Looks interesting. Definitely nailing the old myspace aesthetic. I’d be more curious about active users versus registered users. Social networks are usually defined by activity. Unfortunately registered users probably contains a lot of bots and spammers.
Please let this go viral, it's about time to make social media great again
Anyone here tired of social media? I’m almost 40. Just curious of my age group.
More angry than tired. To clarify: angry at Social Media rather than on it.
FB was great in about 2010, but is now ridiculous and basically unusable. My wife is addicted to IG, and spends multiple hours each day scrolling the feed. My social life revolves around WA groups. I tried moving people to Signal but got few takers.
I'm enjoying Mastodon at the moment.
I'm scared that if I install TikTok I'll get addicted. I've seen it happen to friends.
I would like to return to email, circa 2000, that was fun.
I have been addicted to ig. Still can be if I let myself. Reddit can also get me hard. Whatsapp groups I actually love because there's nothing to scroll. Just people lmk about an event and I can interact with them like a human, and I can go to the event. I get to know about things and I don't have to interact with meaningless content alongside it. I love it. What exactly is wrong with Whatsapp groups other than that it's owned by Meta? I also have some Telegram groups.
zulip seems like a nice sweet spot between email and instant messaging apps, and maybe forums. ive havnt actually used it yet but its on my self hosting todo list
We may be choosier than most about social media, but here we are typing our thoughts into a web page expecting nothing in return except the possibility of hearing other peoples' thoughts.
We all know people who are truly tired of social media, we're not going to hear from them here.
Almost 40 as well, also tired of social media but I do miss social networks. This seems to hew more closely to the social network concept than being a media outlet which is lovely to see coming back.
Definitely am. I’m 35. Thankfully I found a great place to be in the blogging world. I write posts, I read posts from others, we connect via email. It’s great.
I'm 26 and I'm tired of social media. I was addicted to insta for a bit and I've teared myself away. Now when I go back, I can still feel the addictive quality but for the most part I look at people's posts and wonder how they aren't embarassed. Like why do I care to see this photo of you? Did you really just set your camera up in this complicated way to take a photo in your room? Isn't that sad? Do people actually get anything from these reels that are so vapid? The fact that one of my favourite songs is being used as background music to the most inane "comedy" makes me angry because it's ruining my experience of the art itself! All these things go through my head. I couldn't take myself seriously posting any more unless it was strictly for business.
I don't know how to interpret statements like this. In my mind there has to be a clear separation between problems individual platforms have (ie an algorithmic feed where you may or may not see what your friends actually post despite explicitly following them) and... the rest of the discussion. "Social media" (a very broad term) as a medium people dislike, well, that's individual. It means no matter how a platform does some people will always be against it. I don't understand that. I think the more important discussions to have are how we can improve specific sites
No, I moved abroad and when sm was good it let me preserve my friend networks. Now it’s a wasteland. I miss it.
And it’s time to stop saying “make ___ great again”.
O Rly?
There's a paradox almost worth discussing somewhere, but not here.
Make "And it’s time to stop saying “make ___ great again” great again?
make HN great again
We're gonna build a wall, and Slashdot is gonna pay for it!
Doesn't everyone want everything to be great again?
We need MSGA hats!
Whatever you think of the site itself, this is prime HN content. A kid in high school starts a site that scales to 1,000,000 registered users while working on it during nights and weekends in college. If the founder is on here, what tech stack did you use and how long had you been programming before you built it?
(not the founder!) Looks like it's built on ColdFusion
Wait, that still exists / still gets used for new projects today? Wow, I'm feeling teleported back to the 2000s.
"Well actually" a relevant discussion hit the front page yesterday:
Lucee: A light-weight dynamic CFML scripting language for the JVM - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41409434 - Aug 2024 (37 comments)
Peep this, I stumbled on it randomly last week and also was surprised that it still seems to be around and kicking. It’s basically a Rails for cold fusion lol.
And it’s using Silk icons.
I’m working with it every day. It’s pretty capable even today. Server side rendering is in!
We have several legacy products still running on CF, all running rock solid, but also all ported to Lucee these days. I still like CF but I'm an old fogey that started with it in the late 90's Allaire days. I often wonder if it had been open source from its inception if it would have grown faster than PHP. It really was a 'swiss army knife' of web development. It's still around here and there but mostly in larger corps that don't blink at Adobe's crazy licensing fees. Most everyone else in the communities I talk to has jumped to Lucee.
That’s strong commitment to sticking with the original tech stack if it’s not just reskinned the error pages
He uses "vanilla PHP/HTML/MySQL":
So the same stack as 20+ years ago… good job, kid.
vDOM bros hate this one simple trick.
Love this comment
The web stack “they” don’t want you to know about
I call CSS, HTML, Apache, MySQL and PHP the CHAMP stack for a reason. ;)
Was launched on HN 3yrs ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25245740
It's pretty easy to check if a page is a PHP page: just add a .php suffix, it'll work most of the time depending on where the files are placed in the web directory (also technically depending on how the site implements URL rewrite rules):
* https://spacehey.com/index.php
It's incredible how this type of revival from the past gained such meaningful traction, but, in a way, I fully understand it. The online world has become so confusing that many desire a simple one. The same feeling drove me to adopt Threads over Twitter/X—even if I still use them both.
The confusion, especially on X, is caused by focusing on what advertisers want vs what users want
The confusion, especially on X, is caused by focusing on what the loudest dumbest users want vs all else.
The confusion, especially on X, is caused by focusing on what the loudest dumbest users want vs all else.
I'm not on X, so I don't know, but IME on every other place on the internet since forever is that the loudest, dumbest users ARE the advertisers.
An environment that monetarily rewards users pushing their message into other peoples faces performs an environmental selection to make the advertisers the loudest and dumbest users.
Shilling scams, cosplaying as an influencer or being a bot does not make users an advertiser.
No, Twitter was never especially advertiser focused, although it did do a bit of "brand" stuff. The destruction of Twitter was because as a a "free speech platform" it naturally picked up the most aggressive, nastiest, confrontational politics. It then algorithmically shoved this in front of the people most likely to make retaliatory posts. It is dying because it now focuses on what the owner wants, which is a set of increasingly fringe right wing lunatics and some guy called "catturd2".
Hence getting banned in Brazil. I guarantee that is not an outcome any advertiser wanted.
I still use X and it's still very good. It's tough rn (as it always was) 6 months before the big US election but it'll go back to normal. I've been on twitter since 2011 and it's been the same pattern all these years.
The secret, always is - follow new people in small increments and generously unfollow at the slightest annoyance. There are still lots of interesting people to find!
You'll discover there's people on both sides of political issues who can make their points and not be annoying about it but these are maybe 1-3% of political people. You can also completely ignore politics by being judicious with your unfollows.
The confusion, especially on X, is caused by focusing on what advertisers want vs what users want
Is it? Last time I heard about it advertisers were going away because Musk is focusing on what loudest users want (being able to speak loudly) and not what advertisers want (moderation)
I feel like this is a relatively new situation, whereas the parent post describes very well the development of the service over the last decade.
The problem is that all mainstream social media has degenerated into entertainment. Staying up to date about the lives of people you know irl is seemingly no longer their intended purpose.
But people's need to connect in this way — just updates from those who they chose to follow, displayed chronologically, and no other content whatsoever — has not gone anywhere. That's why I'm also working on my own project that implements this type of social network with ActivityPub support: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen
It's beta quality for now and I'm not promoting it much yet, but I hope to bring it to 1.0 by the end of this year.
You should add some screenshots or video to the Readme, I'm too lazy to build it just to experience it.
Yes I should. A proper website that explains what it is and contains docs about the client API (that also doesn't exist yet) is something I plan to have for 1.0.
In the meantime, here it is live on my server: https://friends.grishka.me/
It's happened time and time again already. Firefox was the light version of Mozilla. Then that got bloated. Chrome was the light version of Firefox. Now that's bloated. Very few things resist bloat over time. This website is an example. People sometimes ask for new features, but the only change I can think of is pagination for long comment threads, which was driven by necessity.
Can't wait for IRC to become popular again. I'll still be there, waiting.
First, let me say I admire the successful effort to revive a piece of the 2000s web and wish the project the best. Having said that, I am of the right age to have been on MySpace, and exploring Spacehey gave me a better understanding of why I wasn't on MySpace.
The focus of the site is on you and who you are. It's about presenting your many overlapping identities with style. Your interests and creative output are secondary. Interests serve as more of a way to categorize yourself along standard dimensions (favorite movies, books, etc.). I don't think I want this! It's okay if you do, but it really isn't for me. It seems so optimized for legibility, in the late James C. Scott sense. I feel like all the CSS in the world won't help if this is how you must present yourself. Let me hide in my shell [1] and put forth my work. You'll get a better idea of who I am when I write something or if we talk.
GeoCities, LiveJournal, DeviantArt, and Tumblr all seemed less like this, though I also wasn't active on any of them in their heyday. People may think Tumblr is about the user's identity, but identity isn't at the core of the site design. The site design is about tagged posts. Where you might want to push for legibility is on a dating site. I am sure MySpace served as one for quite a few people. :-)
[1] I have realized this is a pun because I like pubnixes.
I suspect the world would be a bit better, or at least a bit less toxic, social media kept that primary focus on open expressions of identity rather than only the highlights from a person's work or art or daily life.
my work and art are more important than me
Your work and art are an expression of you. How can you express something effectively that you deem unimportant?
Not to downplay my personal importance (=make an ostentatious display of humility, lol) I can work on art and projects to express the importance of other things in the world that aren't myself.
But it's still your expression, or put another way an expression of you.
Imagine art critics studying your art - they would be asking what was your history, context, what happened to you and what was going through your head that made you do this. It's always about you, even - maybe especially, considering that defeating one's ego is still noteworthy - if you don't want it to be about you.
Making art that's not about the artist is reserved to LLM... At least for now.
First, humility is an under-appreciated virtue in today's world.
Second, the idea of "your work and art are an expression of you" is dangerously self-centered, in that it can limit your growth by pushing you conform to acceptance over aspiration.
They are and at the same time they overcome me, they are more than just "me." And that is why the possibility for greatness lies in the artwork, and not the person.
Agree - content oriented social media is just advertising.
I wasn't really on MySpace either, but I think it's exactly where your complaint lies that drew such a huge demographic. When I think MySpace, I think teenagers who are still discovering their identity—not seasoned creators with a catalog of work to show off.
The masses were given a means to make a page that encapsulated their identity and connect it with others, during a time where it was suddenly made possible for everyone to express themselves, but still difficult to produce meaningful online content. I think Tumblr eventually ended up capturing a lot of that, but I also feel that there is a sense of pressure around having a space where the purpose is to publish content (even if just reblogging). It was really meaningful to a lot of people that they could have a simple space to express themselves through custom mouse cursors, cringey quotes, and autoplaying emo music.
Nowadays, this expression of identity for younger audiences seems to be driven by being a part of online communities with common interests, expressing oneself through content (now that it's so easy to make and share). But I think MySpace was there for people at the right time.
I've been on Spacehey since 2021 and it's remarkable how fun and cozy the place has stayed over the years.
How often do you login? What makes it sticky for you?
I stay logged in almost all the time. I wanted some place where I felt like I could blog freely, and one that _felt_ like a blog instead of some ad-ridden mess. It was partially the customisation aspect that drew me in at the beginning, having that much control over my profile (even if it was just basic HTML and CSS with some JS) reminded me of what I loved about being online. I have a personal website and don't really pay much heed to the 'social' aspect of SpaceHey but having a little corner where I can just go and blog/post bulletins about things I'm thinking about, especially because it has a straightforward interface, feels really nice. The lack of ads and algorithms and general 'social media' paradigms of the modern age do a lot to make sure I keep going back.
What's your username (if you don't mind me asking)?
Hey man, I'm getting started on the platform. Mind sharing your username?
I wanted to get more involved in the community on that site but it seems there's a LOT of teenagers on it
Edit
Subs get bad with more people, to really ruin them you need power mods.
No MFA?
I get why they wouldn't offer it. Support nightmare and very few people would use it anyway.
Almost everything should have MFA, but it's not a solved problem. The overhead is to high and if you force it upon users you'll lose many of them.
Valid point about support but if you enforce it everyone will have to use it unconditionally.
Not having MFA opens it up to potential data breaches causing havoc.
Absolutely, but not even Facebook enforced MFA... Though they do offer it. I just can't imagine the absolute nightmare it must be to get Facebook, Google or Microsoft to reset your MFA if you lose it. You might as well create a new account.
We did a MFA reset for a remote coworker a few weeks ago, the about of validation and procedures we had to go through was insane, but also the only way to ensure that this is a correct reset.
MFA is really really important, but there's no good solutions for it yet.
It's funny, normally I would say "MFA? for this??" But actually I used to curate a MySpace for punk shows/bands in the city I lived in. I found every local band's page and added them as friends. Reposted flyers for upcoming shows. Posted pictures from shows. Had a blog. And one day a girl I broke up with found my password (or reset it, not sure), logged in, and deleted everything. Years of work down the tubes. So even for a MySpace clone, I'd say MFA is pretty handy, in those few cases that you need it.
That combined with less psychotic girlfriends in your case.
You can actually enable 2FA in your account settings
Scrolling through these profiles in the age of text generating AI, gives me this uncanny feeling, that what I am reading is just random gibberish spat out by a LLM.
I feel like anything I'd post on this platform, would get lost in giant noise of generated feces.
Maybe it's just, the unknown world of "artsy" people is what is really so off-putting. Maybe I am just getting old and don't understand this joy of childish expression anymore. But the other, most popular platforms, seem to have more appeal for followong reasons: - Facebook works around ads (pages) & groups about my (technical) interests, there isn't really a reason for AI spam. If any would appearx it is easy to make them disappear. You get some ads here & there, but content generating bots are often named bots & post content we've agreed to. - Discord gives you high walled gardens for every topic you are interested in. So, one really needs to get out of their way to get content they are not interested in right now. Plus, everything feels like a DM, even the public chats are all just quick chats. - X is literally a politics platform, so I am not expecting AI content from verified account of a diplomat, or media person.
I was very stressed last year and had what felt like a dissociative episode: Knowing what was becoming possible with LLMs, I one day just couldn't shake the feeling of unreality while reading any online spaces, including hacker news. I felt like maybe 70% of comments I was reading might not be real. Everything, including HN, just seemed so predictable or unsurprising
It was an altered state that felt like the leading edge of... something
Everything […] just seemed so predictable or unsurprising
That are people for you. Most of the time, we are uninteresting, predictable, and unoriginal. Especially when you got used to some subset, like HN, where there is a bit if self reinforcement, through the voting system.
"FB and there isn't really a reason for AI spam."
Heh good joke. Facebook is full of spam bots, phishing etc. Using following template, hack legitimate account, buy ADs for your phishing campaign with stolen CCs, phish people, rinse and repeat.
And quantity of phishing/spam is so huge, Meta is basically unable to fight this.
You're right about it existing, but FB could definitely fight it, removing 90% or more. But sadly it generatesa LOT of extra revenue for them (stolen account with stolen CC = thousands spent on ads) so they have monetary incentive to turn a blind eye and let people get scammed.
I like the UI. I think the old UI of web is pretty cool. I think making old UI websites with modern backends would be a great design choice.
That's what I have been trying to do with the B3ta site[0]. It is a UK humour site forum that was founded in the very early 2000s. I have been looking after it's backend for about five or so years, trying to modernise what I can and keep it stable and maintainable. I have learnt a lot of respect for people who create a site like Spacehey, it quickly spirals in to a job in itself.
[0]: https://b3ta.com/
b3ta is awesome. It's had a crucial, but mostly unknown, role in Internet culture for two decades.
Thank you for your service :)
Thanks, I only do it for the childish laughs! It crazy how it shaped so much yet only a very specific slice of people know it exists.
Nice! Personally I think that the more niche social networks we have the better it is. The big problem with the mainstream networks is that they've evolved from a media to communicate and keep in touch with real people into a platform for influencers and businesses.
The common complaint I hear about instagram for example is that every second connection of yours would try to sell/teach something and that's just garbage if all you need is to keep in touch with your friends.
The main problems to tackle imo are:
- information propagation speed. This is good in case you want to get a quick update but it also a double edged sword, since this allows information attacks, trolls etc
- Scale. Anything of big scale becomes a problem by itself since it becomes economically viable to target the platform with bots, scam etc.
- Incentives. I think we should get to the point where social networks are being run by non profits
I've posted the link a couple of time, I'm working on my personal take on this problem[0]. My approach is the following:
- Slow down information propagation. Every post is visible to the direct connections, to their connections if you allow it, but no further
- No way to get a connection request from a stranger. Either you specifically allow it, or it's introduced by your direct connections
- No federation, since my idea was to have small communities
- Fully open in the sense of data formats, import/export etc. Migrating between instances is as easy exporting posts in bulk, creating an account on another instance and doing the import. You could do the bulk updates the same way
Also, it's all go + htmx just in case anyone else is also tired of modern frontend mess. I have a couple of videos on the feautures[1], if you like. The design is not great, since I wanted to focus on the idea itself
[0]: https://github.com/can3p/pcom
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa5K-kCUS-FozB6Cw7rJL...
Good post. Have you already took a look into NOSTR?
It permits both private/niche communities and public (global) texts.
Just checked it, thanks for pointing to it. I think it's more of a decentralized encrypted messaging platform, and my idea was to have a way constrain the visibility of the conversations to naturally connected groups of people while giving a way to slowly expand the connections rather then fighting censorship
More or less like in real life, where you chat a lot with your friends, but necessarily with some of their friends you don't know that well. In this case you would ask your friends for the introduction and that what I've tried to model.
One other feature I've been thinking about was to make the moderation automatic in a sense of making signups possible only via invitation and putting some weight on it. Basically if you invite somebody who's misbehaving on the platform and they get flagged, you get penalized as well unless you do it first. My theory is that it should make users care about their digital surroundings.
Presumably that is 1M people in the database, I'm curious to know how many active users who sign in once a day, once a week.
In essence, how big is the community versus how many people have stepped in the front door once.
I did a quick check on the Online Users [0] via the Browse functionality and found there is a filter for online users. Currently it's 9:19 AM in the Netherlands. And there is about 7 pages filled with Online users. 45 users per page. About 7 pages filled with users [1].
So that's around 315 Online users in Europe during the day. My guess is that during US daytime numbers will be higher. Maybe someone in the US can do a check in a few hours? :)
[0] https://spacehey.com/browse?view=online [1] https://spacehey.com/browse?page=7&view=online
That's pretty active, assuming the system somehow pulls them all together in some way.
As long as this site doesn't implement the ActivityPub protocol, I don't see any reason for me to move to this site. I don't have time to maintain another account, and I want to keep in touch with people from Mastodon and Threads.
This feels like a very 2010s comment, when it was assumed that one has to be on every single social network app, copy/pasting the same 'content' into each of them, in order to be visible online. All that did was turn the net into a giant monoculture of hot takes and too-short posts. Only influencers and shovel-sellers need that.
Being its own local place is a feature, IMO.
This looks so cool! And I love the feel of basic server rendered pages!
It's also so much more responsive and predictable than most of today's crap
This site is more usable on my phone than 90+% of "mobile sites." It loads instantly, even on a crummy cell connection.
There's no ad divs that load 5 seconds after everything else and screw with the layout while you're reading something. There's no attempt at "infinite scroll," which universally results in stuttery scrolling and a generally sluggish experience. No fake modals with infuriatingly small close buttons, heckling you for your email address.
The WWW has become stuffy and stale, and this site is truly a breath of fresh air.
I enabled ad blocking on my iPad primarily because a webcomic I read put one of these fucking ads at the top of the comic page, and it seems to be “optimized” to load in just as I’m about to click the comic image to zoom in on it. I must have clicked that ad on accident a hundred times and I hate it. How many cookies is that? How many networks now know how much more about me. Fuck that. You’ve gotten a lifetime of ad revenue from me boyo and we are done. Everybody is done.
Congrats! How do you promote ? Post links everywhere ?
they've got merch, you can be the promotion you want to see in the world! (jokes aside the hat is pretty classy)
The kids are alright.
Agreed :joy
How does it make money?
SpaceHey is a small, independent social network, funded by your donations.
appreciate the nostalgia.
Neocities has a similar vibe.
As its name suggests, it was inspired, in part, by Geocities.
Let's be friends: https://spacehey.com/ricburton
It's a total blast from the past - even profiles look exactly the same
I love that it is snappy. I didn't read the article but I spent time examining the browser network calls, not much css and js downloads. I truly love the feel of it.
Not sure I care about another SM platform but I was very happy to see a snappy site on a Monday morning. A good reminder to put care in my work this week.
During the weekend, I had to fight the urge not to implement a tiny client for interacting with my bank. A company making loads of profit but can't fix their online banking platform. Every page takes not less than a minute to open. No form of caching user details, API calls are made and take same response time not matter how many times you navigate to a screen.
Great, but will the powers-that-be allow it to grow beyond that?
MySpace ran so SpaceHey could walk
Home page has a lot of red flags
(Does every comment need a "report comment" hyperlink? I like how HN does it, timestamps are permalinks, permalinked page has additional options to flag and favorite.)
(edit: timestamps are permalinks, at least)
(Edit edit omg people customize their profile markup like it's 2006 again)
Excellent achievement!! A good feel of the Internet before monetization poisoned it.
I've stopped myself from working on any new features in the past months, but rather improve the existing ones and make SpaceHey overall a bit smoother.
Wise. Not everyone is willing to do the hard word of slogging behind the scenes with little or no visible changes to users, but it makes a huge difference. Kudos.
This feels like giving a cigarette to heroin addicts saying it won't f them up so badly.
Just curious, without ads, what are the running costs and how are they paid for?
How much of the 1M is the bots they found? Hopefully none, but that’s a big number of humans.
Related:
Show HN: I rebuilt MySpace from 2007 (2 year update) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33792956 - Nov 2022 (9 comments)
Spacehey: A Space for Friends - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28770637 - Oct 2021 (15 comments)
Show HN: I Rebuilt MySpace from 2007 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25245740 - Nov 2020 (290 comments)
I love it. I’d like to make something similar.
One million people from all over the world have used SpaceHey so far - an independently run platform that does not track you and does not show you personalized feeds nor ads.
Does anyone here know how it’s funded or what this would cost to host?
This is my first time hearing of this site but wow I love the design! It’s so intuitive.
It's been over a year and a half since I was last able to access their site at all without seeing just a "403 Forbidden" page.
I love this website's design. Look at those icons. They have color!
When I saw this I was like ooh noes not myspace all over again. I feel this style may actually be a hinderance for adopting more users. People really want something more reactive like Discord. Discord is very much disliked, but the software is really good and that is why most people won't abandon it. It is like comparing Slack to Teams. It will be a long time before anything catches immediately up to Slack or Discord in usability. Although I have a short list of things that would be QoL improvements that would make both them soooooo much better.
I dislike every single one of discord's design decisions, I think the software is garbage, and it is riddled with security problems. Their customer service is a nightmare, a hacker got one of my friends accounts and even though he'd paid up for some kind of Discord extra service for more than 2 years in advance they wouldn't refund him or give him his account back. The API is bad too.
I use it purely because of the network effect. The people I want to communicate with use it, and the instant that changes if Discord isn't better then I'm out.
Having customer service would be a step up.
What's the point of banning an IP address?
Some people (like me) have a fixed IP for their internet connection. Although this isn't super common any more.
Yeah, it's really only tech folk who have fixed IP addresses, and they're usually too busy futzing around with servers to post shite on social sites ;)
Most IP connections are dynamic, and always were. Assuming that a person is synonymous with an IP connection makes no sense to me.
For most dynamic IP connections, as long as your router doesn’t go offline for days on end, you keep the same IP; so in practice your IP (almost) never changes.
I love Tor - but the exit node IP addresses do not have a good reputation, because they're a source of a lot of misbehaviour.
Sure, 'serious' attackers have botnets of home users' PCs and insecure IoT devices and whatnot. But because Tor exit nodes are easily used by even unsophisticated attackers, they quickly get flagged as sources of abuse.
You got an actual useless automated message? The lucky 1%.
While I disagree with the parent I personally think Discord is great. I've been on IRC for over 30 years and Discord is what I always imagined IRC 2.0 would be like.
What, owned by a single company and monetised within an inch of it’s life?
I would have loved to pay monthly for IRC Nitro™ back in the day to use… uh, forbidden ascii art?
Agreed. I like almost everything about discord. I just wish it did threaded replies in a more low key way.
I feel sort of ehh the same but also the opposite. I feel with both slack and discord that they are a little better than IRC. But that I so easily can see those features being implemented in IRC and I feel really sad history didn’t go in that direction. What if IRC had became the standard in the same way email did. IRC was so great and I miss it. I know ppl still use it, but I don’t even think I have a client anymore.
Learning to program as a kid in the 90s and getting that 28.8k modem with direct chat access to adults at Apple and later Sun/Java was amazing.
People who liked IRC will generally like Discord. However, there’s a lot of people who prefer asynchronous forums.
Discord as a text chat app is appalling. Whether on mobile, chromebook or desktop PC it's slow and janky to transition between channels. It is a measurably worse user experience than using IRC on a computer from twenty years ago with 1,000x less raw MIPS.
Maybe it has some advantages for voice chat, but to me it's a lowest common denominator we use because of the people and despite the software.
What makes it appalling?
You can press ctrl + K to jump to any channel from anywhere. Feels snappy.
I wonder if this is just everyone else using it on massive gamer PCs and me using it on mobile/chromebook, but .. no. It it is not snappy. The process of fetching all the new messages and rendering them takes up to a second.
I don't understand why people who insist on 60fps games are happy with a 1fps chat app, but I guess they don't have that experience.
I'm using a $6000 gaming rig I put together and Discord is one of the worst performing apps I use, so I'm with you on this one.
Even on mobile switching channel feels snappy to me. The images can take a while if they are not cached yet.
And yet the one thing I can't do is automatically jump to the top of a question. One of my Discord servers loves doing FAQs as separate conversations, and once they get too many replies, I have to scroll endlessly (PgUp, etc) to see the first few comments. It's maddening.
Discord's back end is amazing and they've blogged about a lot of it over the years (https://hn.algolia.com?query=%22How%20Discord%22). Not as smooth sailing on the front end though, and unfortunately they threaten to ban accounts using alternative clients, though there have been several (https://hn.algolia.com?query=Discord%20client).
Discord is good enough for most users and since it was one of the first to fully leverage WebRTC in-browser for voice chat (without requiring an account), the network effect is almost impossible to overcome at this point. This is incredibly unfortunate as closed chat ecosystems are an information black hole (except possibly when user generated content is licensed to the highest bidder for LLM training, what a gold mine!)
PS. It's worth mentioning in any Discord discussion with the (though the usual "could get banned" caveat applies): it is possible to export from Discord using https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter
Unfortunately, personal account automation like this is also in the reasons for "could get banned". Sigh.
I thought about building a scraper using something simplistic like Puppeteer to login to my account since the Discord browser experience is basically the same as the Discord app (which makes sense since its Electron). It would just issue a command to scroll arbitrarily up on a given channel/etc. until a certain earliest date was reached, and scrape all the data.
But.... again I'm sure that they have all sorts of mechanisms to detect unusual user behavior, so this might be JUST as vulnerable to detection as the aforementioned DiscordChatExporter.
Even leviathan walled gardens like Google let you export your data in a reasonable fashion (Google Takeout) - this is probably my biggest issue. On the other hand even if I could find an equivalent user-friendly platform, I'd never be able to convince all my contacts to migrate off Discord.
The disparate experiences people have on the same piece of software is interesting. I'm on a Mac M1 (so definitely a higher end laptop) and have had zero issues with the Discord app. It sits comfortably on my second monitor and I use the Cmd-K shortcut to quickly snap to the correct channel/user when I want to chat. While I wouldn't call the app "blazingly fast", I don't really notice any meaningful latency.
I mean it's not like it's a low-level ASIO driver for pete's sake.
Memory usage is also reasonable. Continuous uptime is over 4 days now, and combined real mem shows it's using about ~400mb which honestly is about what I would have expected from an Electron app.
I think some of it comes down to user expectations. When I'm playing a game, we're primed to look/notice choppiness and dropped frames particularly since the graphics are constantly animated. When I'm using my DAW, I'm primed to hear latency between my interacting with a midi controller and the audio output. I don't have any such expectations when I'm using a glorified text messaging platform, so while there might indeed be some latency, it would have to be significant for me to notice.
That being said, I'm not a fan of the Android app - the UI/UX experience is rather rough.
Yes on very fast modern hardware, the textbox sometimes takes dozens of frames to display the character I typed, and it is inconsistent. The tech sucks.
Discord always had a unique way of making me feel old
I avoided it because when when a ding occurred there is no indication which channel had just donged, just left me confused as to what was happening
Likewise - a notification history feature would help, the confusion really cripples the real-time experience.
it has a notification history feature (at least on PC), it's just impossible to find and deleted messages disappear from it. Upper-right corner is your "inbox" which is totally worthless, and tabbed behind that is your notification history. I use it to find totally buried @Mods pings that I missed by thousands of messages and that's about it, it's not good.
You can usually get most of your notifications with Ctrl+[T or K] and then going through the menu here, but for reasons I've yet to figure out sometimes DMs don't show up here even when they have unread messages. I think there is some incorrect logic that kicks in when you have a high number of unread channels and it can't show as many "previous channels" as it wants to.
None of this is to defend Discord, I think their UI is bad and I've hated the way DMs function since day 1, and every single part of their app that relies on frecency (or doesn't but should) is abysmal (reaction autocomplete, the reaction pop-up menu, ctrl+T when you start typing something, the mention autocomplete behavior in any channel)
But once you learn the poorly-documented navigation flow of ctrl+T and then using @, #, or * to filter users/channels/servers it gets easier to use. My current biggest complaint is lack of a "previous channel within this server" hotkey, "previous channel that you visited globally" exists but you can't restrict it within one server, and it makes navigating some of my servers an absolute nightmare.
It's there. Top right corner. "Inbox" then select mentions.
It might be that someone sent a message and then deleted it.
I get on Discord here and there to discuss Linux, programming and so on. It is definitely much different than IRC. The demographic seems to be 14 year olds trying to customize their WM.
Go use facebook then. This project seems fun.
This probably comes as a surprise to Discord users, but it really is a niche social network.
We're talking fractions of a percent of users compared to existing social networks.
People don't really want something like Discord - the downsides by far outweigh any upside of "a closed-off private network of people", biggest one being lack of visibility and consistency.
Citation needed :) This feels like you are parroting either your own preference or something you have heard other people state as fact.
Hmm.. I love Discord?
I think there is enough space for lots of styles.
Ah yes, because real time chatting and a wall to post stuff on like early facebook surely are the exact same hting.
Promotes a smaller, more tightly knit community.
One person's X is another's Y.