My impression—I don’t use it myself and my few experiences touching it have not impressed me—is that the major selling point is that it provided several different forms of communication that gamers wanted to use in a single package. Like, instant messaging, VoIP, video calls, chat, etc.
You could set up all of these individually, but this was free and all-in-one, is managed, and it didn’t require much technical expertise to use. Any user with an account has access to all the components.
And it didn’t cost anything to set up.
If I were going to set up, say, a VoIP server, I’d probably use, oh, Mumble. I’d get my own VPS for it, which would cost something. I’d only have VoIP at the end of that. If I wanted to use say, text-based communication or have some mechanism for sharing files, I’d have to go cobble something together from other components.
Take a look at this absurdly long list of apps. How many have been created at this point and half of them have overlap with a quarter of the list. And yet, from my experience, every single one finds a unique way to fall short of the basic functionality I expect from Discord. And I’m definitely not counting anything available through Nitro.
All of the ones that claim to be full Discord replacements have had incredibly difficult and multi-layered setups that don’t follow any regard for the ability to easily remove if it doesn’t work for you. Their instructions will start with ordering a VPS or will assume that you want to host on the public internet first or do wacky stuff like setup their own reverse proxy without me asking.
Mattermost was almost there. It even has voice and video sharing. But they don’t have voice lobbies. (Not counting the janky plugin) They all just find something that makes my friends not want to use it. Many of these projects are like 2-3 features away from being able to convince my friends to use them but until that day comes, the Dicksword will win.
My impression—I don’t use it myself and my few experiences touching it have not impressed me—is that the major selling point is that it provided several different forms of communication that gamers wanted to use in a single package. Like, instant messaging, VoIP, video calls, chat, etc.
You could set up all of these individually, but this was free and all-in-one, is managed, and it didn’t require much technical expertise to use. Any user with an account has access to all the components.
And it didn’t cost anything to set up.
If I were going to set up, say, a VoIP server, I’d probably use, oh, Mumble. I’d get my own VPS for it, which would cost something. I’d only have VoIP at the end of that. If I wanted to use say, text-based communication or have some mechanism for sharing files, I’d have to go cobble something together from other components.
Take a look at this absurdly long list of apps. How many have been created at this point and half of them have overlap with a quarter of the list. And yet, from my experience, every single one finds a unique way to fall short of the basic functionality I expect from Discord. And I’m definitely not counting anything available through Nitro.
All of the ones that claim to be full Discord replacements have had incredibly difficult and multi-layered setups that don’t follow any regard for the ability to easily remove if it doesn’t work for you. Their instructions will start with ordering a VPS or will assume that you want to host on the public internet first or do wacky stuff like setup their own reverse proxy without me asking.
Mattermost was almost there. It even has voice and video sharing. But they don’t have voice lobbies. (Not counting the janky plugin) They all just find something that makes my friends not want to use it. Many of these projects are like 2-3 features away from being able to convince my friends to use them but until that day comes, the Dicksword will win.