Wayland and audio is fixed, but only on the canary branch for the moment, this isnt lazy either, they changed the whole screenshare flow to suit linux’s permission prompts
I was almost convinced they were keeping this broken on purpose, it’s been broken so long. Like, years long.
It was broken so long I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if news surfaced that Discord was taking back-handers from Microsoft under the table to keep it broken. With steam working so well on Linux now, broken discord streaming without actual working audio share was one of the last things that posed a hurdle for gamers ditching Windows.
(In the meantime, thank you Vesktop for your service <3)
I saw something from a discord dev (can’t find it, so grain of salt) about how there was interest recently to do it, but they’d have to work on other stuff that affected everyone first, and they’d probably get it done by q4 2024, guess they were right.
I think before then the whole linux graphics and audio space hadn’t really stabilized enough for them to be interested.
convinced they were keeping this broken on purpose, it’s been broken so long. Like, years long.
Heh. There’s a ticket with Splunk. It’s a simple request: do the 30 sec of work to let us install your software rpm from a proper yum repo.
They can’t figure out how.
They won’t ask.
It’s 12 years old now.
The ticket for them to do a trivial exercise with tools twice as old, is now a tween. It can ride the bus on its own. I think it can get a Facebook account. Maybe.
We should get one for it.
It was the same with Zoom but AFAIK they’re finally working on it now.
The Zoom flatpak works fine. Haven’t tried native.
I had weird issues with the Flatpak (can’t remember what they were) but the native RPM worked fine. Previously you had to download and install/update the RPM manually but I’ve heard they’re working on proper RPM and deb repos.
That’s good! Options don’t hurt imo, as long as they’re properly maintained.
who in their sane mind uses zoom on their private device. holy molly
I’m using it on my work PC, since it’s what we use for meetings.
Is there really? Long time splunk admin, I would love to see this
It was broken so long I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if news surfaced that Discord was taking back-handers from Microsoft under the table to keep it broken.
Tech companies are fully capable of being lazy for free. Fixing this takes dev time from other work that brings Discord money so doing this costs them, especially considering that Linux userbase must be rather tiny. 99% of software companies don’t give a shit about making quality product and will always try their hardest to do as little work as possible while making as much money as possible. If fixing a bug will cost them more than potential profits from making it work then they won’t fix it.
You’re right of course, it’s definitely down to simple lack of incentive, rather than some kind of conspiracy. But the conspiracy was a fun shower thought! :)
You give them too much credit. It’s just shitty, that’s it.
Discord is pretty much broken on all platform. It always was. There’s just no real alternative unfortunately.
“Don’t attribute to malice what is explained by incompetence”
Lets create an alternative.
If Twitter is any indication, Discord would have to fuck up big, and for a long time for people to switch.
I agree, but working on an alternative an cultivating it could be a good start. Look at mastodon or lemmy.
There is an alternative people have used before discord came, it is called teamspeak. Is still around as well, but works more like a federated system since everyone has to set up and host their own server for people to use.
Teamspeak is no alternative to discord. Sorry. Also its not even open source, is it?
Discord isnt open source either tho so how does that matter for the comparison?
And while yes it is a little outdated, I do recall the time before discord when people would have their own teamspeak server instead, which worked very similar to the fediverse.
You had the client and could connect to any server you had the credentials to, which each were owned and hosted by various people or groups each with their own rules and code of conduct.
Mumble is open source.
I’m all for it tho I have no idea how to grab the folk’s attention
We would have to sit down and actually think what an opensource solution can achieve and how it gets traction. Also from the get go it should be clear that there will be no feature parity between it and discord. If it was me, I would cut out the whole chatroom functionality, leave private messaging in, use threaded conversations as a standard and but a decent videocall system on top. But this would be my version of it, other people have other needs.
For the video call system you would not have to reinvent the wheel, use something existing like Jitsi (?) or alternatives. Then you would
Maybe the best bet is to look at matrix and wrench out the chatroom focus and replace it with threads?
best alternative would be a forum + voice calls + dms IMO
why cut chatroom functionality? Servers are the main reason people use discord?
Not in my bubble, chats create insurmountable loads of noise. By focusing on threads you get the discussion much more focused and streamlined. Example: Most of my discords are ttrpg related, where with the usage of bots games are scheduled. Or where discussion are happening around certain ttrpg systems.
I agree that a lot of discord servers focus on chat rooms. But you could retain that by simply having 1-2 chatrooms per server and structure/direct conversations to dedicated threads/voice chats instead.
Again this is just MY view. I am totally aware that other people, use it differently.
that’s a totally fair view, and the people at matrix seem to agree because it has threading, seems to be the kind you like, too
It was 100% because the existing Electron version they were using was ancient, a giant pain in the ass to update, and represents exactly zero revenue for them so they hadn’t bothered putting anyone on fixing it. Every tech company has the ticking time bomb in the corner like that.
Screen sharing infrastructure (for Wayland) in Linux was still in development recently. Maybe they just wanted to be able to use newer APIs?
The screen casting portal is 6 years old. 6 years is not recent…
Just being supported as a protocol doesn’t mean everything is done. Chromium probably didn’t have it until years after that, and operating systems may not have implemented it umtil more recently.
Chromium had it for qhite a while, but it isn’t really relevant… Discord’s implementation of screen sharing was custom on X11, if they had used the one that comes with Electron, this would’ve worked far earlier.
operating systems may not have implemented it umtil more recently
DEs that had a Wayland session (aka Gnome and Plasma) supported it very soon after the portal was made.
The real reason won’t be anything external, but something in the company. Usually it’s just that Linux isn’t a priority for a given company, so even if there’s a motivated engineer that wants to take care of it, it’s hard justifying to their managers why they need to spend a lot of time on it.
This isn’t exclusive to Discord, to use a very similar example, Zoom is kinda worse. In the past, Zoom misused a Gnome screenshot API to do screen casting very badly, and recently they ported to the desktop portal - not because they had a choice, but because Gnome locked down the API they were using. Screen casting still only works on Gnome though, because they still check for the desktop name. If you set it to Gnome, it works perfectly fine everywhere else too!
All it would take to fix that problem is removing an if statement, yet, despite many complaints, it hasn’t happened… because no big customer has complained, so it’s just one of the unimportant Linux bugs.
Thanks for the additional info.
I like how Vesktop updates in the background. Discord proper has to close, download the .deb, install, and relaunch.
And yes, vesktop did it first, but discord’s version is quite a bit more polished
Finally I can go back to having people at 200% 😍
Vesktop still allows you to choose a single audio output, Discord’s implementation seems to share system audio of all running apps, and doesn’t let you choose the specific application.
As far as I’m aware, Vesktop also allows you to share at 60fps, not just at 720, but up to 1440 at no charge. Can’t wait for Vesktop to continue being ahead of the curve
Wait how? Does it only share with other vesktop users?
Nope, any discord lobby afaik
Can confirm! I screen share all the tile and I take advantage of this. Love Vesktop ✨
Fuck Discord! 🙂
Sadly there’s no alternative.
matrix, xmpp
no alternative that’s as user-friendly and feature-complete
I wouldn’t say discord is either of those things
They need to limit server sizes, get rid of community searching, and add #XXXX to the end of usernames before we can pretend that
Wouldn’t limiting server sizes and getting rid of community searching be removing features? Why would anyone want that?
And Discord used to have #XXXX at the end of usernames.
Why would anyone want that?
1 they aren’t pedos
2 they want an app to talk to their friends with
3 they don’t want to be victims of misinformation campaigns
And Discord used to have #XXXX at the end of usernames.
Yeah it was better, it meant if you were being stalked you could just have the numbers changed. Now you need a completely different alias with the only purpose to be discouraging victims from getting help
1- What does that have to do with anything?
2- Then make a private server for just your friends.
3- Then make a private server for just your friends.
And no, it wasn’t better. Just… different.
I so wish there was matrix protocol for voice rooms and a good reference implementation but sadly there are neither
How long has it been since you used element/matrix? Serious question because the new element call stack is now finally released in element stable, as of a few patches ago. (It still only shows up as the “video rooms” feature that u have to enable in the labs/beta settings)
Its much cleaner than before and properly supports screensharing, adjusting individual user volumes and more. The previous jitsi based voice rooms were somewhat lacking i admit but they have been functional for years.
That was the last thing that kind of kept me from fully endorsing matrix but now it does all that really important stuff. The new mobile ElementX client also supports the new call system but its overall lacking compared to the normal mobile client which does not support it.
But for desktop use i dont have any complains anymore about matrix really.
not that I dig into it very far but I check maybe once a year to find out if any of the features I want made it into matrix protocol yet and they always seem stalled
You can do it for xmpp and Jitsi right?
Revolt looks pretty good despite its lack of a large user base
No screen share and there seems to be a reluctance to add/address requests for it. They add that and I can get my whole community to switch. Until then it’s not happening.
Zulip has been around for a loooong time. It integrates well with Jitsi, and is fully self-hostable.
Why?
Centralized social media. Poison of the masses. If they control the pullpit, they control the congregation. Tale as old as time.
It’s reach not centralization
You’d think Lemmy would’ve taught you that by now
The founder’s shady history with OpenFeint, their entire privacy policy and shit like this, take your pick. Wikipedia also has an entire section dedicated to Discord’s controversies. No matter how you look at it, Discord has a great many shortcomings.
i agree with your points but wanted to mention that binding arbitration is bullshittery that most large companies do by default these days. sign a cell phone contract, streaming/cable service, utility bill, whatever. there’s probably an arbitration clause right in the fine print.
These articles are very old and not super relevant any more. Sources of 2018 and 2019, while a lot has changed over the years.
I’m not here to “defend” Discord and pretend it’s all gravy, but if you want to make a compelling argument, I think it’s a good idea to stick to current, factual information.
These articles are very old and not super relevant any more. Sources of 2018 and 2019, while a lot has changed over the years.
Did you even read them? They changed for worst all the points remain.
Which got worse? Feel free to show me an example. I’ll try to investigate and find out its merits.
It must be said that that site also considers browsers like Firefox and Vivaldi to be at a high level of being spyware. I think it’s important to understand that Discord doesn’t do things much differently than other platforms, other than not having any 3rd party ads.
You sound exactly like a bad actor. If you open and read the website you would know why Firefox it’s listed
https://cadence.moe/blog/2020-06-06-why-you-shouldnt-trust-discord
You see a couple of orange lines. You think, well that’s okay, it’s up most of the time? This isn’t helpful. Discord needs to be up all of the time if it wants me to take it seriously. I understand that writing code is hard, and I’m aware that I sound demanding here, but I just cannot adopt Discord for communicating if I cannot rely on it to be available when I need it now. If it’s down for half an hour, that’s not a long time in the big picture, but it’s a long time in the moment when I have a message that I need to send right then.
(emphasis mine). Ah yes, another blog by a user that thinks everything revolves around their experience.
I would love to act in good faith, but you’re not making it easy linking this drivel. Because I don’t want to make you feel like I’m fishing for sources, let me expand some points in the original link to talk about:
Discord contains features which allow integration with other spyware platforms
Discord contains the opt-in spyware feature known as “social media integration.” This allows you to sync your persistent user identity on Discord with your persistent user identity on other spyware platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. In its privacy policy[1], Discord has confirmed that if you opt in to this spyware feature, Discord will obtain an undisclosed amount of access to information obtained about you by the spyware platforms that you choose to sync with.
Ah yes, very scary. Connecting your account with other platforms to show your profile.
Discord uses its process logging for advertising
That the process logging features of Discord are now being recorded on Discord’s servers as a form of telemetry (spyware), and removes speculation about why this feature exists. It is clarified by Discord that this spyware feature is used for advertising to its users.[8] This means that Discord is recording the programs you have open to build a statistical model of what programs you might buy/license in the future.
The “advertising” in question:
We use certain information to personalize our services. This includes features like customizing your experience on our discovery surfaces, highlighting activity on Discord that may interest you, and surfacing Discord features and promotions from us and our partners that may be of interest to you. For example, we may use information about who you interact with to rank a Friend who you interact with often higher in the “Active Now” section of your Friends List.
Discord tries to force some users to give their Telephone numbers
Discord will lock users out of its service and will not allow them to continue using it without giving their phone number or contacting Discord support. This is especially true for TOR users. This kind of feature is designed to extract very personal information out of its users (phone numbers). The criteria for locking out users isn’t known
Usually this is a server (community) - side setting, but Discord also forces it when they think you are a spammer or malicious actor. Pretending it’s to collect phone number is a bit out there. Also, 2FA has been a thing since forever.
Lastly, there’s probably the argument of selling our personal data:
We don’t sell your personal information. Our business is based on subscriptions and paid products, not from selling your personal information to third parties.
We make money from paid subscriptions and the sale of digital (and sometimes physical) goods, not from selling your personal information to third parties.
We do not sell the personal data of our users or share personal data for targeted advertising purposes.
No sale or “share” of personal information: The CCPA sets forth certain obligations for businesses that sell or “share” personal information. We do not sell or share the personal information of our users as defined in the CCPA.
This is a legal document that they will get in trouble for if they were lying. They’ve already been fined hundreds of thousands of euros for GDPR violations but that curiously did not include a fine for “took people’s personal information and then sold them without consent whilst explicitly saying they didn’t do that”
Discord further has no third party advertisements which they can use to “sell” your data by allowing those advertisements to target you.
Oh my fuck, finally. Good lord Discord, only took you eons to get that working with Wayland after you broke it.
I get that there’s other things like Discord out there, but nothing works like Discord.
Matrix doesn’t?
I get that there’s other things like Discord out there, but nothing works like Discord.
There’s plenty of free alternatives that works much better than discord
Not if I want calling, video chat, screen sharing and role based chat rooms all in the same place. I’ve explored this, but it just isn’t feature complete enough at the moment. I’d definitely describe myself as a Discord power user and Matrix just doesn’t manage it.
Calls and video chats works just fine in matrix and client like element allow you to integrate other services if you don’t like the default ones.
I’d definitely describe myself as a Discord power user
You sound a lot like someone who use windows. We are on a linux sub.
I am a Linux user. Bizarre assumption to make given my excitement over a Wayland specific Discord feature. But I don’t have any actual qualms with how Discord implements its own services. Matrix just doesn’t fit the bill for me. If you enjoy it, and it suits your needs then all the power to you. It just isn’t what works for me.
Matrix does not have the features of Discord. It’s far closer to a Telegram alternative. It doesn’t even have voice channels, a very basic requirement for a Discord alternative.
When do they stop selling user data? Next patch?
they say they dont sell any user data, although i have my doubts about that
It doesn’t really matter if they do or don’t. What matters is that they can change their TOS at any time, they keep an archive of all historical data, and you will have pretty much no recourse no matter what they decide to do with it in the future.
Who knows what will happen to Discord in five or ten years?
They might get bought by a narcissistic billionaire.
They might sell all their data to Google for training AI.
They might go bankrupt and sell off their assets to the highest bidder.
They might have an IPO and begin the usual value extraction at the expense of their users.
I know, I know…crazy ideas, right? When has anything like that ever happened?!
i think you’re totally right, i just dont like people saying theyre doing it right now.
Frankly i think we should use matrix instead, but it just isnt good enough yet
Yeah, Matrix is a very, very hard sell. I mean, “normal” people (for lack of a better term) are put off by Mastodon, and Matrix is a hundred times more complicated to join. I’m also not sure what it would look like to use Matrix the way I use Discord. Perhaps there is functionality in Element/Matrix I have never explored since I use it more for messaging and group chat, not for communities with multiple channels like IRC/Discord/Slack.
In any case, Discord is too entrenched to be replaced by something that is merely technically superior, or even more user-friendly. Realistically, you can’t migrate entire communities if they’re bigger than a tight-knit IRL friend group, and even that is hard. That seems to be the only reason X still exists.
all of this is true with literally any company.
Almost, yeah. Certainly the big corps.
This is why I strongly favor services that use end-to-end encryption or do not store history in the first place.
There are not many times when I’ve needed to search back through history on a Discord server, and every time I have I thought to myself “this would be much better on any platform besides Discord”. Discord would, IMHO, be a better product if they did not retain history forever.
Ditto for Slack. Slack has the additional gall to limit access to that data unless you pay for a premium plan, despite the fact that they keep the data forever regardless (as evidenced by their occasional free trials which magically bring all history back, and some search tricks you can use to access old posts regardless).
Both Slack and Discord have lulled their user base into a false sense of privacy. Nothing you post there should be considered private.
A bear doesn’t tell you it shits in the woods.
it would if itd get sued by forest conservation groups if it didnt admit it
They also recently implemented E2EE for calls.
Just use spacebar instead
Spacebar doesn’t even do voice calls does it? Let alone screen share
Yea Its not perfect, but hopefully on the way
It’s not ready for most people unfortunately
Nice! Thank you
That’s about time… I won’t be uninstalling vesktop tho
I like their UX, the button doesn’t say “Share screen” but “Make Selection”. On Element my dad every time has such a hard time to share the screen because even though he did it already a hundred times, he presses the share screen button and then waits, without choosing which window or screen to share.
you first click the “share screen” button, then it asks if you want to share a device, screen or window, then it shows you that screen, that summons a permission prompt tailored to what you selected recently.
I agree it’s quite nice
But still doesn’t accept my legitimate phone number, which is mandatory now.
Only in servers that enabled that verification. Its a server setting
Sent by me:
Dear Discord Privacy Team!
I’m writing to you to inform you that your platform (mobile, desktop, browser) can enforce the user to verify their account with a phone number, after the user has changed their E-Mail adress. This is a serios privacy problem! I’d like you to verify that you don’t intend on providing other (more privacy friendly) means of account verification apart from providing the phone number. I suddenly cannot use my Discord account due to this and I object to providing a phone number.
Kind regards, ~sntx
Their answer:
Discord Privacy Team (Discord Support)
Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out to us. Unfortunately, we aren’t able to assist you here. This channel is reserved for privacy questions and requests.
It looks like this is a question for our Customer Support team. We recommend that you resubmit your request and choose the appropriate reporting option. You can do so here: […].
In the meantime you can check out our Help Center for more info on everything Discord.
We appreciate your understanding.
Sincerely, Discord Privacy Team
But its a server setting to need phone verification. Im on a ton of servers and never provided them my phone number. One server changed access rights manually for my username because i refused to give discord my phone number when they enabled the verification requirement haha.
Also, their response is terrible haha
It isn’t just a server thing. Discord can request a phone number from you if they think something unusual is happening. Trying to create an account while using tor will make them ask for a phone number, and they reject those numbers offered by shared number services.
Fair enough, but then you are kinda asking for it if youre doing fishy shit. They need, and i do mean need, to somehow verify the actions being done are from a normal user and not a botnet or other fishy activity…
Took them long enough
About fucking time
This is past due, I use Vencord.
now fix push to talk which is arguable far more important
How would they implement this? I’m curious to know.
https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.freedesktop.portal.GlobalShortcuts.html
KDE has support for it, Gnome is in progress: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/xdg-desktop-portal-gnome/-/issues/47
Is there an actual implementation of this for Electron yet? Also, do you know any apps that use these yet? I haven’t found any.
Apparently Chromium has merged support for it, so it should get to Electron soon-ish: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/5871484
Just installed Canary on my system to test this, and while it’s a little janky and the hardware acceleration seems to stop other apps using the GPU at the same time this is still good enough I think I can finally move to Linux as my main OS. I assume this will get polished further in the future. Great stuff though.
There is another, semi official linux client called vesktop. Comes with a range of plugin options, all improving or enabling functions the default client doesnt offer or hides behind a paywall. It also has had screen share on Linux for the longest time,if you do the switch give it a go. Certainly better than the default app
Except push to talk doesn’t work in Vesktop/Vencord sadly.
Or any global shortcuts (i.e. to mute oneself) for that matter. Pretty useless in a gaming context because of that imho
And sound overall is shit.
Isn’t sound shit on Discord anyway? Low bitrate
Getting good enough noise cancelling and mic detection working is only almost decent on the official app.
I’ve never had a problem with low bitrate or anything related to that.
I was more just shitting on Discord to shit on Discord because you can have insane bitrates on clients such as TeamSpeak, which I would prefer everyone use.
Vesktop supports the same mic detection and krisp noise suppression as the desktop client
they also offer vencord, that patched the official client to offer those features
I’ll.check.it out, thanks for the recommendation!
THIS prevented you from switching?
Afaik screenshare always worked when using Discord in a browser
Pretty much! Never saw anything that said the browser client worked on Linux, but last time I tried the discord browser client it was pretty rubbish as well.
As someone who only occasionally uses Discord, I honestly didn’t even know they had a desktop version of their app. I’ve always used it in the browser. Why do they even have a desktop version of their webapp?
The desktop version uses Electron, a shitty Chromium + Node.js framework for devs that really only want javascript and web tech
Integration at a level a browser can’t offer. Most importantly, imo, a browser can’t bind global keyboard shortcuts for websites. So push to talk, mute keybinds, … don’t work in the browser version.
thank FUCK
Does that works for Wayland or X? or both?
Quite nice feature indeed.both, i mentioned that in the body text
You didn’t mention it works for both, just Wayland. Good to know it works on X, as well.
I mentioned the audio and wayland was fixed, x already worked
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