I agree to an extent, but usability is not a sufficient condition for mass adoption. I think Lemmy for end users is just as usable as Reddit was, at least for me it is. But people don't want to leave their communities.

That's why personally I have a Discord still. There are too many communities I am an active part of on there to abandon Discord outright. Plus all of my friends and family are on there, and I've already approached some them about switching and they all have said the same thing I just did.

I wasn't ever super invested in Reddit, so it was easy for me to abandon it for Lemmy, and I vastly prefer the communities here. Discord though is a different story for now, unfortunately.

Pfft. My gramgram self-hosts on her own LFS build with a hardened kernel and custom written SELinux policies. All your grandparents need to get on her level.

Disclaimer: Everything here is a lie.

like how not being able to sign up for something with tor and monero is a privacy violation, it’s not.

Note that "secrecy" and "privacy" are often understood in Security lingo as different things. One protects confidentiality, the other one protects anonymity.

It's possible to have one and not the other...

You can have a very private system through onion routing but have the contents of the messages exchanged be in plaintext, open to the public. Nobody will be able to know the one who wrote the message was you. But they can see the message. (then there is privacy, but not secrecy).

Or you can have very strongly encrypted communications (say HTTPS) but have the DNS exchanges (or the TLS handshake, or the IP addresses) be in the clear, so people in the middle (eg. your ISP.. or your workplace tech guys) can know exactly that the packages are sent by you and where you sent them, even if their content is encrypted. They can know which service you tried to access to, for how long and how many times (so you have secrecy, but not privacy).

Shun!

Because it has significantly more features than IRC and it's dead simple to spin up your own "server" where you aren't beholden much to "admins" or whatever.

fancy IRC

IRC was already "caveman playing with sticks and pebbles" a decade before discord became a thing. It's really not a good point of comparison and questioning.

Discord became popular for one simple reason: anyone could make a server, share it with a crossplatform link, and others could then try out that link without installing anything. In other words, it became popular because it literally copied Slack and because the Skype era was atrociously bad customization and ease of use-wise compared to the preceding.

If you legitimately don't understand why it's popular, you are seriously out of touch.

• Better moderation tools
• Easier to do voice/video channels
• Easy to create your own server
• Huge amount of useful bots created by the community
• Features like replies, threads, onboarding screens, and custom emotes

Don't get me wrong, I wish that we could use a FOSS platform instead of Discord, but 1: people are already using Discord and it's hard to get everyone to switch platform, and 2: there is no comparable alternative right now

I don’t understand why it’s so popular…

It’s a fancy IRC

The answer is in the question. Even the centralization is not a bad thing for most people.

I use it because some of my favorite games for the Nintendo DS that has Wiimmfi support use it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Too hard to regrow the, already tiny user base in those cases.

“I guess people just prefer and are more active on TikTok”

You should start at the fact that Discord is owned by a chinese company.

Discord Inc is a privately-owned American company. If you're referring to Tencent, they are investors, and not owners. And they're only one of several foreign investors. As for ownership, two dudes share majority ownership of the company.

Then discuss everything else.

Maybe you should do ten seconds of Googling before discussing anything.

Yes, I'm using Discord's terminology for a discussion about Discord. What they call a "server" is not actually a server, but that's the term they went with.

I could've used the Discord dev term "guild", since that's how "servers" are referred to internally and in the code, but I don't think as many people would understand what I meant by that.