And by “rewrite”, they mean point Claude at a vague spec and hope for the best.
This is the way
I’ll never touch Discord again after their Palantir ID verification bullshit
And Google play started doing it with a do you want to do this pop-up prompt, they don’t say that,it’s very vaguely just verification and looks normal and not new but traffics you to the id verification thing and then make it impossible or very difficult to back out without doing it.
You mean they asked Claude to rewrite their app in Rust like fucking everyone else is doing rn?
The real question is which is the greater evil, AI or electron…
One steals ram you don’t have, one steals ram you already own.
Sam altman interest piqued
Ngl I would rather use an awful Electron app than an AI slop “open source” rust slop.
Well, right now you can use the existing web client in Firefox.
In the future you may not.
It looks like it might be possible to target wasm (at least GPUI can), so hopefully Discord won’t kill their web client.
If I have to use it, I’d much rather run their software in a sandboxed environment like a web browser than install a program that can then do whatever it wants with my user data.
Well, if they kill the web client, they will lose tons of users. I am on the web client right now, since their app is not working - again. This has been a common occurence on multiple machines, with different operating systems… They really should rewrite that shit.
I can’t say they didn’t, but at least they have a track record of doing Rust rewrites from pre-LLM days. As a fan of Rust, I wish it weren’t a company like Discord getting the headlines for doing this type of thing.
https://discord.com/blog/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to-rust
The UI framework is literally vibe coded claudeslop by a guy who didn’t know anything about graphics rendering by his own admission: https://youtu.be/j2goZBL156Q?t=2012
just checked this talk and holy shit, this is exactly how I imagined these kinds of meetings, just a bunch of guys that agree on everything they say and probably feel so smart about it
And yet the app that uses it (zed) is one of the most polished editors out there
My first thought also
Discord requires ID verification. It is dead to me.
Not where I live
I think it is just GDPR. I uninstalled the shit immediately when I saw the prompt. Just like my reddit account.
They do it if they think you’re underage and it’s optional. If you don’t do it, you can’t see nsfw. That’s pretty much it. They also switched away from the sketchy id checker. I’m not saying it’s good, but you can avoid it.
Probably. But every server I was investrd in migrated, so why not ditch that horrible murican company alltogethet…
Understandable. I do think it’s one of the better ones, but the bar is low.
To be fair, I wasn’t an avid user. I had 2 or 3 important communities there that I was active in on and off for a long time. It wasn’t a big sacrifice… reddit feels bigger.
It doesn’t, you just can’t view NSFW channels if you don’t. Which is a problem if that’s something you want to do, but “requires” is a strong word.
Almost every server was nsfw tagged for nudity and profanity when they rolled it out. It was a shitshow. I have no interest. Same goes for Reddit now.
Edit: missing an N in nsfw botched my comment completely
Hmm, I’m at the server limit (in 50 Discords) and none of them were marked in that way. Some of them have NSFW channels that I can’t access anymore, but I don’t care about that.
Maybe I’m in different kinds of communities.
I heard a cousin of a friend saying if you connect via a Moldavia VPS there is no age verification for Reddit (there is, however, for Discord).
how else will I use it
Ideally you won’t, the requirement sucks
You just know it’s basically vibe coded
I’m torn here because I didn’t know what’s worse… Electron shit or AI shit.
On the plus side, the AI shit will at least be a proper application and not a web browser pretending to be an application.
I wonder how long it will take for Vencord to work on it though.
Tough question. I hate electron so much that I might be leaning towards AI shit.
I kinda feel the same way and I don’t know how I feel about feeling that way.
I think I might actually hate Discord more then both, so my hope is that this just makes them leave my communities alone somehow
AI shit is worse cause of the issue with AI being trained on everything?
The flip side is that Electron shit is worse because it’s bloated to high hell, and it’s literally just a browser. It’s completely unnecessary.
vencord is unlikely to continue unless they reverse engineer the new binary, and if they do, guess how they’re probably gonna do that.
They probably will continue by just using the web version of discord which is basically the same as the app.
Electron isn’t a problem when it’s used well, eg VS Code. At least you know what you’re getting.
You have no idea what the code is doing is when some numbnut vibe codes it without a thorough review.
Electron is a problem in the sense that it’s completely unnecessary - just run a website and leave it at that. Who wants to install a bunch of useless chrome instances pretending to be other programs? If you want to make a program, make a program. If you want to make a website, make a website. Simple
The JS in your electronic bloat could be just as vibes as the code in your standalone app, too.
You wouldn’t run a website because a website doesn’t have the capabilities of a desktop app. No one wants to run VS code from their browser. People don’t even want to run outlook or teams from their browser. A desktop app results in far superior UX in most cases for tools that people need to use frequently.
Electron allows you to use existing webdev teams to build apps for basically every platform in existence, which is exactly why companies use it.
Alternative platforms exist but not every company has the right people to build on top of them and it’s difficult to argue against the cost savings of using electron.
It’s not really that complicated. Many of these apps simply wouldn’t exist on Linux or Mac if it weren’t for electron or similar frameworks. Companies might build a website (if it makes sense) and a Windows app and that’s it, depending on the target audience
And yes, you might get vibe bloat in the framework code but that isn’t an argument against electron, since literally any framework could be and probably is infected with AI bloat at this point.
Why wouldn’t people want to run them in a browser? Running an Electron app is literally just running them in a browser, it’s just that the browser is disguised as not a browser.
It’s unnecessary bloat. They’re cross-platform because I hey are literally just webapps masquerading as actual programs.
Has this been proven or is it speculation?
It’s closed source so can’t really prove it
But when a bunch of companies suddenly have native versions of their apps which they haven’t bothered with for 15 years because it’s too hard to maintain you can put 2 and 2 together
Looks like the RAM crunch is starting to affect more than just greenfield projects.
Good. Electron is a bloody memory hog. We don’t need to squander 300Mb of memory just to display 15Kb of text. And then rinse and repeat with multiple other apps like BitWarden Desktop.
You listening, BitWarden? The browser add-ins are fine, the full-fat desktop app needs to lose some serious weight.
This is the creator of BitWarden and we hear you! Because of this we’re getting to release an update and give you what you want. AI, AI everywhere inside BitWarden for your convenience!
I’ve begun switching from jetbrains IDEs to Zed because of the memory usage. I want snappy.
I have 64GB of RAM and I will damn well use it.
Doesn’t matter whatsoever since Discord as a company is total garbage.
The problem is that Matrix doesn’t allow you to opt out of video streams when you’re in a voice chat. And Revolt doesn’t even have video-streaming. Discord’s video-streaming is incredibly robust on average, though I, too, long for a competent, free competitor.
You can’t opt out of video streams when you’re in a voice chat. Is it really that big of a deal though? I mean it’s a problem, but not something to discard Matrix over… Unless of course you have some other complaints you haven’t metioned. Regardless, it depends on what client you use. Matrix being decentralised means you have to choose a client, and it’s up to the client devs to have the features you want implemented.
if your data is limited, yeah it’s a huge deal. voice takes a smalll fraction of the data video does.
Fair. If this is the Element client they’re talking about, I don’t know why they haven’t implemented that yet because they’re the biggest one. If it’s another client though, it’s a problem with the client, not Matrix.
Oh, Matrix can do it in general? Hmm…
Gets in a Discord VC on mobile
One person turns their camera on
5 minutes later
You’ve exceeded your 2GB monthly data allowance. Purchase more data at $10/GB
Yeah, not good to force on video, especially on a mobile client.
Have you tried Kallisti? It’s built on top of Mumble
Oh cool, this is new to me. Seems pretty recent and heavy on AI-assisted code, but the features look awesome. Definitely keeping tabs on this one. Appreciate the share!
Never heard of that, thanks…
Me and some friends have been using fluxer recently and it’s been pretty good, streaming works like discord so you have to click into it. It’s very similar to discord UI wise so it’s been easy to get people to swap over, and it supports self hosting which has been nice. Only complaint is that it’s missing the built in soundboard discord has but that’s a pretty minor thing.
I wish i can use Matrix but my friends force me to use Discord :(
The one good thing that’s come out of the RAMpocalypse is devs finally considering writing their software in more efficient programming languages and systems. Every app that gets away from web browser-based backends is a plus in my book, free memory on my system, and less energy usage to save my electric bill and CPU cycles - plus, it very lets older compys be useful again.
Fuck discord and everyone involved with it.
That’s a lot of people. Do I get to use a condom at least?
Nah, raw dog it.
I’m assuming this is not just about the app being shitty and the face id shit?
It’s probably that. Opinions on lemmy get… extreme.
Forced face ai is extreme, warrants an equal opinion that anyone who works on that shit should line up for the guillotine too
You have an interesting definition of ‘forced’ for an app that you’re free to not use.
Or, seemingly unlike you, I could talk to my friends and enjoy my life, and farm an excuse to hate face id
I’m not the one with a hate boner here 🤷
Spot on.
Sounds pretty good until you realize it’ll be Claude generating all that code.
To be fair they already adopted rust in 2018 so maybe not all of it
I just can’t imagine rust by an LLM, that must be wild to maintain.
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Fun! I’ll get to moderate a Discord server for blind people that blind people can’t use on desktop!
Seriously, anything on GPUI reads as “empty window” to screen readers.
Fun! I’ll get to moderate a Discord server for blind people that blind people can’t use on desktop!
How would a rewrite cause this to happen? Is there something about Rust frameworks for the desktop that exclude accessibility features?
I’ve been working primarily with C#, but none of their frameworks exclude accessibility features… would be shocked AF if Rust frameworks just left that all out.
I checked the gpui crate and it has an accessibility module that uses AccessKit, but I can’t say if it actually works.
Yeah, but this is Rust, not some single-dev pet project. You would expect a fully fleshed out framework to have accessibility features built in as first-class features, not some randomly bolted-on afterthought.
this is Rust, not some single-dev pet project
The programming language has absolutely nothing to do with the size or maturity of a GUI library using it.
Without knowing what framework is in use its hard to say. Hell electron had accessibilty issues for a while
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Well that sucks. Do you know if Tauri is any better in that regard?
Unrelated to Rust, I assume Qt6 has the expected accessibility features wired?
How the fuck is anyone still using Discord.
Because not everyone has the know how or resources to self host an alternative that only a small amount of people are going to use.
Also, trying to move an entire friend group to a different platform is hard, especially when they are part of other friend groups that are also using discord.
Yeah I get it. Not everyone is as ideological (not a putdown). I just left all those groups. They know how to reach me when they want to chat.
I don’t know your situation, and more just for the sake of a debate, but doesn’t that just silo you or put you in a bubble?
PS thanks for asking! This is my favourite rant atm
Sure I guess—moreso than if I went everywhere. But I’m still in other groups and like I’ll meet with my bookclub, my local nerd friend group, LAN parties, Doom modding projects, etc—I just won’t join their chats.
Most socialising happens outside of Discord, so I feel like I’m just excluding myself from one of the bubbles by eschewing it.
It’s the same thing with reddit, facebook, Instagram, tiktok, tumblr, substack, truth social, lemmyml, bluesky, yt, twiter, that mall that’s owned by the rich fuck you hate, etc etc etc, and on and on. Maybe you’re just on all of them, but imo it’s reasonable to curate your social bubbles around what spaces you want to contribute to and partake in. It’s not like there aren’t enough to choose from.
Anyway, I’ve managed to pull a few people away, or get some people to become dual users. Every person that isn’t only reachable except in the corporate playgrounds lessens the network effects that much more.
I just finished setting up my matrix homeserver and got my friends to use Sable. So. Yeah, fuck discord and their AI “age estimation,” their promises of “we don’t store ids” before leaking tens of thousands of them, and their “our trusted partners are the best” and it’s literally Palantir in a trench coat.
Fuck all of that. AND they’re enshittifying with all the quests and ads. Discord has some real problems but violating everyone’s privacy is not the solution. Hire more people, actually investigate, and listen to the community. Don’t be a Roblox.
i’ll never understand how discord became the standard for gamers. Back in the day we used to use Teamspeak + IRC and that was great. Decentralised, low latency, etc. I still use teamspeak occasionally. Still works great. The discord app was just a mess from the very beginning. Resource hogging electron nightmare. Still everybody thought it was great. And now all sorts of communites, even open source and maker communities are on there. Makes 0 sense to me.
Because discord made their app user friendly for the masses and team speak was slow to adapt.
Kinda says something that team speak now looks a lot like discord.
Yeah I hated it from the word go. It was always the poorest option. Everything about its UX makes me cringe. Even fucking slack by now Salesforce is somehow better.
Every moment I deigned to use Discord I felt like there was friction between me and the people on the other end of the application. Like typing while wearing gloves and getting interrupted every time I wanted to do anything.
Their client could be pure assembly, it’s to little, to late.
Everyone get on Fluxer already.
Waiting for federation before I’m able to hop over I don’t want my friends first experience to be on my self hosted server where they can’t interact with anyone else. But yeah fluxer will be great
Federation? In Fluxer? I’ve missed something.
https://fluxer.com/help/federation Check this out
Ah, cool! Thank you! 🙏 Very neat. Wonder if Stout can do that. Seems like it can’t from my initial, quick investigation.
I joined fluxer some months ago but the amount of communities seems very little.
🤷♂️ I just made my own server and my friends joined that, then we talk while we play Rocket League. Just like we did on Discord.
I dunno why you need to join so many communities on Fluxer?
I never said I needed to join so many communities but the list of communities is small. For example, I have a huge interest in certain types of music and I like to find out about bands and artists I may have never heard of, so its nice to join a community of people from around the country/world. Also, getting people you know to switch to something different or more privacy respecting isn’t always the easiest. Believe me, I’ve tried.
You… use Discord for this stuff? Communities around interests? I wouldn’t have thought to use it for that. I only use it to comm with my buddies while we play games. 🤷♂️
getting people you know to switch to something different or more privacy respecting isn’t always the easiest. Believe me, I’ve tried.
I feel you. I just told my bros I’m not using Discord, so if they want to talk it’s either Steam voice chat or Fluxer. Thankfully they jumped on board. (Very difficult to play Rocket League well at higher levels without voice comms.)
Well, I don’t use discord, but on some platforms yeah, music, gaming/modding, 3d printing, just to name a few. I mean, I think a big purpose of a lot of those types of platforms are for communities around interests. But no Discord.
I think Fluxer works best as a functionally equivalent alternative to Discord, specifically. Not as an alternative to social media revolving around interests and communities. 😁
Do you feel a difference in voice delay from discord to fluxer? We have so many double commits because discord delay is so high.
Ah, no not that many double commits at our level mostly due to game sense, and we’ve been playing together for close to ten years now. But I haven’t experienced any noticeable delay in neither Discord, nor Fluxer. So, I might not be the best person to ask. Perhaps I’ve been lucky. Steam voice chat had quite a latency, however, IME.
wtf are you talking about. fluxer.lemmy.world returns nothing.
Fluxer Platform AB (Swedish private limited company: 559537-3993)
Made in SwedenNeat, so I am switching from a California based LLC, to a Swedish LLC. How decentralizing!
Maybe I’m confused here but if you’re seriously questioning whether you’d benefit from a smaller, Swedish based service over an American tech giant (unsure if this term applies to Discord in all honesty) - for starters you have the Swedish laws/consumer rights, GDPR. This company’s whole idea also seems to resolve around being ‘basically like Discord’ - but without all the aggressive data collection, fingerprinting users, storing messages, and profiting from users data. I also took a quick look at the ToS and PP and it seems pretty solid what their ideals seems to be, or what they want to advertise themselves as. But hey, I bet using a US tech giant company with its entire business model focused on making a profit from user data in the year 2026 is just as good for data privacy respecting laws and regulations as any other!
Scroll back up the 🧵, I am anti capitalist.
Does that mean you selfhost every service you use unless it’s run by a non-profit, or what?
Is your previous point then that this is a private company, rather than FOSS?
Do whatever you want, bro. 😄 I’m proud of my guys at Fluxer, fighting the ugly Discord.
Matter of fact imma uninstall Discord when I get back home in a couple of hours.
Fluxer has been everything I need it to be in order to switch. Just saying. And what I use it for is basically just voice chat while gaming. No complaints thus far. Do with that what you will.
👌 sweed
Everyobody that read this thread: Fluxer’s AI slop.
- https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer/issues/435
- https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer/blob/main/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md#authorship
- https://web.archive.org/web/20260213205023/https://blog.fluxer.app/how-i-built-fluxer-a-discord-like-chat-app/
- https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/ai-free-foss-alternatives#messaging-clients
https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer/blob/main/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md#authorship
If you read that carefully, you will see:
An LLM may assist a contributor privately with learning, investigation, planning and review. It MUST NOT author any part of a submission.
Emphasis added by me (in bold, not capitalization).
I think they have a pretty sound policy at this point?
Yeah, and that’s still slop.
No AI use is acceptable.
https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/ai-free-foss-alternatives/src/branch/main/why_not_llms.md
No policy is good unless it’s a full stop one.
bro how are you gonna enforce that? “Oh you must have never used an LLM to learn, investigate or try it!!!” is just silly, as long as no AI is used for the actual code that is fine
It MUST NOT author any part of a submission.
Yeah, and that’s still slop.
😂👍 I don’t think we’ll see eye to eye here. gg, have a good day.
Fluxer’s not libre.
Also wants you to either pay for stuff that should be free as they’re basic or even cheap features, or to self host.
Stoat or Matrix with Cinny or Sable Next are best.
Fluxer is released under the GNU Affero General Public License. 🤷♂️
I’m going with Fluxer for the time being as that was the easiest setup as far as I could tell — on par with Discord. Just sign up, create a server, connect to voice. Blam-o. No payment necessary for what I’m using it for. Golden, simple, clean, focused UI.
I’m not sure which features you call basic which are not free of charge, but voice, chat, and screen sharing are all free last I checked.
They can use whatever license they want, but if they trap their users like that (not everyone can pay, not everyone can self-host), then they’re not truly Libre, at most, they would only be so in words, or just lip service, if at all.
About the features, there are ridiculously low character limits, also ridiculously low filesize limits. The part of emojis, stickers and banners is not that important, although the fact that both Stoat and Matrix lets you do these for free (and they have pretty high size and character limits without charging you for that) is just better. Stoat’s not hard at all, and with Matrix, just point it to unredacted.org and that’s all, you can create a community (that’s the word for “server” in both Stoat and Matrix [along with Space here, though]) pretty easily.
Investigated file size limits, and my conclusion is that stoat has a 20 MB file size limit, and fluxer’s is 25 MB. 🤷♂️ I don’t know about character limits, and I don’t need to know because I never post long messages because I don’t treat this app as a bulletin board.
You seem pretty set though, so enjoy your freedom to choose whichever platform you like, that is subjectively better for you. 🙂
Just found out Fluxer intends to add federation soon as well, which seems like a one-up on other platforms? I don’t think Stout has that unless I’m misunderstanding what Stout is built on.
unredacted.org lets me send up to 250 MB.
As for the character limits, for me and most people they’re important because we’re not using that only for voice chat and little gaming messages, we’re using them mostly for structured projects, creative stuff, or even simply joining communities of our interest (I’m full on music production, so I’ll surely look for one community that gives me larger convos about that).
PS: Also, they’re AI slop.
- https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/ai-free-foss-alternatives#messaging-clients
- https://web.archive.org/web/20260213205023/https://blog.fluxer.app/how-i-built-fluxer-a-discord-like-chat-app/
- https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer/blob/main/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md#authorship
- https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer/issues/435
Okay, then you are using that platform in a way which I don’t think is in scope for Fluxer. So that’s a subjective requirement and you’re better off with what you’re using, of course.
Also, they’re AI slop.
Permissive AI policy
A policy, written or otherwise implied by maintainers’ actions/statements, that permits the use of AI/LLMs in a way where LLM output is added into the project.
Fluxer doesn’t allow LLM code output whatsoever, if you actually read their policy. They are not slop.
The first link there to a blog post or something detailing how he built Fluxer and the story etc, I don’t see any references to LLMs being used. I skimmed the whole page. I might’ve missed something, but I suspect they are merely suggesting/implying that because it was just one guy that it must’ve been AI output?
Great, but the client is not why Discord sucks.
