Why are FOSS platforms like Matrix having such a hard time getting users to migrate from Discord? Because of PluralKit.
This seems like a rather really hyeprspecific use case than āthe reason platforms like Matrix donāt get as much traction as Discordā.
Preach
(a) network effects (b) inertia Ā© Matrix is still kind of a pain in the ass
Are all easily more capable to explain it (d) all the users are otherkin
Plurality is a lot more common than most people think. The existence of pluralkit exposed a LOT of people to the idea of plurality and got them realising they were already plural. Myself included.
Itās kind of like how a lot of lesbians didnāt understand their own identities until they heard Katy Perry sing āI kissed a girlā.
Furthermore, imagine youāre on a server with 500 active members, and there are 5 systems who use pluralkit. That server has probably had the āwhy are you a botā āIām using pluralkitā conversation dozens of times. All 500 people know how important pluralkit is. On Discord, there are dozens of allies for every one system.
It mostly seems like your personal experiences and server choices might be giving you the wrong idea. It might be the reason your communities donāt make the switch, but the wider userbase doesnāt really know about any this at all.
If it was as prevalent and the big reason, plurality would be more common in general servers or those dedicated to some other topic. Itās my, and probably a sizeable portion of peopleās, first time hearing about PluralKit. Even knowing about plurality and systems prior to this. Iām in a bunch of servers with indescribable amounts of people and this really hasnāt come up at all.
If you were to ask a random discord user/mod/server owner why they donāt switch to Matrix, they most likely wonāt answer āIt doesnāt have PluralKit and I/my friends use itā, but āWhatās Matrix?/Whatās PluralKit?/How so you use it?/Discordās fine/But why?/IDCā
Like, all power to you, this shows an important missing feature for your community in Matrix, but I donāt think this is it.
With federation between different Matrix servers, whatās the holdup? Why arenāt people leaving Discord?
Poor usability, confusing to get started on, your instance may just vanish at some point, annoying encryption system you have to verify new devices on, feels slow on both browser and in app, lack of features (ie; no low latency game streaming, rich presence, easily joinable voice rooms).
It also shares the same issue as Mastodon, where if your instance vanishes you canāt just log in with your account on another one and have everything ready to go, because the account is tied specifically to that original instance.
Overall as a fairly techy type user I still find Matrix, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc all pretty frustrating to use.
Iām a techy, linux-driving, self-hosting guy. Iām using Discord for my club chat because thereās no other practical options. People who harp about moving off Discord seem like theyāve never considered user-friendliness in their considerations.
Iām sorry, but no. PluralKit only really impacts a tiny minority of the userbase to begin with. It isnāt enough to cause people outside that group to choose the platform, nor is it enough for people outside of that minority to avoid moving to whatever the next big thing is.
No, I definitely have friends who are allies and who care about accessibility for their friends.
Sure, but that doesnāt mean Discordās āsecret weaponā has anything to do with PluralKit specifically.
Discord is popular compared to both commercial competitors and eg. FOSS projects like Matrix because of a variety of different factors, usability being one of the biggest ones. Accessibility may well be a factor (even a big one), but attributing all of that to just PluralKit honestly seems a bit short-sighted
You are certainly not wrong, but I think even if you add up all people with multiple personalities + their friends willing to stick with Discord due to Pluralkit, I would be very surprised if youād be within less than 4 digits after the comma percentage-wise.
I think @Kangie was mostly responding to the clickbaity title of it being Discordās āsecret weaponā to keep everyone on the platform when no, it just would not matter. Itās like Mastodon and Twitter. The people who really, truly care are already on Mastodon and the rest is where the biggest community is.
As far as Iām aware, thereās nothing preventing a PluralKit equivalent from being made for other platforms. In fact, a quick search turned up a WIP Matrix port on github.
So no, I donāt think this is true. Lack of PluralKit isnāt whatās preventing people from switching en masse. Itās the oppositeālack of people switching means thereās a lack of demand for a PluralKit port in the first place, so even though there is a port people donāt know it exists and thus it doesnāt get as much dev attention.
It comes down to network effects, ultimately, and just plain inertia. If youāre already on Discord, and all your friends are on Discord, itās hard to convince you to switch. And being more familiar with the Discord bot ecosystem (like PluralKit) is just one more thing that adds to the inertia.
But Discord has cultivated a queer membership by serving a different need than those platforms: privacy.
Yeah, gonna stop reading right there. Discord is absolutely selling your data. Nothing against inclusivity features though.
Discord became ubiquitous because it works well, and is free. Take VC money, run at loss, get tons of users, enshittify, die because something better becomes good enough. Itās just another one of those speed runs, which will happen over and over again until the end of humanity.
The difference:
- Discord, Facebook/WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. are selling your dataā¦ to select customers.
- Matrix, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc. are giving your data for freeā¦ to everyone.
Like, if there was a stalker wanting to attack you in particularā¦ neither is good, but one is worse than the other.
How matrix with its end to end encryption giving my data to everyone???
Matrix encrypts by default when starting a āDM roomā, otherwise it doesnāt force encryption, only allows it.
All the unencrypted rooms out there, are susceptible of getting their contents scraped by either the server, a federated server, an invited user, or even anyone.
Encrypted rooms, can also get scraped unless theyāre set with security in mind (only send to validated users, make it invite only, donāt show past history).
Lemmy is not enriching the data you put on it with data that Lemmy purchases from third parties, in order to create a
user-productto sell to advertisers. Meta and Discord are (obviously Meta much moreso). Thatās why advertisers buy from them instead of just scraping your posts themselves.Advertisers buy from data brokers, not necessarily directly from Meta or Discord. Meta and Google act as data brokers themselves, but they also sell to other data brokers. Those data brokers, will definitely scrape your posts themselves, if they canāt buy them, or the derived data, directly.
Lemmy, and the Fediverse, has multiple instances that federate and get handed out copies of what we post. We donāt really know whatās going on at each and every instance, and thereās no way of knowing.
(don't do this)
If I was a data broker wanting to siphon data from the Fediverse, Iād set up several instances with fake communities and fake users, federate with the different shards of the Fediverse, have the fake users subscribe to as many feeds as possible (easier to do on Lemmy/Kbin than on Mastodon), create accounts on some of the larger instances to get the āLocalā feed, and just wait for the data to arrive. It would miss some of the posts, mostly from smaller less federated non-Lemmy instances, but Iām guessing close to 99% could be siphoned with relatively little effort, and for cheaper than buying the data from any single instance. Scraping historical data is extra easy with instances returning some JSON and having clients parse it, be it in JS or in apps. Deleted messages can be either gathered with the custom instance setup, or retrieved from instances that didnāt honor the delete action (there still are some out there).
Right, you do have to understand that either way, if you put something on the public internet, it is gone.
I donāt want a company to sell my data, making money off of me, then having the audacity to ask me for MORE money on top (nitro). It feels gross.
I donāt mind sharing bits of myself online otherwise.
The owners of federated instances can also just start selling your data too at any point. And as you said, advertisers will also just scrape public data trivially. Basically, the internet and world is a terrible place.
Stuff gets deleted from the Internet all the timeā¦ other stuff goes viral and lasts for decades. YMMV
It seems to me like your threat model is different from OPās, though. Worrying about ad blockers not being enough, is not the same as fearing for your life because someone might decide to track down where you are IRL.
which will happen over and over again until the end of
humanitycapitalism.I fixed it for you.
I think you should keep reading for 10 more words. I elaborated on exactly what youāre talking about in the 10 words after that quote.
Literally never heard of it let alone know anyone who caresā¦
Thatās really strange, this seems like the sort of Lemmy instance where people would care about accessibility the minute they heard about the issue
Iām a Discord-using LGBT ally, and I donāt know anybody who uses this (nor had I heard about it until now). You may be overestimating itās reach / appeal.
Youāre responding to someone from a different instance. Lemmy is not Discord, itās federated š
So, let me see if i understand the argument: Discord, a piece of closed source software which is very popular at the moment because they hit first (user inertia) and havenāt yet ramped up the enshittification (but sooner or later will because they already announced the intention to go the IPO route), wins over free software alternatives because of a 100% unofficial bot designed to help with one tiny niche user case most users of the platform havenāt even heard about, which is itself free software and therefore could be migrated and/or adapted to other free software?
Iām not sure the argument is very solid
This bot detects messages with certain tags associated with a profile, then replaces that message under a āpseudo-accountā of that profile using webhooks. This is useful for multiple people sharing one body (aka āsystemsā), people who wish to roleplay as different characters without having several accounts, or anyone else who may want to post messages as a different person from the same account.
Yeah, that seems incredibly niche. Never heard or thought of necessity of it.
Discord gained popularity and maintains it, in spite of the many reasons to avoid it, because of usability and feature richness. Slack, Teams, Matrix, Telegram, they are miles ahead of everyone else in the live-chat space, when it comes to user experience.
This was an interesting article about some tech Iāve never heard of before, but it has little to nothing to do with Discordās overall success.
I did this for the dumbest of reasons, but Iāve been testing Guilded for a week now. My friends and I bought each other discord nitro for a few months over Xmas and when it ran out we were bummed. But we all agree nitro is not worth it unless discord is a part of your income stream like a Streamer or somekind of media relation for a company that hosts a discord for feedback and engagement.
Found someone mentioning guilded randomly on a lemmy comment. Turns out you get higher quality voice, large amounts of emoji and a few features not in discord. Currently no soundboard or stickers. Havenāt tested a stream yet, but I donāt think you are limited there either by default like discord.
Is it the discord killer? Probably not. The discord killer will be the IPO or company that buys them and has to actually make a profit on the platform. Once people get ads in their chat, some will bail. But for now, I think we are in an era of jumping from āgrowth phaseā platform to āgrowth phaseā platform. If data privacy isnāt your primary concern, doing this lets you enjoy features for mainly free until a platform has to monetize.
Advantage of moving on services like discord is itās feasible for some of us. I have a small group of friends we use discord for and get together to game. So as long as I make a good use case and we like the new platform, jumping to guilded will be similar to when we jumped from mumble to discord.
As someone who is very much inside the queer bubble, and who thinks pluralkit is an essential tool to have in any discord server that considers itsself accessible or queer friendly: I strongly disagree that its the feature preventing FOSS alternatives from taking off. It could be a small factor in a sea of small factors, but Iād wager over 50% of discord users have never even seen PluralKit.
Interesting argument. Iād be curious if you know roughly how many plural people there are (letās say headcounts as thereās only one body) compared to Discordās user base. (150 million active users per month according to random half-assed google search)
No, I donāt know.
But your point was that this is actively keeping people on Discord? By extension, that must mean that a significant bulk of those 150M users are kept on Discord because it has PluralKit. How do you reconcile that with the group of plurals being, apparently, quite small? To the point where even on Beehaw/Lemmy almost nobody seems to even have heard of it.
Well, there are a lot of discord users who are allies and believe in supporting others, and thatās why
Ever heard of the terms faulty generalisation, sampling bias, or echo chamber?
Very interesting indeed.
I guess a usecase like this easily slips past most developers due to lack of exposure :?
Is the need to respond as a separate entity so frequent that separate accounts for each entity would not be enough or is the user switching process too much friction?
I once knew a system with 400 members. Thatās not common, but it is a thing. Systems of around 10 people are very common. Discord only allows up to 5 accounts. And only up to 1 account on mobile. And besides, having to maintain separate email accounts, even for a small system, is a burden. What about walk-ins and dormancies? What about new members who are still figuring themselves out and might want a change of name later? Pluralkit makes it all simple.
Matrix allows up to ā accounts, changing the display name, and user icon at any time, plus true E2E encryption (if enabled). Also allows only sending to cryptographically verified accounts, to curb impostors.
There is a list of several clients with multi-account support if you filter by āFeaturesv Multi-accountā: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
Itās a pity the reference client doesnāt have the support, and some of are in beta, but still seems like PluralKit is kind of a clumsy workaround for an artificial limitation imposed by Discordās monetization goals.
How long would you say it takes to change your username and pfp on Matrix if you know exactly what youāre doing and have done it plenty of times before? 20 seconds? Pluralkit can do a proxy in 2 seconds. 20 seconds is not an acceptable delay to sending a chat message to most people, but 2 seconds is.
And what if two members of a system are in a conversation, possibly with a third person? Is it going to retroactively change the username and pfp on the old messages? Cause that would turn the conversation to complete nonsense. Imagine Iām having a discussion with some friends, two of whom are in a system, I step away to go to the toilet, and when I come back 5 minutes later I canāt tell who was talking in the last 5 minutes.
Changing from one account to another takesā¦ letās see: click on the icon, pick an account, done. 2 seconds? yeah, something like that. You had to setup the accounts beforehand, but Iām guessing the same thing happens with PluralKit, doesnāt it?
Is it going to retroactively change the username and pfp on the old messages?
Each account/user has their own setup, soā¦ yes? no? Not sure what you mean.
Imagine Iām having a discussion with some friends, two of whom are in a system, I step away to go to the toilet, and when I come back 5 minutes later I canāt tell who was talking in the last 5 minutes.
Not sure I follow. How does PluralKit do it? Does it create a separate user for every message?
PS: for reference, FluffyChat even has an alt account grouping feature:
Interesting article! I canāt tell from the post, though, is this due to a limitation on bots in Matrix or that no one has invested to make a similar bot for Matrix?
I donāt know. Maybe one day Iāll look into the Matrix API and see if itās possible. Theoretically it should be easy as long as webhooks are in place. The hard part is hosting. Pluralkit is huge compared to most discord bots. They used to have lots of downtime, but now they run it across a lot of shards.
I mean Revolt has the capability for per message profiles, it just doesnāt have the ui for it yet
I have no real hope left for Revolt anyway though so meh
why no hope for Revolt? I had looked into it self hosting wise, but when I realized they had made it really difficult, I lost interest and havenāt been following it since.
Pretty much this plus a bit more
Theyāre honestly low-key hostile towards anyone trying to host another instance
Theyāre clearly going for profit, theyāve said it before, and I can only see it going shittier from here because of it
I donāt see the point of PluralKit, you can just use multiple accounts.
I donāt know shit about plural systems and have no idea about PluralKit but I can already forsee two issues that regular user accounts would have:
- There may be systems who switch operators frequently; having to switch between multiple accounts could be a major hurdle for fluent conversation
- Some systems may have too many operators to reasonably manage accounts for
As far as I understand it, PluralKit is more of a hack for acting as multiple pseudo-accounts with the convenience of a single (platform-) account. Given that Matrix, Element and the like are FOSS, it ought to be possible to build such a convenient single-āuserā multi-account mechanisms into the clients or even protocol themselves rather than relying on hacky 3rd party add-ons.
Especially given that the user base of Matrix is far more likely to come into contact with plural systems than the general population is. (In the communities I frequent, I know of at least one and would not be surprised if there were quite a few more.)
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