anhedonie @joegaffey @zzt if they can't telnet 6667 can they even really be allowed to use the computer
the key problem is that nobody wants to run a box
they want to use a service
that ends directly at discord
mastodon has the advantage that it actually successfully decentralised, and 75% of users can and do tell eugen to go whistle
it has the disadvantage that you can see the wires and plumbing and worst, the guys loudly telling you that the leaks and sparks and flames and outages are features akhully
@davidgerard @anhedonie @joegaffey @zzt and worse than just seeing the plumbing, there is no real model to buy a box and then call a plumber when you need the sewage flushed
You either give a company the right to all your personal info so they can shove ads in your eyes or you learn enough about admin to be able to run it with the help of a hosting service you pay a sub to. There's no Middle model that mostly just works with occasional maintenance like plumbing
@joegaffey @zzt if your answer starts "well i'm a snide hipster, but" then you have singularly failed to understand the question
@zzt Old stuff still works though.
@t_var_s @tux0r @zzt fsvo. distributed irc was shit in extremely tired ways, somehow combining the worst of decentralised with the worst of feudalised. it only "works" on a single well-run server, and we're back to the original problem.
i met my wife on irc, i have a fondness for it. it still doesn't answer the question.
@davidgerard @t_var_s @tux0r @zzt
<DrCuriosity> Yes.
<DrCuriosity> There are some things I don't miss.
* DrCuriosity has quit (*.net *.split)
@DrCuriosity @t_var_s @tux0r @zzt
IRC's fragile spanning tree structure is the root problem but i don't know how we'd do cross-tree links without all sorts of weirdness
there's probably a solution involving terrible hand rolled cryptography that also doesn't solve the problem
(as with so many such problems)
@davidgerard by hand rolled do you mean reinventing the cryptographic primitives, or do you mean not using tls? or maybe youre okay with tls but dont want to use https or wss in particular?
@DrCuriosity @t_var_s @tux0r @zzt discord basically worked in ways irc didn't. if you don't understand that, you don't understand the question.
@davidgerard @t_var_s @tux0r @zzt I have no fond memories of IRC usability wise. The UX was already bad in the 2000s, and from the little contact I've had with it since, there has been no improvement.
don’t come to this thread to argue. get angry and fucking do something about it. you feel trapped? good. welcome in. it fucking sucks in here.
@zzt
Do you know the best place to start making a difference?
I'm super out of my depth but from today it seems like XMPP might be a viable way forward in terms of large-scale community platforms like discord? Does it lack for decent clients or... are we really so far behind that we don't even have a base to build upon?
@davidgerard @R3yScale signal groups support 1000 participants, and video chats supposedly will do 75
an idea (no warranty on how good it is) is to use libsignal to implement a signal client with a concept of a signaling group chat, used to implement groups of groups and present them like how discord presents servers and channels. signal’s existing invite URL mechanism can be used both to invite users to the “server” (signaling group chat) and manage channel membership.
So this is fun: libsignal is AGPLv3. This means that you cannot use it in anything that you put in the Apple App Store. Signal requires a CLA that allows them to use a different license for their iOS app.
It also means that you cannot use it to integrate Signal with any proprietary services (which makes me sad because I'd love for banks to use Signal to reach people instead of SMS).
Protocols should have permissively licensed reference implementations.
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @zzt@mas.to @davidgerard@circumstances.run @R3yScale@techhub.social what terms for Apple's app store disallow AGPLv3 code? I thought it was not required because signal releases the code and apple isn't modifying or hosting their infrastructure at all
@david_chisnall @zzt @davidgerard @R3yScale I like using signal for a lot of stuff but also there's a lot of signal I don't like, and that's going onto the list too.
hey shitheads who came here to argue: fuck you
that’s it actually, just fuck you
“oh ho ho you posted this on mastodon which is the alternative to” get fucked. the open web is burning and you’re jacking off on the flames. the fuck is wrong with you.
I have just been informed that atlassian quietly* acquired jitsi several years ago
to the absolute little shits who came into this thread to do free advertising for the jira of video conferencing: ahahahaha
* for the tedious little shits: 8x8 (other enterprise assholes) bought it off them but atlassian still considers jitsi theirs in every way that counts: https://developer.atlassian.com/platform/open-source/
@zzt it’s also mondo impossible to deploy and administer yourself. Because the company that writes it only profits when you pay them to deploy it. Toddler blocks level of obvious motive.
And then people say “look there are free hosts!” Yeah and what has happened to free hosts of literally every previous “free alternative” web service?? Shut down/paywalled as soon as it’s popular enough that the bills to run it (or prospective profit) are more than a rounding error of nerdery. This isn’t a fucking sustainable ecosystem and believing it is is fucking yourself over.
@s0 fucking exactly! nothing kills kneejerk advocacy like running this absolute shit in production.
![[object Object]](https://media.mas.to/accounts/avatars/109/287/758/133/964/366/original/0f3099c0adfb36a0.png "[object Object]")
