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 “the reason platforms like Matrix don’t get as much traction as Discord”.
Preach
(a) network effects (b) inertia © 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.
It’s kind of like how a lot of lesbians didn’t understand their own identities until they heard Katy Perry sing “I kissed a girl”.
Furthermore, imagine you’re on a server with 500 active members, and there are 5 systems who use pluralkit. That server has probably had the “why are you a bot” “I’m using pluralkit” 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 don’t make the switch, but the wider userbase doesn’t 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. It’s my, and probably a sizeable portion of people’s, first time hearing about PluralKit. Even knowing about plurality and systems prior to this. I’m in a bunch of servers with indescribable amounts of people and this really hasn’t come up at all.
If you were to ask a random discord user/mod/server owner why they don’t switch to Matrix, they most likely won’t answer “It doesn’t have PluralKit and I/my friends use it”, but “What’s Matrix?/What’s PluralKit?/How so you use it?/Discord’s fine/But why?/IDC”
Like, all power to you, this shows an important missing feature for your community in Matrix, but I don’t think this is it.
With federation between different Matrix servers, what’s the holdup? Why aren’t 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 can’t 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.
I’m a techy, linux-driving, self-hosting guy. I’m using Discord for my club chat because there’s no other practical options. People who harp about moving off Discord seem like they’ve never considered user-friendliness in their considerations.
I’m sorry, but no. PluralKit only really impacts a tiny minority of the userbase to begin with. It isn’t 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 doesn’t mean Discord’s “secret weapon” 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 you’d be within less than 4 digits after the comma percentage-wise.
I think @Kangie was mostly responding to the clickbaity title of it being Discord’s “secret weapon” to keep everyone on the platform when no, it just would not matter. It’s like Mastodon and Twitter. The people who really, truly care are already on Mastodon and the rest is where the biggest community is.
Congrats
Do you have enough of them to even moderately compare to discords user base?Because that is what the article is saying keeps most users on discord
I think it’s a nexus effect. For every plural user who needs plurakit, there are dozens of allies who know that pluralkit is necessary. Those dozens of allies are on dozens of other servers, applying pressure to stay on Discord. So even if plural users are only 1% of the population, the number of servers influenced by plural accessibility is many times that. Those influence the rest, and everyone agrees to stay on Discord. There are lots of other effects present as well, but this is the “secret weapon” that Matrix needs to get right in addition to all the obvious things people already know about.
This is an incredible amount of self delusion.
People do not choose services for themselves based on what is most convenient to you (or your tiny community)
You aren’t special. No one is.
I think there are allies who care about accessibility for marginalised people. I don’t think everyone in the world is making decisions based purely on their own self benefit.
Then you need to grow up (harsh, I know) because even those allies are only allies because they’ve decided being so is in their benefit.
There are no selfless actions, only the attribution of such by other selfish bastards happy about the decision
Oh, is your username saying you’re a Randian? As in Ayn Rand? Is that why you don’t believe there’s any nice people in the world?
As far as I’m aware, there’s 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 don’t think this is true. Lack of PluralKit isn’t what’s preventing people from switching en masse. It’s the opposite—lack of people switching means there’s a lack of demand for a PluralKit port in the first place, so even though there is a port people don’t know it exists and thus it doesn’t get as much dev attention.
It comes down to network effects, ultimately, and just plain inertia. If you’re already on Discord, and all your friends are on Discord, it’s 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. It’s 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 data… to select customers.
- Matrix, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc. are giving your data for free… to everyone.
Like, if there was a stalker wanting to attack you in particular… 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 “DM room”, otherwise it doesn’t 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 they’re set with security in mind (only send to validated users, make it invite only, don’t show past history).
Right, you do have to understand that either way, if you put something on the public internet, it is gone.
I don’t 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 don’t 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 time… other stuff goes viral and lasts for decades. YMMV
It seems to me like your threat model is different from OP’s, 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.
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). That’s 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 can’t 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 don’t really know what’s going on at each and every instance, and there’s no way of knowing.
(don't do this)
If I was a data broker wanting to siphon data from the Fediverse, I’d 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 “Local” 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 I’m 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 didn’t honor the delete action (there still are some out there).
Well that’s bullshit.
Knowing what you post in a public place is public is a much safer situation than believing you are safe while someone sells the data off behind your back
It’s talking specifically about LGBT people online, who are rightfully less worried about data analytics than targeted harassment. Having a closed space is obviously better for that than a public platform.
Targeted harassment becomes even easier, you’re just adding the $3 fee to the data broker and now they can correlate it between all your internet accounts.
Nothing about that situation is safer
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 you’re talking about in the 10 words after that quote.
OP considers “privacy” to mean their bullies have a harder time screenshotting their conversations for shitposting later
Not sure why they couldn’t have just made the Reddit communities they complain about private, but oh well
Literally never heard of it let alone know anyone who cares…
That’s really strange, this seems like the sort of Lemmy instance where people would care about accessibility the minute they heard about the issue
I’m a Discord-using LGBT ally, and I don’t know anybody who uses this (nor had I heard about it until now). You may be overestimating it’s reach / appeal.
You’re responding to someone from a different instance. Lemmy is not Discord, it’s federated 😉
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 haven’t 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 haven’t even heard about, which is itself free software and therefore could be migrated and/or adapted to other free software?
I’m not sure the argument is very solid
This bot detects messages with certain tags associated with a profile, then replaces that message under a “pseudo-account” of that profile using webhooks. This is useful for multiple people sharing one body (aka “systems”), 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 I’ve never heard of before, but it has little to nothing to do with Discord’s overall success.
I did this for the dumbest of reasons, but I’ve 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. Haven’t tested a stream yet, but I don’t 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 “growth phase” platform to “growth phase” platform. If data privacy isn’t 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 it’s 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 I’d wager over 50% of discord users have never even seen PluralKit.
Interesting argument. I’d be curious if you know roughly how many plural people there are (let’s say headcounts as there’s only one body) compared to Discord’s user base. (150 million active users per month according to random half-assed google search)
No, I don’t 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 that’s why
Ever heard of the terms faulty generalisation, sampling bias, or echo chamber?
Dozens * Dozens of allies = hundreds
Hundreds / 150,000,000 = not enough to matter to the reasons you state it does
No, I know dozens of systems personally, and the systems I know are definitely a tiny fraction of all the systems on Discord.
Fine.
Dozens * dozens * hundreds of communities perhaps unknown = thousands
Still not enough to make a meaningful difference.
Look, I know I’m being a hardass about this, but progress is not achieved through wishful thinking, but by understanding market forces and ensuring the inevitable consequences of them are as minimally harmful to marginalized populations as possible.
What happens when discord pulls a Reddit and disables bot access for some bullshit money reason? Then all PluralKit users are SoL
As presumptuous as I know this is, what your post and article should have been about is an explanation of how Pluralkit benefits you in the discord workflow, and how that might be best adapted to better and more user respectful platforms so that the transition of some groups becomes easier once discord starts pulling the inevitable shit.
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. That’s 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 ∞ 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 “Featuresv Multi-account”: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
It’s a pity the reference client doesn’t 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 Discord’s monetization goals.
How long would you say it takes to change your username and pfp on Matrix if you know exactly what you’re 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 I’m 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 can’t tell who was talking in the last 5 minutes.
Changing from one account to another takes… let’s see: click on the icon, pick an account, done. 2 seconds? yeah, something like that. You had to setup the accounts beforehand, but I’m guessing the same thing happens with PluralKit, doesn’t it?
Is it going to retroactively change the username and pfp on the old messages?
Each account/user has their own setup, so… yes? no? Not sure what you mean.
Imagine I’m 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 can’t 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:
system with 400 members
You might want to start suspecting that person of being full of shit, seeing as the human brain is only capable of maintaining around 150 identities so you can remember who your friends are, not even including plurality.
If they have 400 “members”, then most if not all of them no longer qualify as a full identity. Human brains are literally not capable of such a thing.
Interesting article! I can’t 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 don’t know. Maybe one day I’ll look into the Matrix API and see if it’s 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.
pluralkit is huge compared to most discord bots
Citation needed
I mean Revolt has the capability for per message profiles, it just doesn’t 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 haven’t been following it since.
Pretty much this plus a bit more
They’re honestly low-key hostile towards anyone trying to host another instance
They’re clearly going for profit, they’ve said it before, and I can only see it going shittier from here because of it
I don’t see the point of PluralKit, you can just use multiple accounts.
I don’t 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-“user” 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.)
Well, this author has no idea what they’re talking about.
They even invalidate the importance of plural kit in the article
Sure, you can prefix your posts with the member of the system who’s speaking, but that’s clunky and boring.
Honestly, I doubt queer focused communities hit even 2% of discords user base, and to pretend that an accessibility tool specifically designed for them is what keeps discord on top is delusional in the extreme.
The answer is quite simple: discord has the network, so they get the network effect. Even including how not private or secure they are, until they royally fuck up that network effect will continue.
And this tool will likely never be implemented in any secure type of system, due to its potential for abuse. Who you are talking to is then solely on the word of that handle, without even the platform account providing any guarantees. Tools like this are narcissists dream: able to filter through potential victims playing both sides of any drama perpetually.
The author is Me, and I’d like it if we could have a nice discussion without calling anyone a delusional narcissist.
Nobody did…
I’d like it if we could have a discussion based on reality, and not through the lens of your personal biases or your delusion sense of self importance.
We can’t all get what we want, tho, can we?
Look, I understand this bot is important to you, but that doesn’t make it important to everyone else, and that isn’t wrong of them.
You also really overestimate the effect of “allies”, thinking they would change which services they use based on what’s most convenient to you.
If this bot is so important to you, go make a version of it that works on other platforms, instead of trying to bait others into doing the work for you by falsely claiming it is a “secret weapon”
Even by accessibility standards, Pluralkit is far down on the list of priorities, for just about everyone.
Oh, you’re a realist? No, I don’t think we’re going to have a fruitful discussion at all. If you’re going to call anyone who disagrees with you delusional then there’s no point at all in trying to have a reasonable discussion.
You can think I’m calling you delusional just because you disagreed with me if you want, I can’t stop you.
But know you are assuming my motivations, and it comes across as a further denial of reality, since if you cared about reality you would want this discussion to be on provable assertions, but everyone else itt agrees with me, so you know that’s not going to go well.
And for the record, I called your take delusional because it flies in the face of obvious data and known market forces that many others have pointed out.
I then referred to you as delusional when you completely rejected what everyone else said because it disagreed with you.
Projection, thy name is Grail
