cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/26986197
Wayland and audio is fixed, but only on the canary branch for the moment, this isnt lazy either, they changed the whole screenshare flow to suit linux’s permission prompts
Well, “nice” to have that feature, but you still shouldn’t use Discord, or at least limit your time on it as much as possible. Remember, when you use it, you’re part of the network effect that makes Discord big. You have to resist that. Take a look how Discord compares to pretty much any other messenger or communication tool in existence: https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html Avoid it whenever possible, get your friends to leave it and weaken its network effect.
So, some of the drawbacks (there’s probably more):
- Discord has weak security (see URL above)
- Discord has non-existent privacy
- Discord has an incredibly vague privacy policy which means they do what they want. Even companies with strong privacy policies screw users over routinely. Guess what companies do who don’t even care about good privacy policies. They even weakened it further a while back because they need to train their new AI features on your data as well, and probably even their weak privacy policies were in the way before. Well, good thing that the users agreed that they can change it at any time for any reason and be fine with it.
- You grant all rights of everything you write, say, share or do on Discord to Discord, and everything you type, say, upload or share is being processed by their servers
- Discord tracks what you’re typing before sending it
- Discord suspended accounts and required even more user data for “verification”, such as telephone numbers which is completely unnecessary except for tracking and data selling purposes
- Discord shares chat logs with law enforcement (and they can share everything because they’re collecting everything)
- The Discord client app tracks what programs you have running so it can for example display what games you’re currently running. That means it contains a process logger. It has to scan every running application and then finds games out of those, and then you have to hope that only the game-specific bits are uploaded to their servers. Maybe that is the case, but can you trust them, and also to never change that? No.
If you have to use it:
- Never use their desktop app, always use the web version from a secondary browser (web apps running in the browser have much less rights than locally running applications), and even then limit what the site can access to the least amount of stuff necessary. If you never use your mic or camera then block it in the browser settings. Don’t trust Discord’s own mute setting (this also applies to other proprietary software).
- Use a fake e-mail alias / telephone number when creating your account, generally give them the least amount of data possible. Opt out of any options or features which are tied to you exposing more data to them
- Don’t give them additional money e.g. for their premium stuff (you already pay with data they gather from you)
- Block at least these API endpoints which are purely used for tracking purposes (there may be more though, and they might change) [easy to do with uBlock Origin for example]:
https://discord.com/api/v*/science https://discord.com/api/v*/channels/*/typing https://discord.com/api/v*/track*- You can also block these related hosts safely without impairing Discord’s main functions (again there may be more):
crash.discordapp.com status.discordapp.com b.stats.paypal.com app.adjust.com client-analytics.braintreegateway.comI just wish there was a FOSS version of Discord. I haven’t looked too deeply into existing alternatives, but I have a feeling they all miss features Discord has and are just not as good.
Revolt, can be self-hosted and all, not federated
[matrix] looks promising, but it isn’t quite ready yet
It is way too expensive/wasteful to run as both a client & a server by its architecture.
I think SimpleX is similar
Depending on what you aim to do, Matrix works well enough. Reminds me a lot of Discord back in 2017 or so.
I’ve been using Vesktop since forever. They have had it working already for a looooong time.
What about video acceleration though? Cause last time i tried it as soon as I moved the camera the screen share’s framerate would drop like crazy making it essentially useless. On AMD anyway
I’ll prob check later today cause im interested
Fuck discord. Proprietary spyware. That shit isn’t getting on my computer anytime ever.
FYI, Element now has a lot of the call features that Discord has
Including screen share with audio?
nope but this must be added its like the most requested feature
Doesn’t mean it’ll be added in an open source application… There has to be a dev/some devs willing to implement that, they can’t force volunteers to implement features because of the selling value it’ll have.
Been using matrix since forever :) But the dissing of shitty corporate centralized applications is necessary because way too many naive users still give their data away for convenience.
in the case of discord, it’s not convenience, it’s the network effect.
That falls under convenience. Getting others to leave corporate bullshit malware and/or spyware takes effort (and I know very well how frustrating it is). Personally I refuse to use discord or FascistApp (I guess with the recent policy changes that name is warranted) etc with all the implications that it has.
Facts, I just left discord and joined groups in matrix, and had some close associates get matrix/element to chat w me. Easy peasy
And people are celebrating it now being able to record your screen 🤣
yeah, proper facepalm there… hello Winsucks Recall…
people on reddit are saying audio-sharing is still broken for every app that utilizes the pipewire audio API directly
Which programs use the pipewire API? I can only think of mumble but no one is going to stream that.
i think bitwig is one
MPV also supports pipewire.
Note that the flathub version has not yet been updated. The version with the screenshare is 0.0.79.
Oh ok that explains why it wasn’t working very well
Whish Steam would put some effort into this too.
Try using OBS with its virtual camera.
I’ve been using that for ages to share my screen, but it doesn’t bring over the audio which can be annoying, but otherwise works great. I am sure there are ways to get the audio into it, but it felt like it would be more trouble than it was worth.
You can stream the audio using PulseAudio volume control. (pavucontrol)
Click in the Recording tab, find the discord input (it should be called WebRTC engine or something similar) and select the audio device you want to use.
To stream audio from your computer, just click the ‘monitor’ version of the device you want to use.
it’s horribly out of sync with the screenshare and low quality
Really? I don’t have that issue. Are you also using OBS? It’s possible your stream is lagging due to hardware restraints.
Meh, I guess there’s just no reason for it to be synced. Hardware is out of the question
I would love for Valve to make an alternative to Discord, built into Steam.
Matrix really is the answer.
Not if we want sustainable chat. It runs like a blockchain under the hood & duplicates so much data.
Matrix doesn’t have voice channels, probably the most important part of Discord for everyone I know. It’s also built around single rooms, not servers, which just doesn’t feel as good as Discord for interacting with friends.
Dang, looking into Revolt seems like it’d be more in your use case yet. I wonder if it also has separate voice chat rooms?
I’d love to be able to get people to switch to something like this.
Same. Atm it works well for basic voice chat but not much more.
Finally!!!
Still ass, use matrix/element
literally not a single person i know uses matrix, and calls aren’t supported on most clients, so getting them to switch would be literally impossible.
Idk brah I managed to make 3/5 friends switch to it and we almost exclusively use that to chat, and now got 2-3 family members to use it when talking to me too
Element is a messenger and will never have the UX of Discord. There is Revolt, which is actually similar to discord but self-hostable
Has screen sharing a video calls and group calls and working on addons/extensions, not sure what more people would expect from a project of its size
Can we get actually working global keybinds in Wayland next? Or is that a chromium/electron problem?
It’s an Electron problem, yes. The API is there, just waiting to be used.
wayland global keybinds are not really ready yet, they’re only properly implemented in one desktop, so i don’t blame the discord devs for not adding them.
Serious question: I see the topic about Discord screen sharing a lot. Why is this such a big deal?
because it’s the communications platform for gamers™.
But seriously discord screenshare was a massive painpoint for gamers switching to linux, so it’s very nice to see it finally, properly, solved.
It’s also the discussion platform for open source (sadly)
I will continue to kick & scream at every project that thinks free software is the way to go with their software, but not good enough for the tooling around their project. Fuck Discord. Fuck MS GitHub.
In my opinion GitHub is seriously good software, but it is awkward when FOSS software is developed on it instead of on Codeberg, Gitea or another FOSS platform.
Discord is actually a security risk, it walls information off the outside world (compared to a forum or IRC server) and incredibly difficult to find information in even when you’re in the server (as opposed to documentation or a forum)
Matrix has 2/3 of these issues, so it being FOSS aside I very much would hate it when development discussion and software documentation is done through Matrix, as well.
MS GitHub doesn’t do anything the others can’t besides the social media features which do not need to be so prominent. If you must, it can be one of multiple code mirrors but should not be the exclusive one, or even the primary option.
Matrix is ass. You cannot reasonably scale an eventual consistency model without centralization & it will be a wasteful network like many of the blockchain projects. We already have had IRC & XMPP MUCs for ages that run on toasters & did not need to be reinvented. Chat has its place tho to help steer folks into asking the right questions, but such questions once formed need to be triaged as bugfixes, issues, FAQs, or forum posts to benefit everyone on the discussion.
Aside from it being a main way that I spend time with friends, it’s good to see mainstream products spend effort supporting Linux as a viable gaming platform. I have friends who haven’t made the jump to Linux yet, but giving up core discord functionality was simply a dealbreaker for them.
Screen sharing is a big social thing for my friends and I, lacking this functionality would mean I wouldn’t be able to interact as much sharing goofy game moments and watching movies together.
I tried Vencord for a while, but my friends said that the quality of the stream on their end was consistently stuttering, an issue which isn’t happening for me in the official client, so the release of screen sharing on Discord stable after working so well on canary is a welcome update for me.
people like to share their screens with friends. generally so they can stream a game for them to watch or so people can watch stuff together
Don’t use discord it’s like reddit
At least you can still read some of reddit without an account.
/readme.md
Join our discord
That forwards to a shadily different URL.
Why does Boost turn that into a clickable link in the first place…?
Added a /
I’ll see if I can raise an issue with the devs of Boost because that didn’t fix it.
A \ might, but it seems simple enough to me to exclude readme.md from being automatically marked as a link. And that phrase basically never refers to a link (:
In what sense?
What’s a similar alternative?
element
For those of us not using Wayland, any idea if this still applies? Waiting on my flatpak version to support audio sharing with screen share… And please performance improvements.
it (mostly) fixes audio on x11 too
Lemme guess, no Wayland support.
did you even read the post??
edit: like seriously i get not reading a long article but the post body is 35 words long
