I’m not verifying my old age with any online service. They can go fuck themselves.
My discord account itself is 11 years old now, most of my accounts are, but they still need to age check me. What did I set it up which n I was 4?
Gotta have massive surveillance in a fascist society.
The age verification isn’t to check age, agree is r excuse they want to tie the account to you.
The selfie method stands out: on-device processing with no video retained is a meaningful privacy distinction.
Yea I don’t buy it
Yeah, this just means, if true, it’s totally ineffective. It’ll be hacked to bypass it if it’s all local, which means people wanting to avoid it will.
Yea I don’t buy it
Good. No one should. Not at least after the data breach. I ain’t giving them shit.
That quote from the article also sounds like AI wrote that bit.
The whole article was AI written, the headings the “voice” scream AI
It 100% is. That’s a Claude-ism if I ever saw one.
I read too much AI slop for a living to know.
Matrix honestly sucks ass and is full of spambots posting illegal content
Xmpp is too confusing for most people
I agree with Matrix Sucking, it needs very heavy work on both frontend and backend implementations to be taken serious, that’s why I stopped pushing it to my friend groups, the people I convinced to join ended up needing features it just doesn’t support yet, like an actual permission system instead of the numeric based > x style, or actual custom emote capability that isn’t a patchwork decided by the software and the huge barrier of getting started. People don’t want to have to pick through 30 different frontends to find one that works perfectly for a server.
Matrix works amazingly for the techies, or for people who want a limited IRC style feature set. But for for the casuals who are used to what discord provides, it just isn’t a good competitor. It’s complicated to get going, isn’t unified and lacks features. Most people I have tried to suggest it have bailed due to that not long after joining.
XMPP being difficult though? I hard disagree. It’s well maintained, it’s super established, and for the most part unlike matrix whom decided frontend needed to make decisions on feature-sets, everything on XMPP is backend based. You have the same issues as matrix client wise but, for the most part client feature-sets are universal due to how long it’s been out. I would push XMPP long before I go back to pushing matrix again. I have had better luck keeping/maintaining people on XMPP than I have with matrix.
and Fluxer, it seems the most feature complete
Moved onto Matrix a while ago because of this. Gonna be real, Discord is better but all Matrix asked me for was hardware verification. I fucking hate this ID verification thing. Like we are going to see a sharp spark in identity theft going forward.
…and shit, I might be part of it. I had to verify with an ID to get my CompTIA tests, which I passed. I am still arguing with Pearson to delete my personal data, but I might be in the shitter with all the others getting their identity stolen.
What Matrix client are you using?
Element.
That is your problem, it’s super slow and server management is hard. I am seeing that Sable seems to be popular.
Is Sable worth getting into? My friends and I have been using Element for a hot second now and it works good enough for us. Like if it does everything we need, so how is Sable better?
but all Matrix asked me for was hardware verification.
what do you mean? I don’t think it uses anything like that
Fluxer continues rapid development and is now self-hostable.
Does it have audio notifications yet? That was my deal-breaker when I tried it 6 months ago.
yep! you can even turn on a notification sound for messages in the current channel while the window is focused
It had audio notifications 6 months ago.
Yeah, my bad, I was thinking of Stoat.
I wish they’d do a cheap “Nitro Classic” style tier, rather than just having only “Nitro Premium”.
They don’t have either.
It’s called Plutonium or something. They do have the equivalent of Nitro.
Yes but unlike Discord you can just ignore it.
Actually not. They do impose really stupid upload limits.
Storage costs build up fast, the real solution is just handling peer to peer file sharing.
Yeah, and that’s the cool part on Matrix. It’s not really P2P yet, but it’s federated (including the storage), and they have a project looking to make it P2P.
Not stupid at all when you’re the one paying for storage.
If they had a super cheap $1 tier just for being able to use custom emotes anywhere, I’d honestly love that. Though I feel like the $5/month for Plutonium is a lot better than $10/month that discord nitro goes for
The current stand alone client doesn’t allow you to specify a self hosted server though I’m limited to the web interface until there’s a fix, hopefully soon.
Really like fluxer though! Highly recommend it was very easy to set up and looks exactly like Discord.
Can’t you specify instance when logging into a canary client?
Not on Linux and the forums said it’s an oversight or bug and would be fixed but not when. Frustrating I am trying to migrate friends but they whine about the web interface.
It should also be a very easy fix so i wonder why it takes so long
Genuinely the one issue I have with it at the moment. Had been using Matrix since early this year. Got Fluxer up recently when they got the beta apps. Shut my matrix server down about a week later. It’s just nicer. Missing some things like E2E (for now) but my friends hated the additional step of having to put in that decrypt phrase anyway. Fluxer is easy and incredibly familiar out the box. Gonna keep my eye on Matrix clients though, but neither Element, Cinny, nor FluffyChat impressed.
It’s also a slop project. Matrix exists: join it and enjoy the federated future.
It’s not. Matrix is awful.
Ok go ahead, and please explain why matrix is awful. Please only speak from recent experience.
Slow loading, constant encryption errors, difficult to use, and way too many people on the flagship instance.
I’ve been on matrix for over about two years now. There is no noticeable slowness on the client, on any that I tried (and I’ve tried a lot of them), and the chats for our groups open immediately.
There have been 0 encryption errors so far. We use encryption only in private chats and chats where we exchange important data. I have only been on large encrypted rooms (100+) once, and I did have an initial loading phase which took a couple of seconds. One should be able to live with that.
I have brought 12 people including my mother on element. Three of those people are what I consider “techy”, and the rest managed to join and use it by themselves with zero teaching from me (other than giving them the home server URL).
Hating matrix because lots of people are on the flagship server is like hating email because most people use Gmail. It’s not relevant for you. They can use whatever and you can use whatever.
I have a feeling that I have this talk once a month because there are misconceptions and misinformation on matrix. Matrix does have some issues, but these are not it.
I don’t know what to tell you, that has been my experience, and the experience of many others I have discussed it with.
Hating matrix because lots of people are on the flagship server is like hating email because most people use Gmail.
Well for one, yes, I absolutely do hate that most people use Gmail. This i s simply not the case with many competing protocols. For another, no, it’s not the same, because Gmail makes no illusions of being private.
Yeah.
Also Fluxer is closed-source AFAIK.
And they say they will open it, but that just feels like empty words, and even if they did, I know they will use a shitty license as the FSL.
It’s open source under AGPL 3.0.
However they have worked on stuff privately before pushing it.
Oh well, I take back what I said, sorry for the misinformation. At least last time I checked there was no source code.
And about what I said about the FSL license, I’m really traumatized by projects that supposedly open source their code, but with that license.
Matrix has its benefits, but it is not a 1:1 replacement for discord, for one thing they still haven’t figured out audio screen sharing. If privacy is your thing, it is also a mixed bag since jitsi is not e2ee while the fluxer video calls are. For my use case fluxer is preferable for less tech savvy people or people who want e2ee video calls, & matrix is good for e2ee chat messages, both have their place, & I use both where their strengths shine
Element call exists and both audio over screen share and encrypted video calls are a thing since couple years now. It’s not a 1:1 discord and it’s good because of that.
Matrix is cool but the lackluster custom emote support on mobile clients is kind of a deal breaker for me
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/2545 Exists since 2020. But are custom emotes really the reason that you don’t use matrix?
Actually there are plenty of mobile clients with that feature lol.
I do use Extera Next and it does have them.
this does seem like a pretty nice mobile client. thanks for sharing!
though unfortunately there’s no iOS version, so my partner can’t use it
extera is a fluffychat fork, which does have an iOS client fwiw
I’ve been trying Fluxer recently and it’s been really great. though not as nice as Stoat with emotes, they still give 500 emote slots and 500 sticker slots for servers on the main instance. The mobile app that recently came out are a bit rough around the edges, but works well enough to replace discord for me (if only I could get all my friends on it…)
yes but ai slop article
I’m so fucking tired of AI slop
yesterday I even got google AI search summaries quoting Meta AI summaries of people’s public facebook comments
like guys I just want to know the fucking difference between these two driveway sealer products, I don’t need a 1000 word AI generated food blog post on the incorrect reasons why sealing is important
For people that want advice for finding an alternative service, go to the github repo and figure out the state of development. Find the answers to these questions: how many active developers are there? when was the last commit? does this look like LLM code? What do the issues and PRs look like? Remember that we don’t want to have to do this again in 10 years, so open source and decentralized are major points.
debian community is migrating to Fluxer, but a lot of people in that community are still asking for IRC, which has “discord-like” front-ends nowadays, so idk why not. It would allow anyone to use any client they want.
Fluxer?
Vibe coded slop by one person. It is not really an open source project if nobody can work on it.
Is it ?
Open the GitHub repo. This guy is outputing more code in a month than I have in my entire career.
Fluxer has no E2EE yet, and no Federation. But it’s very easy to set up your own server.
It’s also very easy to set up your own Matrix server with Tuwunel or Continuwuity. I don’t know about the state of hosting your own XMPP server, but I assume it’s just as easy.
My friend has set up his Matrix server with Continuwuity (what a name…) and it required quite a bit of technical knowledge. With Fluxer you basically don’t need any technical knowledge.
For comparison, it took my friend about a day or two to set up his Matrix server with Sable as his client, and make sure everything was running smoothly. We managed to set up a Fluxer test server within 30 minutes.
They moved my local D&D group onto discordia and ended up kicking me out of a session I wanted to attend.
My friends and I are in Matrix with the Sable client since march and we are really happy with it.
My friends and I use Matrix with the the commet.chat client. It is the best.
Thanks for mentioning that client! Just gave it a go and its probably the best client I have tried so far
Can vouch for him. I can’t be happier with Matrix & Sable client.
You self-host or use a public instance? I’ve been curious about Matrix for a while but never found the time to set it up or find a decent instance
I was using a etke as a hosting service for a while but it was a bit expensive and I wanted more control. I set it up on my homelab with a VPS running a reverse proxy and like it a lot more. I believe I deployed it with someone’s Ansable playbook I found on github. Make a matrix.org account and play around with it. I hate the Element client though.
Good thing I made a Discord alternative that is using p2p and thus making it impossible to verify the age of any user.
Already have sharkord hosted via a VPS via linode, so no worries about uptime. Fuck discord, open source for the win.
Wish I could delete it again
Time to delete account 👋
Help, I am still looking for assistance setting up the proxy that lets me downvote someone else’s decisions. Getting desperate here.
Ha! Well, I’m glad we moved our gaming community off of it when all this kicked off first time round, knowing full well it wouldn’t be the last time they tried this shit. We started entirely self hosting our community to focus on user privacy and haven’t looked back since.
If people want a link to join, comment or DM, I don’t want this to come across like a sales pitch or shill lol
