Discord Rival Gets Overwhelmed by Exodus of Players Fleeing Age-Verification

Maybe a good opportunity to reduce screensharing (unless pure video content). A lot of people are sharing webpages through video. That's subpar (except for the shared pointer)

10MB seems like a vestige of old code. What used to be reasonable no longer is. Cameras have too many pixels now for that low of a limit.

Doesn’t text chat still have a weird thing where you can’t see the texts unless you’re in a voice call in that channel?

Many reasons:

1. To DeDoS a Teamspeak server, it's enough to DeDoS a single server. You may not even need to do that, it may be enough to be such a nuisance that their host kicks them out. To DeDoS a Discord server, it's necessary to DeDoS the entirety of Discord, which is much, much harder, and also much more likely to put you in legal hot water. Discord is the Cloudflare of gaming.

2. Discord servers aren't real servers, they're tenants in an application, effectively "rows in an SQL table", not standalone containers requiring their own tech stack. This means they can be offered for free. You also can't abuse them for E.G. crypto mining, like you can with a VPS where a Teamspeak server can be hosted. Free increases adoption, which makes people a lot more likely to pay for extra features. It's the standard "the rich subsidize the poor" model, common to so many web applications.

3. No technical expertise necessary to set a server up. Bus factor is basically equal to infinity.

4. One service, one account, one interface, many servers, many groups, many people. There's no weird workspace switching and per-workspace DMs like in Slack (not sure how TS does this). If you log in once on a new device, all your server memberships are there, and everything just works. You may be in dozens of servers, and they're all behind the same single login.

Those 4 features are table stakes now, like it or not. If you want to be a real, long-term Discord competitor and attract real users, you have to figure out how to get those 4.

> I was curious why so many younger people were getting Discords instead of starting up Vent or Teamspeak servers like we used to.

Discord did a great job of making it easy and free to get all of your friends into a group together. Everything just works. You don’t need to have an IT person in the group to set up the server and walk everyone through connecting.

In the early days of gaming it seemed like every gaming group had at least one person who worked in tech and didn’t mind setting up a server. Now gaming is mainstream and the average gaming group doesn’t have a person who can host a server for them. Even when they do, that person would rather spend their gaming time on playing the games instead of playing the IT person for the group.

I think the main reason was Discord basically doumping free server hosting with VC money to eliminate competition.

Now that money has finally run out, it looks like things are reverting back to normal.

Because a Discord server is very easy and free to set up, and has nice features like screensharing that weren't commonly handled well at the time. Before that, we used Skype or AIM or iChat if we even wanted audio at all; Teamspeak was more for "serious gamers."

Isn't this usually cause the admin went overboard? Like a server of 10 people has 30 channels, one of which is a lobby you have to clear first, and 10 bots telling you that you leveled up or whatever.

I think it depends on how the servers are setup. Chat channels with 1000s people participating are typically worthless as the signal to noise ratio ruins it.

But when the majority of conversations are happening in forums/thread style channels then it works well. You can still have some more niche chat style sections where typically 2-10 people participate

Chat channels are also fine for lots of people when its not about conversations but more just about sharing things. Like a "Share what you build" or "memes" channel work well as tons of messages are fine as you only care to see a few anyway.

Also limited size voice channels can be good aswell 5 people max.

I think you overestimate the capability and willingness of the average Discord user to go through that. Majority are not technical, they have no idea what self hosting is, what a VPS is, etc.

Also self hosting creates an issue of balkanization. Everybody will have to join everybody else’s server. Too much effort. The closest we can probably get is the Mastodon model.

Normally I'm a lurker here but I gotta put in a good word for this project: https://sharkord.com/

It's still super early in development but it's already been amazing to have a self-hosted 3rd space for my friends and myself. The "living room not a convention center" focus is exactly what I find missing in most of the other options.

There is Mumble for a free software option similar to TS. Works well in my experience. I've hosted a server for friends for around a decade now I think.

The things in politics have a habit of spreading outside of country's borders, as politicians in other countries just go "huh, that's nice kind of oppresion, and their population didn't totally revolt so maybe we should try"

Also technically US is fault of UK too

Fark, somehow still holding strong.

It's decentralized but still has central servers that can be overwhelmed?

Yes, the self hosted servers register with a centralized server to check for a license and to optionally list that server in the centralized list of public servers. Teamspeak can be hosted for free but has client restrictions that can be overcome with a license.

On a related note, Mumble self hosted servers can also register with a centralized server if the server owner wishes to have it listed for public use. This is optional as the server owner can also just advertise the connection details on a website and/or in Discord. Mumble [1] has no concept of a license to operate however. There is a light-weight version of the Mumble server called uMurmur that can run on a Linux router or RasPi but the channel configuration is statically defined ahead of time on uMurmur. The full blown version is just called Murmur and by default uses sqlite but it can also use a database like MySQL or MariaDB for storing persistent data like user registrations, channels, bans, and server configuration. .

https://www.mumble.info/

It's decentralized because you can run a server yourself, but they also offer hosting services.

All features? Where are the custom emojis?