Discord became popular because it was free group/team voice chat. Mumble, Ventrilo, Teamspeak all needed servers/clients, paid hosting etc.

Discord is text chat (with history) + voice chat in one place. If you want an alternative it needs to do this both first and foremost.

People saying IRC are trolling or never used Discord.

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benrutter 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> People saying IRC are trolling or never used Discord.

I think it's probably that Discord has such a range of use cases.

I only ever use Discord for open source projects that have communities there. Discord supports a whole load of stuff around voice chat etc, but I've genuinely never used it.

Open source projects I've seen mainly just use it as a text chat, so they could in theory switch to something else with only a tiny fraction of the features.

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Bombthecat 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It also needs users, the network effect aka lock in is gigantic with discord, I don't see discord ever going away. Or anything else gaining traction.

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apetresc 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, Discord will obviously never lose its network effect edge and get supplanted. That's simply what always happens with network effects.

Now excuse me while I go post to my Facebook about my new MSN Messenger and ICQ addresses.

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einsteinx2 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Exactly, I’m in like 50 discord groups, that’s literally the only reason I use it. Those groups don’t exist elsewhere so there’s no other option.

	▲	Melonai 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But I remember when Discord began, I was actually the person who got around 10~ people onboarded onto the platform back in 2015-2018, because I simply thought it was the best way to communicate with a group of people or single person, in multiple ways like text, voice and video, with extremely low friction to do all of these things. Eventually the hold-outs joined too on their own volition, and that was because of network effects. A platform does not start growing because of network effects, that's what keeps a platform alive and growing later on, but it starts its growth because people really prefer it to the alternatives (which back then for me was Skype and TeamSpeak). Nowadays I'm not too happy with Discord anymore, some of it because of enshittification, but most of it is me being spoiled by what we already have, and being used to having this huge centralized (as in, can handle lots of different activities without switching to another platform) social tool that does everything I want it to, without me having to think about it at all. Thing is, the alternatives, are not as good as Discord, and it really isn't close enough for me. Matrix would be the one I would love most to succeed, but everytime I used Matrix and Element, it's been a massive struggle, encryption constantly breaks (still), joining rooms still fails, rooms are spread about randomly, either standalone or in the new Spaces, searching for rooms is usually broken except on the large matrix.org instance, recently a bunch of rooms migrated because the event syncing completely failed and the decentralized state was broken. Not to mention the contant CSAM attacks (Does anyone know why this happens so much on Matrix? Is it really only because of the bad moderation and the fact that it auto-downloads the illegal images? Just feels so disappointing...). I really hope we get a really good Discord alternative, maybe even an open-source and decentralized one, if possible. I would really rather not jump onto another proprietary platform.

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spike021 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Discord for sure has way more features and use than IRC.

On the other hand, IRC lets me /ignore a user and my client renders channels without ever showing a hint of that user's existence.

Meanwhile, in Discord both ignoring and blocking a user still shows a "3 ignored messages" or "1 blocked message", etc.

There are always going to be pros and cons to one or the other.

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71bw 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And video calls + screen sharing.

No alternative platform does this.

	▲	su-m4tt 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Teamspeak6 does have screen sharing. I've been using it with my group of friends for a about a month now. Its quite solid in my opinion, uses a peer to peer system with an option to host a central server for video.

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xnorswap 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's also images, videos and message boards.

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juliangmp 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And screen sharing, like actually good screen sharing unlike Microsoft teams That is a huge feature for many people

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forgotusername6 7 hours ago | parent [-]

What's wrong with Microsoft teams screen sharing?

	▲	BLKNSLVR 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The 'Teams' part

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Buttons840 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's also a UI that makes covert (bot) advertising basically useless. Any form of communication that is not one-on-one-real-time has a bad UI and is heavily deprioritized.

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WhereIsTheTruth 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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rcakebread 6 hours ago | parent [-]

First laugh of the morning. Thanks.

	▲	WhereIsTheTruth 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's better to laugh than to get censored, thank god, this is not Iran