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Discord going public. Plz help a future refugee.
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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Honest question, but on a technical level isn’t discord basically IRC with some bells, whistles, emojis, and a some WebRTC Logic wrapped in electron with a large marketing budget? Throw in some cloud storage and a CDN for images. What am I missing? I’m not saying it’s “easy”, but I’m curious what it would take to build a solid streamlined FOSS alternative built on combining existing technologies.
Edit: I’m not familiar with the ecosystem… is the issue with existing FOSS bad UI and complicated onboarding? Missing features? Or is it simply a critical mass issue?
In addition to the replies you got already, discord has screen sharing/streaming. An experience kind of like zoom (I don't use it and dont see the appeal but maybe someone who does can elaborate more. My partner uses this feature sometimes).
Discord is not even necessarily Electron. I'm running it as Datcord, which is a Firefox based wrapper.
Discord has a searchble chat history, which is what sets it apart from IRC. Everything else can be emulated by modern IRC clients, such as emoji and embedded / unfurling images and link previews.
However imagine the chat history as if you had a bouncer that has 100% uptime and joined all possible chat channels from their creation, along with offering you search and buffer.
If not IRC, either Matrix or XMPP should be capable of this.
I'm fairly sure Discord's popularity was due to aggressive marketing, likely during their venture capital funding rounds. Something which FOSS does not have.