Microsoft reportedly have Discord in their sights to acquire

I'm still waiting and hoping someone with the dev skills I don't have figures out how to get persistent hop in/out voice channels on Matrix + Element, global hotkeys for push-to-talk / mute, etc. so it can cover and replace Discord's use case without splitting people up between the text chat 'community' in one app and voice via Mumble in another. Plus, connecting to and lurking in several different Mumble servers at once (not necessarily joining a voice chat) is.. not easy?

It's been something heavily discussed on the Element (formerly Riot) issue tracker since something like 2016 or 2017 I think, but their focus is on emulating/replacing Slack, so it doesn't get traction in favour of more business-focused features, since they're paying the bills for them.

Another account to delete... What's next? Will they buy my country too?

Haven't they still yet?

Well, time to look for alternatives.

BTW. I'm surprised so few projects decided to move away from Github...

So few developers moved away from Github because you have to be where the people are. Why cut yourself off from such a large developer community?

It will be the same with Discord, people will huff and puff but in the end they will stay where the users are

You may be right, although it's an odd thing for a guy who calls himself "Liberty" to say.

Never understands why Discord is popular and certainly never will with this news.

Another account to delete... What's next? Will they buy my country too?

Not MS. But, T--c--t proxies is being extremely aggressive to conquer on my country's digital market with it's buying power. So far, they're on right track to succeed, but with lots of losses and sometimes revenue is a joke when compared to supposedly it's market valuation. Still, don't worry, Big Papa will personally underwrite it.

Neat, hadn't heard of that one. One advantage Tox has over it though is decentralization and possibly anonymity. You don't have to use anyone's specific server, i.e. everyone is a server since it's purely p2p.

Once the next major release of toxcore is out, group chats will have file sharing, so it will be more Element-like in that regard. But cool that there seem to be some other secure options out there. ^n.n^

Yeah, taking a real quick look at that, it reminds me that I've also played around with Jami in the past (previously GNU Ring), but honestly the thing I like about Matrix is that it is a bit more persisent/organized in that you can administer a server, moderate it, etc. - I'm thinking more for organizing a gaming guild, or a convention... something that blurs the lines between business-focused Slack/Teams, but with better voice UI.

Just doing ad-hoc group chats, yeah - that's got a few more options, thankfully.

They've been very 'hungry' lately. If you can't innovate yourself, just take over those who are (in general), and also remove competitors. It's Microsoft 101. (and many others in fairness, like Google and Facebook).

it's capitalism 101. Be the shark that eats / hoards (acquires) all the growing smaller fish until there is no other fish left in the ocean but just one giant shark, eventually and inevitably a crisis occurs, there is not enough food for the rest of the fish to eat. The shark gets to swim to the government boat and ask for a free food bail out. whilst all the everyday mino fish get nothing when they have nothing left to eat because the big shark consolidated and consumed it all and there is nowhere else to find food (work)

the little fish are told to pull themselves up by their boot straps but they don't even wear shoes.

Another account to delete... What's next? Will they buy my country too?

They most probably already bought some influence.

While I'm in no way trusting Microsoft on what they would try to do with regard to privacy. I'm not actually sure I would trust Discord itself any more than that as it is now. There is a reason why I only run this thing in complete isolation. It doesn't even have access to snoop on my running processes. And otherwise I regard it as a public discussion forum.

The lack of isolation and its built-in process snooping is one of the key reasons I gave up on the fat-client experience. But while I'm sure they'd love to snoop processes on non-Windows machines, I suspect that this move is more to get rid of competition from Teams. And my god Teams is so bad, this is the only way it'll succeed (speaking as an 8 hours a day Teams user at my work).

They tried to buy Slack before. I wonder if they'll try again?

Funny, I do the same thing with Teams (run it in a browser), not that I know if it snoops other processes, but because the Electron application is such garbage. In a browser with a styles plugin that lets me make it less garbage. I mean it still stinks, just like throwing febreze on on a pile of rotting vegetables.

#MumbleMasterRace

I refused to touch Discord before this and would not see this as a reason to start.

Neat, hadn't heard of that one. One advantage Tox has over it though is decentralization and possibly anonymity. You don't have to use anyone's specific server, i.e. everyone is a server since it's purely p2p.

Once the next major release of toxcore is out, group chats will have file sharing, so it will be more Element-like in that regard. But cool that there seem to be some other secure options out there. ^n.n^

Yeah, taking a real quick look at that, it reminds me that I've also played around with Jami in the past (previously GNU Ring), but honestly the thing I like about Matrix is that it is a bit more persisent/organized in that you can administer a server, moderate it, etc. - I'm thinking more for organizing a gaming guild, or a convention... something that blurs the lines between business-focused Slack/Teams, but with better voice UI.

Just doing ad-hoc group chats, yeah - that's got a few more options, thankfully.

Ah okie, yep can't have persistence without storage, and Tox doesn't have p2p storage implemented, most likely intentionally since anonymity, privacy, and security is the goal. You also can't have users directly joining a group chat and instead they have to have one of the users of the group add them to their private contact list first. Sounds like Element might be better in that case for organizing furmeets, furry cons, etc then.

Avatar matches.

I refused to touch Discord before this and would not see this as a reason to start.

I stayed away from it for a long time as well... and then more and more of the projects I hang out around have decided to start using it (like Foundry VTT, AtariVCS, GURPS, etc). That's the only reason I ever created an account. But much like most other chat systems, I make up info. :P

Discord can go to hell, if you ask me.

I hoped for a worse name than Microsoft, but seems to be all we get. I hope they fuck it up gloriously and people mass-migrate to things like discourse and matrix.

Yes, probably not every kid and their dog can create their own servers then, but there is no free lunch anyway, right.

Neat, hadn't heard of that one. One advantage Tox has over it though is decentralization and possibly anonymity. You don't have to use anyone's specific server, i.e. everyone is a server since it's purely p2p.

Once the next major release of toxcore is out, group chats will have file sharing, so it will be more Element-like in that regard. But cool that there seem to be some other secure options out there. ^n.n^

Yeah, taking a real quick look at that, it reminds me that I've also played around with Jami in the past (previously GNU Ring), but honestly the thing I like about Matrix is that it is a bit more persisent/organized in that you can administer a server, moderate it, etc. - I'm thinking more for organizing a gaming guild, or a convention... something that blurs the lines between business-focused Slack/Teams, but with better voice UI.

Just doing ad-hoc group chats, yeah - that's got a few more options, thankfully.

Ah okie, yep can't have persistence without storage, and Tox doesn't have p2p storage implemented, most likely intentionally since anonymity, privacy, and security is the goal. You also can't have users directly joining a group chat and instead they have to have one of the users of the group add them to their private contact list first. Sounds like Element might be better in that case for organizing furmeets, furry cons, etc then.

Avatar matches.

Why are you pointing out the obvious, that we're furs? X3

I'm already on Element. Actually I was using the Librem Chat client, but it's a little weird, seems Element sets up the encryption keys a lot easier.

I'll grudgingly admit they've managed not to run GitHub into the ground yet

They put Nat Friedman in charge of it; he's an old GNOME hacker, that ended up at Microsoft as part of the Ximian/Xamarin acquisition.

I closed my GitHub account the moment that deal went through and I'll do the same if this happens to Discord. It's a shame, as I like the Discord experience, even though I gave up on their client (I only run it in the web now), but as an old, jaded long time techie, I won't have anything to do with Microsoft. Nothing they do absolves them of the hurt they bring to this industry day in and day out with their legal strong-arming, proprietary lock in, aggressive acquisitions and baffling licensing. They can "love Linux" all they want, I'll have nothing to do with them.

its amazing that their love for linux so far has been one sided. sided to microsofts best interest of course. everything has been centered around making linux things run smoother, and better on windows. to attract linux developers, to windows, to develop their linux things, on windows. none of it has actually benefited linux at all.

if microsoft truly loved linux like they claim, they would start opening up some important stuff. like directx. contribute to wine, etc. if they actively contributed to wine, i would feel far more comfortable with their work on WSL for example.

And WSL still runs like garbage on it :P

So sad news... I moved to Discord after Skype became such a mess under Microsoft's direction. Now I should probably start looking elsewhere as well, but my friends will probably want to stay with Discord because "it works" (they use the full-fledged Windows version)

Hmmm, mixed bag.
Github is fine after their acquisition. As is Minecraft (if not better, actually).
Skype just went downhill after MS took over.

Those are honestly the only projects that MS bought that I had any personal interest in.

I don't really care enough for Discord to react one way or the other.
I'll just keep using it as needed, unless it becomes crappy now.

I'm only using signal now as a skype alternative, even managed to get some family members using it. If you only use such software for group voice chat, there is also mumble, and a myriad of other open technologies that can fit your needs.

Fuck that. I really like Discord and run more than one server for different projects. If this goes through, I'll be looking at alternatives. I was planning on paying for Nitro, but not if Microsoft buys up Discord. This is really disappointing.

I'm no fan of Microsoft buying anything, but I'll grudgingly admit they've managed not to run GitHub into the ground yet, so…50-50 Discord will still be worth using in a few years?

It's not about running it to the ground or not, it's about the problem of having your greatest enemy being in charge of your secret operations headquarters. Yeah, I'm saying it in a somewhat tongue in cheek manner, but the truth is, the ONLY thing that's changed in regards to Microsoft vs Linux is that Linux has managed to grow up tremendously and has completely taken over the server/backend space, and so Microsoft, who is the sore loser of the server/backend race, has been forced to treat Linux as a real business competitor instead of just a small time fish that can be safely slandered as "cancer" and then promptly ignored. And the way it treats its real competitors is, like a guy already posted above, Capitalism 101; ie EEE all over again, part of which is aggressively buying out pieces of your competition and thus slowly chipping away at the things that make them strong.

TL;DR having my business competitor control my center of operations is a big NO in my books.


Last edited by Nocifer on 24 March 2021 at 12:42 pm UTC