About map/area: Some websites still use them, and really well too. The Team Fortress 2 website[0] uses them with the images at the top of the page to link each of the characters' description pages.
I find Discord to be the worst UX for a chat app I can imagine. And nothing is open source so what few client alternatives there are live in mortal danger of having their API hacks closed.
No replies? Why after all this time are there still no replies? Default notification settings are still to flood you every time you add a "server". Attachment limits are tiny. And can I just say as a sysadmin calling your chat rooms "servers" is a huge slap in the face to my profession?
The welcome messages are infantile and spammy. Who knows about any privacy at all on the platform. I could go on and on and on and on.
Grown with IRC, Slack replies are awful and so awkward to use. Should I check "Also send reply to #channel?" or not? I check it 50% of the time and I still don't know if I should.
It depends on your channel’s culture, but generally you check the box when you want to draw some of the general channel population into the conversation or just want them to see your reply.
If you want specific others to participate in your thread, you just @ them in your reply. No need to send to channel.
Slack only has an embedded thread feature, not a reply feature.
Stackexchange chat has a proper reply feature. You can reply to a message in the same channel. Your message still goes on the bottom of the current channel, but it pings(highlights) the user and contains a link icon to the original message. Hovering on a reply also highlights the message it responds to (if it's on the screen). This is mainly used when responding to older messages, where it otherwise wouldn't be easy to see what you're responding to.
I agree, Slack replies are awful. The only chat reply feature I've ever enjoyed was Flowdock's. It doesn't create threads it just connects replies with colors. It's great.
Myself, I would not go that far but the UI seems to have fallen a bit into Apple's "discoverability" trap -- just go ahead and touch every square centimeter of application surface to see if anything will happen.
I agree that that the loading messages are silly, and that could be forgiven, but for the fact that when Discord has trouble updating (which happens when Discord feels like it, not you), you just keep seeing them happen over and over, with no sense of progress or ability to debug.
Discord isn't too bad in that sense.
Other critiques about their administration and overall culture aggravate the UI issues in a way that has a similar non-serious tone. It's Bastard Operator From Hell run through I Can Haz Cheeseburger; I have witnessed people banned on the basis of frivolous complaints with messaging that has a tone of "lolz ur acct bann't" that has left some of the Discord servers I am on without some solid admins until things magically straighten out with the same "guess how this works on the inside" attitude.
It's funny because all over the Discord documentation, the "servers" are referred to as "guilds". I'm fairly certain this was the intent in the beginning. But because gamers are used to joining a server to play a game, it became synonymous.
Funny. Discord is the one line I will refuse to cross on yielding my data and metadata. They _are_ downright dangerous. Their CEO's previous project, OpenFeint, already had a privacy scandal lawsuit.
Are you the original author of the article? The article itself seems to be experiencing issues right now, but from what I recall, the author mentions "extensible roles" and "good free tier" as the features that got him to use Discord. I don't consider these features crucial enough to use non-Free Software. If you are not the original author and have other features in mind, please explain which features of Discord are "so incredibly good".
I'm not the author, just agree with the basic argument of the article, if maybe not every detail in it.
The thing is just the incredible ease of use. The easy with which you can join a server and then drop into any text or voice chat you feel like.
There are probably programms that technically replicate the feature set, but I haven't used anything that feels as effortless as discord does. And I can't even pinpoint why exactly that is.
What's the best Free alternative? Since WebRTC is pretty powerful & cross platform, is there a really good WebRTC text + audio chat system that matches the core functionality of Discord?
I would say mattermost and/or mumble. Each has it's strengths and weaknesses, and neither completely fills the discord role, but I think as soon as mattermost has a murmur integration it will be the place to be. Also irc is totally underrated.
I've been on IRC more or less 24/7 since 1996 and love it, and started using Mumble in 2005 or 6.
While I think they're both great, neither of them are an alternative to Discord.
Getting in? One click on email/URL and then sign up. Join a channel? One click. Voice chat? One click. Stream your game? One click. Seamlessly switch to mobile app? Done. I have yet to meet a user that can't get into it with just an invite link. It's amazingly user friendly.
And if I want to, I can granularly create roles for users and administrators of arbitrary levels and access rights.
I share the privacy concerns, and that I can't grep any logs easily (though with voice chat that's harder regardless), but simply from a user perspective if it wasn't for the network effect of my IRC communities, and Messenger groups, I could happily just use Discord tomorrow.
I strongly dislike that it's closed source and partly Chinese owned, but I've been using Messenger to reach people I couldn't on IRC for years already, and that experience is much worse, with no privacy gain.
Credit where credit is due, they knocked it out of the park in most aspects.
For anyone without the wherewithal to deploy their own Matrix server and without a friend who has one, it looks like there's nothing like the (generous) Discord free tier. Looking at the recommended hosting provider on Riot.im's website:
I should also say that Matrix has a lot of other really nice aspects to it that give Discord and friends a run for their money:
- Open source. Self-explanatory.
- Federated. Sure, you can probably redundant-ify your IRC server with Apache Something and Amazon AWS/ Cloudflare whatever if you really wanted to, but I regularly see Matrix rooms with 10+ addresses because the protocol's designed around that redundancy, not the other way around. And of course with Discord none of this even applies...good luck if Intern Greg elbows the Big Red Button, or they pull a yahoo groups/google+/etc.
- The protocol leaves a lot of room for experimentation that Discord isn't nearly open enough for. [1][2][3]
- There's bridges to other discord, irc, and dozens of other platforms, sidestepping the adoption problem (note that there's been even more added since this graphic was made). [4]
They aren't exactly languishing in obscurity either: the government of France is one of their userbases [5]. Yeah, I'd say Discord-style VC would be nice, but the lack if it isn't exactly holding them back.
Oh, sorry, I didn't know Discord gives people their own exclusive servers to host their rooms on for free. I assumed you just create new rooms on their main server, in which case it would be comparable to signing up to the matrix.org homeserver for free and create as many rooms there and invite as many users to those rooms as you want.
A closer equivalent would be riot.im's servers, which are free in the same way as Discord/IRC's public rooms are. If you wanted custom integrations or the like you'd have to pay out for it, but the free option's still there. You can find a decent number of communities there--#GnuLinuxLovers comes to mind.
That's only if you want your own server. If you just want a room for you and your friends, you can use the primary instance for free (you can make private rooms too, if that takes your fancy).
The only thing this doesn't let you do is install bridges to other services (such as Discord). For that you'll need your own server.
I'm not a fan of paying per user, but the usage is only counted towards the billing when they stick around for two days. That makes it a better deal than if you were charged per invite.
I do not use Discord but I'm under the impression that it has voice channels like Mumble and Teamspeak whereas Matrix does not (yet) have them. This is a big deal-breaker for many teams and I'm definitely waiting until it has that feature before I deploy my own server.
For a chat-only replacement, it's definitely perfect.
Voice chat is apparently harder to implement, but it's still possible to do right now with Jitsi [1]. And even without it, Matrix supports an 'opt-in' style of voice channel that should work fine with smaller groups.
what's surprising about discord's privacy policy? it seems pretty straightforward.
we can push open source alternatives all you want but the truth is that these alternatives don't do a good enough job with the most valuable part of social networks: building the network. yes, word of mouth is a big part of growth, but the developers also need to put in work. discord didn't simply blow up because early adopters told their friends and so on, as much as we want to think that to be the case.
Honestly I don't think that's the reason at all i've never seen anything push by discord or it's developers that actually worked and affected me or people I know.
No advertising until it reached critical mass. No invite incentive programs that made people get it going (despite apparently there being that one month free nitro thing most people don't know off)
Most people came because a)others were there and had chosen it as a platform. b) It's just really nice in every way (other than the bottomline control an privacy part) c) There's no competitors that completely match it's functionality and profit model or if they tried to get close they came too late.
You have your voice chats, video chat and of course text chats. No trouble hosting servers. Easily and extensively customisable modding, structure, permissions, etc. Pins, pings, etc Almost all functionality one might need is there and if it isn't there's bots for it.
Sharing and inviting is easy. No time limit on how long stuff is saved or needing to be online to see messages.
Linked images, articles, videos what have you show up nicely. Theming is consistent. It works on every OS (except maybe bsd idk) and the browsers consistently so you won't have one group being left out and crusading against it.
Everything is in a single place unlike the various irc networks.
Want to show a pic you took? a webm? No need to host it somewhere else first.
If there was an open source alternative that got close hell yes of course I'd use it. I'd consider it a big bonus that i'd drop a bit of functionality for. But as it stands there's no comparable private alternatives either.
yes as i said, word of mouth is an important part of growth. but word of mouth doesn't just happen out of nowhere. discord knows their market, did their research, and did tons of work behind the scenes in marketing, partnerships, developing features that would add growth, etc. you see discord literally everywhere at events, other social media platforms, involved in communities.
where do you see this kind of effort from open source alternatives? i believe this is the biggest issue with the "alternatives". my perception is that they think they built an amazing product and that people should just start using it. but that's not how that works.
No mention of Smalltalk in the comments? The "codebase" that is managed by ucm sounds very similar to Smalltalk images. I am personally delighted about this.
It started out so great, but at the end I was left with the impression that someone was just trying to shoehorn features into C with quirkier syntax than C++. That type declaration syntax will probably haunt me in my sleep.
Here I must praise KiCad. It is one of the best pieces of FOSS software out there. It beats almost all other (commercial or non-commercial) software in PCB design, hands down.
> It beats almost all other (commercial or non-commercial) software in PCB design, hands down.
You need to get out more often. Look, I am a KiCAD supporter, too. But KiCAD is repeating the mistakes of commercial ECAD systems of the 1980’s. Am I glad it exists? Surely. But set your sights higher. KiCAD has much room for improvement.
This is entirely subjective, but I think the UI is needlessly unintuitive (but okay compared to other EDA tools), and the parts management seems not well thought out IMO. A similar feeling that e.g. LTSpice gives me: you can get into it, but parts feel arbitrary and other parts feel hacky, and ultimately you never really enjoy it.
I made quite a few working PCBs with that one already. Downsides are:
- the library is not that big yet (but adding parts is really easy, you can even use inheritance etc)
- won’t run on any old machine because of the OpenGL-version
- if you are not using windows you need to compile yourself
One of the things I really like besides the UI/UX (one button hotkeys!) is the library concept called “pool”, where every part is made up of modular pieces, which makes things reusable and consistent. If you’d like to change the resistor symbol for all resistors you just have to edit in one place, if you feel like making a opamp with eight channels, just duplicate the quad one and add four more opamp units. Their concept takes a moment to sink in, but is incredible flexible and is one of these “why didn’t we do it like that from the start”-ideas.
Handling of bus rippers, and hierarchical nets as they expand through topological hierarchy. Especially in regard to the flexibility of naming ripped sub-nets.
Restrictive topological hierarchy.
Lack of separation between attributes files and topology files. Inability to mate a single topology file with multiple different attribute files for different circumstances.
There are also features like buried components and complicated material stack-ups that commercial tools handle, but I really can't fault an open-source tool for not including things that are expensive to validate.
General complaints:
UI is cranky and not intuitive, especially w.r.t. part libraries.
Obtuse and restrictive footprint specifications. The sad thing here is that KiCAD went through a gut-and-redesign of the footprint specification format, and seemed to willfully ignore the RS-274X specification and willfully ignored the hard lessons that led us to the methodology of using RS-274X macros to define footprints. If I can write a trivial RS-274X aperture macro for my footprint, I should be able to specify that in a footprint and have it come out correctly in the Gerbers. HELLOOOO!!! Please read up on years-old industry best-practices before "improving" your system. (Admittedly, I haven't read the KiCAD footprint spec documents lately, maybe they have evolved.)
In the category of just plain broken:
I don't use KiCAD a whole lot, but not too long ago a client asked for design file deliverables in KiCAD format. I was annoyed that my Rev A boards came back with trivial issues that the design rule checker completely missed. Sorry, that is one piece that needs to be pretty damn solid for me to take the tool seriously. (I have also use GEDA and have plenty of complaints about it, also, but at least the PCB DRC has never led me astray.)
Some of the most annoying things for me in KiCAD are (or were, maybe some of them got fixed):
* Projects not standalone / portable across computers, which makes collaborating hard.
* Parts library management is not intuitive. Lots of confusing UI around library paths for example.
* Footprint assignment should be handled automatically or at least provide sensible suggestions instead of every footprint with the same amount of pads.
But there are two promising alternatives around: Horizon EDA, which the sibling post already mentioned, and LibrePCB (https://librepcb.org).
I personally only used LibrePCB for some project and it worked quite well, apart from some missing features, like missing design rule check. But the upcoming 0.1.3 release adds quite some of them.
It's sure the best thing for hobby users today. It firmly beats probably all of the sub $1000 "pro-sumer" or "maker" tools like eagle.
But as much as I like it, it's still years if not decades away from catching up to the big industry tools like Altium, Cadence, Mentor. They have $$$$$/seat pricing, but if you need them, you need them.
Your application domain is probably targeting a market of 10 customers you can obscenely overcharge, like a mainframe manufacturer circa 1976. There is nothing special about The area you work in that renders it immune to economic forces, if it's worth anything to society as a whole. The directional vector of technology encompassing a wider consumer market heads towards lower cost and openness, inevitably.
Same, compared to some other free alternatives (for example CircuitMaker) it's a complete blessing. I think I haven't seen a worse piece of software then CircuitMaker.
[0]: https://teamfortress.com/