ClassicConnect

[alyx]

Recently I started experiencing a game breaking bug with vesktop, little micro stutters every 5 seconds. doesnt sound like a massive issue but it started causing me to lose flow and forget what im trying to say out of annoyance. So I decided to look into alternatives.

first off, straight up alternatives to discord:

1: IRC - great, lightweight clients available, can self host, irssi is a good client example for my needs,. a ppc build is still in openbsds packages, for example.

issues: too many people use discord, a lot of servers have not bothered to bridge to IRC

2: matrix - also pretty nice, end to end encryption, lots of client choice, self hosting ability like IRC.

issues: too few servers bridge to matrix, and the clients can leave a lot to be desired. IAMB is good for my use though.

now onto the good stuff: alternatives to the official client!

lets set some ground rules: markdown support, folder support, dm support, ability to send images
optionals: voice calls, screensharing (pretty much impossible at the current moment), rich presence

what i found:

dissent, discordo, endcord, abaddon (fully original, not based off the original client code

discords official client, vesktop, legcord, goofcord, and co (client side mods, most of which are wrappers for the web version, but also use electron for some god forsaken reason.

now at the start of this i wanted to settle on endcord. this would bring me rich presence, minimal system usage, and met all my requirements. issue though. its not packaged for nixos (i plan to try and make a flake to build it to give it a good go, though! and it will probably become what i settle on)

i first started with abaddon - wouldnt even login. so thats immediately killed from the roster. which is a shame because it actually had tried implementing voice chat and i really wanted to see if it would work

i then moved onto trying discordo - had some issues with login but i could add my token to my keyring and it would use that for login, which got around my issues with it not taking my TOTP code. client works. cant send images though which is a bit of a bummer and its lacking in places.

dissent: near perfect, and i really want to like it (used to be known as gtkcord4, btw) but its just not for my use case. but i am using it in the mean time.

onto official / based on official clients!

starting with... the official discord client

i first started with discord canary, installing openASAR and vencord to add functionality. to preface: i am a wayland girlie so working screenshare through portals without the stuttering issues was a must for me... and it so valiantly tried. screensharing works great!!! but... i could never get audio sharing working. I personally use pipewire on my systems, using the fallback pipewire-pulse and pipewire-alsa. it seems discord merely doesnt support this setup and expects pure pulseaudio from what i can tell. which is a bummer because its LITERALLY using pipewire to deal with screensharing stuff, so why not implement audio sharing with pipewire too!

i then tried the roster of unofficial clients... and they all had the same. exact. issue. microstutters every 5 seconds. I thought this was odd so i decided to look into it. turns out arRPC is just a complete and utter piece of shit! and when it scans your rpc status againsts its db it just.. causes these stutters (because the scan takes around 330ms). and because for some BENIGN reason they run arrpc on the main thread, every client faces stutters. now there has been work to move arrpc to a worker thread but guess what. issue hasnt been touched in 2 blimming months so ive lost hope.


to sum it up:

endcord seems like the best of everything at the moment - and ill update this post when ive given it a good go

discordo and dissent are also great options, if you dont require every little thing that the official client opens, be prepared to run one of the broken arrpc clients above though to get around not having rich presence or streaming (this is my current flow, so i can still stream, have rich presence, but actually type and message properly while doing it.)

everything else is pretty much a write off at the moment. which is a right shame.

[Sashi]

I actually thought of making an IRC client that has Discord like features. None of the stupid shit like Nitro, but things like embed support and custom emojis.

Voice support would be nonexistant unless I could find a way to use a Teamspeak server as a backbone and find a way to pipe it through the frontend.

I also wouldn't be able to make a phone app (Nor would I really want to). Fuck cellphones anyway, cellphones are dumb.
_________________
I do stuff with things for reasons.
Fuck it, test in prod.

[VCSMaster]

I've heard Discord Messenger (Discord for ye olden PCs) is pretty fleshed out these days. I think they're even planning to add voice support.

My concern has always been with the EULA, since none of these clients are endorsed in any way by Discord. While they do not currently enforce it, there are rules against using third party or modified clients. With their clear intentions of an IPO soon, I'm expecting ads for us unpaid users. Using third party clients will probably become an issue overnight and the bans will come in pretty hard.

I'm more interested in just outright leaving the platform entirely. If there were someone I could commission to build or help build a similar client and server which may or may not be vintage computer friendly, I would. Nobody really seems all that interested, though.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe Discord will actually get better once they have money in their pockets, but it's been over half a decade since the last positive update. Once it gets bad, I will probably resign myself back to forums and email only, as I have no intention of ever allowing them to make one red cent off me.

[Sashi]

Discord will never get better because of that quest for money. It'll never be enough, ever. Getting an investor or getting themselves in the green on their own merit won't change the microtransaction and SaaS bullshit. If anything, it'll make it even worse, but they'll play the line of drudgery and incentive like any other SaaS company to cheat their userbase of money better spent elsewhere.
_________________
I do stuff with things for reasons.
Fuck it, test in prod.

[nick99nack]

As far as alternate services go, there is something you can self-host called Spacebar (formerly Fosscord). I've been looking into hosting that if Discord totally goes to shit.

I do love IRC though and would love to see some clients adapted for better media support, as long as it was done in a way that wouldn't totally ruin the experience for users on older/more basic IRC clients (unlike something like Microsoft Comic Chat).

I have yet to dive into alternative Discord clients other than Discord Messenger (dm), which works great on my older machines. I use an alt though in case it does something Discord doesn't like. Don't want to get my main account banned. It is nice though, it even works on older linux under Wine.
_________________
If you like browsing without an ad blocker, you might also like getting rid of your virus scanner, and running around with your pants down. --SomeGuy, 2016

[VCSMaster]

Yeah, I've been thinking about making an alt just for use with Discord Messenger. I think I will probably do that if a Mac version ever gets made. Or maybe I'll do it just because. Dunno.

IRC works great, especially on old machines, but it's never been a platform I'm fond of. It can be difficult to create and manage large communities in IRC, which is something that Discord definitely shines at. I tend to think of Discord as an instant messaging forum more than a messaging client.

A proper large scale "upgrade" to IRC and some quality media extensions, and of course voice/video, would basically turn IRC into Discord, though all of this is much easier said than done.

[alyx]

just to respond to a couple things:

> I've heard Discord Messenger (Discord for ye olden PCs) is pretty fleshed out these days. I think they're even planning to add voice support.

- i use nixos, discord messenger is not an option for me. I do however use this on my laptop running windows 2000, its nice and light.

> As far as alternate services go, there is something you can self-host called Spacebar (formerly Fosscord). I've been looking into hosting that if Discord totally goes to shit.

I have looked into self hosting spacebar, but the big issue is the utter grasp discord has on the vast amount of the userbase of current computer users. so many FOSS projects use it as a message board instead of having actual forums or using actual FOSS projects, its ludicrous.

> Yeah, I've been thinking about making an alt just for use with Discord Messenger. I think I will probably do that if a Mac version ever gets made. Or maybe I'll do it just because. Dunno.

check out discord lite, same idea, but compiled for powerpc,and intel. itll run all the way down to 10.4 tiger.



now for my own addendum

I have finally gotten endcord building on nixos! and i can say i love this client! rich presence from a literal terminal client is the funniest crap ive ever seen

[Sashi]

Biggest reason to build your own application to do this is the security you can impart. Apps like discord require you to sign a piece of your life away and sign legal agreements to waive your rights if shit happens. This is wholly unneccesary for anybody not trying to make a buck off of you.

I think communities run better when the host is responsible for that kind of stuff, not some over-arching company. It kills that make a buck at all cost mentality when you have legal shit to worry about. This is why SaaS companies push for arbitration clauses. Instead of having to worry about losing what they work for through neglegent development hurting someone, they can either just deny your case in court with some legalese in the ToS or have to pay you a fraction of what the damage is actually worth.

This is where IRC is a good technology. The host server is responsible for their users data, safety and security as well as the behavior and activity those users engage in. This keeps those hosts active and a part of those communities to police and regulate that behavior. Does this happen in communities on the web today? Yes, but it's not as vital as it should be. People who run communities now feel less of that responsibility because they feel the company itself will take care of any big nasties for them.

Now is the time for an application to be made that people can fall back on. Something that can use an existing technology and add more features to it. We need to take the power back and put it in the hands of the people, from there they can choose what works best for them and their communities.

By either building the application to handle the extra features, or if you wanted to you could rewrite the IRC daemon to add those features. The key would be to make the app or update the daemon, release the source so others can develop on it for themselves but write the license in such a way that new source must be released with propagation of that license to all new sources and that all versions made should have some interoperability between them.
_________________
I do stuff with things for reasons.
Fuck it, test in prod.

[VCSMaster]

[alyx]

> what is nixos

declarative and immutable linux distro, simply put. pretty cool, tbph

[VCSMaster]

[alyx]

> I'm not sure what those mean for this. What, is it stored in ROM? How is it immutable? What does declarative mean here?

declarative in this case meaning everything is configured through specific configuration files, usually using flakes nowadays, flakes being a new method of declaratively doing things: if you want one to check out you can find mine here:

https://git.cydiralis.cc/alyx/shorkie-flake

immutable: / is read only, everything about the system that would usually be configured at / (e.g fstab, etc) is configured with the configuration.nix file, or multiple files if using flakes with home manager, etc

[VCSMaster]