Discord should be avoided as a communications platform. I don't see a single point that makes me want to use it.
It has no customization or designing flexibility, you are forced to stick to one design unless you pay for a stupeid & an expensive subscription. Otherwise you need to use potentially unsafe third party tools for it and even those go against Discord's ToS.
It is a non-private, non-secure and overtly commercialized product that should be put in the bin. But thanks to the virtual monopoly in creating a social platform (also thanks to the tech-illiterate influencers for promoting it) for more than just "Chatting for gamers", as it was originally intended for. Discord in its current state is nothing more than just a commercial market where you are the commodity. Its not a social platform.
I don't want to give out my data and message history for some company to sell to be able to discuss about your project on GitHub, or even be able to communicate with you.
The client is garbage as well unless you own a super expensive rig.
I abandoned Discord completely more than half an year ago with the vow of never registering again. I completely shifted my comms to Matrix & Signal. I have not been more at peace since.
If you manage a public project you wish for people to interact with. I request you to at least keep a mirror/bridge on XMPP, Matrix or even Revolt. Please choose something open source, private and secure for the sake of other people.
This is not at all stretching it. Discord's client is very poorly optimized and bloated and it is known since a long time. I could never run it on my hardware with a comfortable experience. Even some of my friends would ask me to look for and provide them older versions of the app because each update would make it laggier for them to use. I don't live in a First or Second world country with a good paying job. Most electronics are imported here and cost a lot.
The official matrix.org server is completely stripped down and removes a lot of features, and Element as a client is nowhere near as good as anything else.
Element X (with the sliding sync support) does fix the massive issue of absolutely horrifically slow syncing.
None of Matrix comes anywhere near the levels of usability Discord has and nor does Element, Discord's server-chat model is unbeatable in this aspect.
accessibility is usually pretty horrendous on most matrix clients, none i could find have full, proper reduced motion support, which i need to properly use pretty much any piece of software. discord is far from perfect in this regard, and getting worse and worse, but still miles ahead of most chat apps i've tried, especially proprietary ones. I have barely used revolt, and in my memory it's far worse than discord, and i have yet to figure out how xmpp works...
none of my friends are on it. while i could convince some to move, here discord is already a quite "niche" chat service, and as a student, i'm more or less required to be on any chat service whatever group project i need to do is organised. same with friend groups, i'm usually not a "group leader", and join in friend groups that already exist, so it's much harder to insist on moving anyone over to a new thing no one but me has ever used before
ux isn't great. it's improving, but i've had quite a few "key exchange" issues with matrix especially... Also, i found most clients quite messy, but that's more to personal taste!
I use discord because my two friends use it when we talk every once in a while and its the tool they know and are comfortable with. They don't live at their computers and do not bother. I don't use it other than that.
I'm gonna look into matrix though. If no one adopts an alternative, it will never be standard. And matrix is a cool name.
I can send messages, images, files, links, it supports youtube miniplayer for links, and I can start audio calls all in a singular app, and I can control which members of a channel see those messages or access that call very simply with roles. They also store that message history for years and years, idk what the limit is for channels but for DMs I can scroll back at least 5 years no problem. This works both on Desktop and Smartphones. I don't know of any other programs or apps that do all of that, please correct me if I'm wrong.
Well, it's the standard now. I don't like it either because of their gratuitous data storage, but what other choice do I have? All my friends and communities use it.
I use theatre mode so I don't care about that, but I remember back when you could customize YT Channel background art and set colors and transparency values, cool times.
One of my favorite things about discord was the fact that your experience was similar on both mobile and desktop. I honestly thought it was fantastic from a UX perspective since your knowledge of the app transferred easily between platforms. The new update destroys that and tosses out a large amount of shared knowledge.
Another, more important, complaint is the changes to the colors/themes makes the accessibility significantly worse no matter what theme you use for anyone with eye issues. They changed the light mode font to gray???? They reduced the contrast on the other modes significantly making it genuinely difficult to read text on a MESSAGING APP.
To me this whole thing, and the earlier username changes, feel like changing for the sake of changing rather than actually improving anything. This is just for the shareholders and not because literally anyone asked for it.
Also why is dms it's own tab I really liked that they were listed next to the servers!
Mobile apps aren't supposed to work like desktop ones tho.
text is already impossible to read for me due to the font. idk every time i try to switch to the new react native version i go back because text takes me like 4-6 attempts to read.
Didn't even know it changed until I saw this thread. Opened it up, saw that chats and servers are sensibly separated and on the bottom now where they're easy to reach with a thumb. Also way easier to reply to messages now that the swipe doesn't show who's online (to see who's online, tap the channel name at the top of the screen).
Seriously, chats and servers previously being as far away from the thumb as possible was a terrible design. The new one is much cleaner and simpler imo
I really don't like this update. Dark mode is now a different, darker color which I'm not too fond of. My muscle memory is completely useless. Viewing server members is now all the way up at the top instead of being conveniently behind a swipe. Swiping between tabs is weird (it's not really swiping between tabs, it's more like the back button Android already has, so it's redundant). The activities menu at the top is a waste of space. The search function is harder to use now, you have to click a little button at the top to filter your search results. Chat pins also don't show image, links, or file previews now. Plus, Discord Mobile and desktop shared a similar user experience, so anyone could just pick up from the desktop version and be able to figure it out very quickly, now you can't do that anymore. So much functionality and convenience just completely gone now. This might be the worst update I've ever seen for a messaging app, and it's not even close.
Same it's different, but it's not a bad different. And it's not on the level of reddit where they basically strong armed third-party with cost to quit them from making apps.
A big big problem is accessibility. The new themes are all worse for the eyes than the previous ones and there's been complaints of vision issues. My fiancé had to install a third party discord client because the actual discord one makes their head spin on every theme.
Also on a more personal note, I really hate that the dms are separated from the servers. My favorite aspect of discord is that knowledge transfers between platforms. It feels like I'm using discord and not discord mobile and then also discord desktop. Now it's all fucky and it took me like 5 minutes to figure out how to even see who was in the server (it's in the top left, the area furthest from the average person's reach).
It's also apparently really buggy and noticeably slower. Earlier I sent a pic into a server and it just silently sent to my most recent DM instead. After a search I found I'm not the only one that had.this happen either.
My biggest problem is that searches don't fucking work anymore. It now defaults to searching the channel you're in, but what if I'm look for a particular message and I don't know what channel it's in? Then there's also searching PMs is so much more complicated now and doesn't even show you who sent the message in the results.
All patches should be open source / freely to inspect afaik, I think the official installation process even involves patching an official Discord .apk file locally
You'll have to use the browser version of Discord to grab your unique Token since they've disabled the inspector console on the application and also removed the ability to turn it back on in the ini file. Don't ever share it with anybody, either.
If you delete your account then you won't have access to your chat history. Because the account will be gone. The account tied to all of the messages. And with which you accessed servers. Because you can't log in to it. Because it's gone. Because you deleted it.
The channel switcher, one of my most frequently used features, is now hidden away on top of the channel list instead of a prominent place in the middle of the bottom bar of the swipe-right menu. Going from a DM conversation to a specific channel, instead of "swipe right, tap channel switcher" (so I can type 3 letters of the channel name and switch to it) became "swipe left, tap 'servers' twice, tap the search box". I like most of the other changes, but this really irks me and makes my mobile discording much less efficient :(