Technology
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
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discord alternative changed their username system to be the old discord situation? lmao gettem
I hadn't kept up with the changes to Discord's naming system, but I had notived they reverted from the USERNAME#0000 to just USERNAME which seems better, was it a good change?
I remember BattleNET having the same type of usernames.
The issue with this change was, that someone who was previously named Mike for instance with a discriminator, has to now choose something else for instance: "Mike372". Discord claims this is a better and a less confusing system, when it really just boils down to the same thing. Making matter worse they claimed all Mike usernames are taken, so #0001 to #9999 which also later turned out to be false, it was just their site choosing a random discriminator, which when it was already taken told you: "This username is already taken.", when in reality there were still available discriminators.
Whether or not it's a good change is likely mostly subjective. I'm guessing Discord made the switch to be more in line with other mainstream social media platforms, and to reduce confusion.
Personally, I kind of like the old way more. It means there could be 10000 different people with basically the same name. Other than paying for a specific number, there is no issue with a person grabbing a handle and then it not being available to anyone else. Otherwise, eventually, a lot of handles will be used up, maybe even dead, so people have to come up with increasingly creative ways to get a unique handle – or just settle on adding some numbers to the end.
I'd even go a step further myself and remove handles completely. Just use a random unique identifier, like a hash or GUID for the user – which a lot of platforms do under the hood anyway, since you can change your handle in many of them – and use invite codes, QR codes or similar to add friends. We don't need this username / handle rotting that just gets worse over time.
So, the actual reason for the change is likely their dumb handling of capitalization in the original scheme. To use your username as an example:
copygirl#1234, Copygirl#1234, COPYGIRL#1234, CopyGirl#1234, etc
Every permutation of capitalization is available as a distinct username. And with the low price of Nitro you get to customize your discriminator, which could make impersonation a very real problem.
Users are NOT happy
I like the Steam system, having a unique login and a custom name that doesn't have to be unique.
I was lucky enough to be a Discord early adopter, so I was able to keep my username. But not everyone else could. So right now there's a lot of people having to part with long-established handles and it kinda sucks.
I'm going to be standing up a Revolt instance, but I'm giving myself a break after spending days and nights getting my lemmy instance up.
Note that setting up a Revolt instance means it will literally only be you that you can talk to, and others that sign up on your instance.
Revolt is not federated (and most likely never will be). You might be aware of this though, but it isn't like Lemmy or Mastodon at all.
I thought Matrix/Element was the discord alternative no? Does Revolt use Matrix, or ActivityPub or is it entirely its own thing?
Self-hostable but not federated. Still in construction though, specially doesn't have all the voice capabilities of Discord yet, but looks quite decent so far
I get that variety and competition can sometimes spur innovation, but it also fragments, confuses, frustrates, and ultimate drives away the userbase. Hopefully this doesn't end up being "Linux on desktop is gonna go mainstream.... any year now"
That is some good trolling.
is revolt good ? I'm in no desilusion that i'd be able to make my friends move away from discord, but maybe for new communities ?
Tried it for a bit... It's just not there yet. And in the end I wanted something I could self host like in the old days of Mumble and Teamspeak.
Went with a private matrix and element instance.
Have you been able to get screensharing with audio to work on Element? I haven't been able to determine if it's in Element Desktop or not. My understanding is that it has worked on some browsers, but I'm not sure about the electron app.
I haven't used it. I'm following a couple relevant threads on github and it seems to be an in-progress issue that nonetheless is intended to be a fully implemented feature.
Glad to hear that it's planned. It's the biggest hurdle to transitioning friends and family over.
I set up bridges for telegram, discord, and whatsapp. Most of them are STOKED to have all their contacts in one place, even if they still have to open the actual apps for certain features.
I just open schildi on my phone and start scrolling past users from different platforms and they go "GIVE ME THAT"
I have been eyeing Matrix from afar for a looooong time, i need to reconsider it once I'm fully settled on Fedi, guides to replicate what you did are easily available?
Matrix is likely the most complicated thing I've ever set up to host myself. Setting up the bridging was a bit of a nightmare as their development moves at lightning speed and docs were light.
Guides were available, they just didn't always explain all possible config options.
If you do set it up, don't go down the rabbithole of trying to sync old message from other platforms to matrix, the current matrix standards just aren't set up for it, and the basic experimental implementations that synapse has for it are buggy as hell.
Just be happy with future message getting bridged. Once you're a few months in, you'll miss the ability to go back in time less and less.
It's definitely not bad, it has some features discord is still missing. But if you looking for an alternative it's for sure the thing to check out! Also it is opensource which is quite neat! https://github.com/orgs/revoltchat/repositories
Is it self-hostable? That's the thing I'm missing from the Mumble / Teamspeak days.
Yeah, you can check it out over here: https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted Keep in mind tho, there is no federation going on to other instances of revolt.
Thanks for the link. That's ok about federation, I was really just looking for a self-hosting option. Thanks for the info!
First time I've heard of it. Just seems like a Discord clone, and there's no real reason not to use discord to chat
Looks open source from their about page, seems interesting enough to me
history is a flat circle
Haven't heard of revolt before. Would be awesome if they had screenshare. I recently switched from jitsi to watchparty.me but this looks way nicer.
Ahaha, amazing.
Hold on, this is real? Not some April Fool's joke?