Developer on Space Station 14.

Admin of lemmy.spacestation14.com

Mastodon: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@PJB

  • 2 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • When the OP article was posted in 2021, Zulip didn’t even have public access as an option. This basically would make it a non-starter for what the article author suggests it for, as that’s worse (having to make an account everywhere) than Discord, Matrix or IRC.

    To be honest I don’t have too much experience with Zulip or Rocket or all of these other new platforms, but my current default assumption is that they will always be designed foremost for organizations rather than the “I am in 20 communities I am somewhat active in[1]” like Discord. Matrix always seems like the better choice here… but it’s got its own issues.

    I also don’t put much regard into the author’s word here because unironically suggesting IRC in 2021 means they’re off their rocker.

    [1] I know you can only join like 100 servers without nitro ok.


  • I am fully aware why people go “Discord bad”. But weak arguments like “you miss out on all the contributors that have too bad of a PC to run Discord” do not outweigh the fact that Discord is a million times better for building a community. You’re suggesting to make the experience worse for 90% of people interested in a project to appease the <1%.

    I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but it is.


  • I’ve evaluated Matrix multiple times, even tried to set up a homeserver once, and I can confidently say it’s an unusable mess compared to Discord.

    If I wanted to set up a community like on Discord the experience would be worse than Discord 8-7 years ago. Is there a nice, GUI based system for managing permissions, administration and members in a group across 50 channels yet? No? Alright.

    Also every time I try to set up Element on another device it takes like 5 attempts to get it to stop spouting errors about E2E stuff, and then still fails to decrypt messages.


  • Ahhh, yet another “Discord bad” post. Let’s see what alternatives they propose. After all, just telling me I made the wrong choice isn’t productive right?

    There are great FOSS alternatives to Discord or Slack. SourceHut has been investing in IRC by building more accessible services like chat.sr.ht. Other great options include Matrix and Zulip. Please consider these services before you reach for their proprietary competitors.

    Hahaha hahaha. Good fucking joke.

    There’s a reason Discord is a million times more usable than all of those, and it’s not just network effect.

    I’m well aware discord is going to enshittify itself eventually. It’s inevitable. However quite frankly as long as that hasn’t happened yet, it will remain by far the best option. I am not going to knee-cap my project by using a Discord “alternative” that barely works.

    The day Discord dies will be a massive loss for the internet. That hasn’t happened yet. But it will. And it’s not going to be a loss just because of all the communities locked in on it. It’s going to be a loss because it’s the best damn community chat software and there’s no replacement.






  • As somebody whose primary language is Dutch, the lack of an explicit plural “you” is one of the worst things.

    If I’m talking to somebody, I can’t nicely refer to a group they are part of, because “you” means they themself specifically, “y’all” makes me feel like engineer TF2, and “you people” sounds condescending.









  • Yeah. People really should be allowed to make things in whatever technology they prefer, but at the same time I can’t help but wince when I see infrastructure such as Mastodon or Matrix Synapse being written in slow inefficient languages like Ruby and Python.

    It’s really bad for the strength of decentralized networks like Fedi when I have a friend telling me “I wish I didn’t set up Mastodon because my tiny instance needs multiple gigabytes of RAM”. I might have set up a Matrix homeserver myself by now if Synapse wasn’t Python and notoriously slow. I immediately discarded Kbin as a choice (among other reasons) because it’s PHP and Lemmy is Rust.

    Always easy to say “hindsight is 20/20”, but still.