Do you use Discord? Well if these reports are to be trusted, it looks like they might get a new owner under Microsoft.
In an article on Bloomberg which cites anonymous sources "familiar with the matter", Microsoft are apparently in talks to buy Discord for more than $10 billion USD. This follows from another article from VentureBeat that claims Discord has been exploring options for a sale and has "signed an exclusive acquisition discussion with one party". Earlier this month the WSJ talked about how Discord revenue has increased quite a lot to $130 million in 2020 (up from $45 million in 2019) but it's not actually profitable yet.
For the Linux support of Discord, if Microsoft did acquire it we don't expect much to change. Discord's Linux client is full of issues that never get solved so Microsoft can't do much worse - we could even see an improvement perhaps. Nowadays Microsoft aren't exactly the same when it comes to Linux with the likes of Teams, Visual Studio Code and Edge all on Linux in some form. Microsoft are also the owners of GitHub which huge parts of the open source community entirely rely on.
Still, with all the acquisitions Microsoft has done, that's a lot to have under a single roof. This continued consolidation across the gaming industry is pretty concerning. Some companies really do end up with far too much influence and power.
How do you feel about this?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
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.
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.
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Quoting: GuestAnother account to delete... What's next? Will they buy my country too?
Haven't they still yet?
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Quoting: GuestYou may be right, although it's an odd thing for a guy who calls himself "Liberty" to say.Quoting: tomaszgWell, 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
1 Likes, Who?
Never understands why Discord is popular and certainly never will with this news.
Quoting: GuestAnother 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.
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Quoting: GuestNeat, 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.
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Quoting: PangaeaThey'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.
Quoting: GuestAnother account to delete... What's next? Will they buy my country too?
They most probably already bought some influence.
10 Likes, Who?
slaapliedje Mar 23, 2021
Quoting: scaineFunny, 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.Quoting: EhvisWhile 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?
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officernice Mar 23, 2021
#MumbleMasterRace
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PublicNuisance Mar 23, 2021
I refused to touch Discord before this and would not see this as a reason to start.
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slaapliedje Mar 23, 2021
Quoting: GuestAvatar matches.Quoting: KithopAh 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.Quoting: GuestNeat, 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.
1 Likes, Who?
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