Nire Bryce

@NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

she/they (pl)
breadthcharge.net/

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.

Nire Bryce @NireBryce5/7/2023, 8:26 PM

Nire Bryce @NireBryce

Nire Bryce @NireBryce5/7/2023, 8:15 PM

thinking about how the biggest thing discord does is make onboarding easy, but noncorporate competitors focus on feature-matching and not ease of:

hosting
maintenance
onboarding

when the thing that will most drive feature development is having people care about your product enough to bring their friends.

as a sidenote I want to point out that discord has perfectly fine¹ communications strata, the issue is half of the actual features are hamstrung by server boosts, where you have to beg members to subscribe to discord nitro plus instead of being able to just pay it yourself². or, yk, have the feature in the app.

#discord #discord meta

Nire Bryce @NireBryce5/7/2023, 8:26 PM

on the other hand, I remember when only technical people and gamers used discord so remember that discord hasn't always been simple

even though it's onboarding issues haven't really changed somehow

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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

fictive @artemis5/7/2023, 8:30 PM

teamspeak3 had this figured the fuck out, though it was basically only voice.

connecting to a server: easy as hell, i figured that out when i was a tiny child on the internet

running a small server for less than 32 people: only challenge was port forwards. the rest was just running the thing and copy-pasting the admin code it gave you to use when you joined in on the client

connecting to multiple servers: you could just do that in the client simultaneously and switch between them however you wanted so you could listen/have presence on many and talk on one

permissions systems: defaults that worked for a small community, super easy to do whatever you wanted after that

AVATARS! CHANGEABLE DISPLAY NAMES! fuckin. it ruled ok. yeah it wasnt open source but it ran on mac/windows/linux. yeah you needed a license for servers above 32 people but thats fine, and also people cracked the license generation code. the phone apps were way worse we don't talk about those.... at least they worked i guess, better than the iOS mumble client.

anyways no self-hosted communication thing has ever beat teamspeak in how easy it is to stumble through making it work with no technical knowledge beyond having run a minecraft server before. and you didnt even need to self host technically you could just pay a hosting company to do it for you if you had money like i didnt

ela @eladnarra5/7/2023, 8:38 PM

I looked into Matrix recently, and it was hard to imagine figuring out hosting, let alone getting friends and family on it...

in reply to @NireBryce's post:

cat @catball5/7/2023, 9:18 PM

I know at least a couple folks who weren't acclimated to either IRC or Slack style chat idioms who both were extremely confused by how to use it

also I still have no idea how to make notifications work on that thing

but agree that other non-corp competitors make it Pretty Rough to host/maintain/use alternatives and that alone ends up being a giant barrier to entry

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