Now that we have a gitplace for t/suki, I’d really like to add a chatplace.
There’s a few reasons I feel motivated to do this:
I use Discord a lot and I think it’s clear to everyone that Discord has been slowly enshittifying, especially over the last year. It would be nice to have a good alternative that isn’t prone to enshittification.
I want to make t/suki into a “digital third place” where people from all walks of life feel comfortable hanging out and having good conversations about games. We added the category as a way to have more casual conversations. It’s a great way to engage with others and become more comfortable with the community, and chat is a natural evolution of that.
There’s a few ways to do this:
Discourse Chat: At the moment, this is my favorite option. It’s easy for me to add and maintain, since it’s a core feature of Discourse that is already installed. I just need to enable it! It’s tightly integrated with Discourse, which makes it attractive. One integration I like is the ability to select part of a conversation and seamlessly start a topic to have a deeper conversation about it. Discourse also wrote a blog post about why they made it and what it’s capable of. It’s not interoperable, but I think the benefits outweigh that.
Revolt: This is basically open-source Discord. However, I’m not really a fan of Discord and Revolt’s design, since I see it as the digital equivalent of suburbia. Every server is essentially a tiny fiefdom and counter to my quest to turn t/suki into a digital third place. As far as I can tell, It also has no interoperability – even with other Revolt instances. You can only join one Revolt instance at a time on your phone, so if you wanted to join multiple Revolt servers you’d have to sign out and back in every time you wanted to look at servers in a different instance. They are also open to the possibility of federating, but they haven’t committed to it and it’s not on their roadmap. That said, Discord is very successful and it’s nice to see an open-source option available for this kind of UX. If it had better interop, I would be pretty enthusiastic about hosting an instance of it.
Matrix: It’s an open communication protocol and you can use any chat client you want! However, I know from experience that the server is a pain to administer and also a pain to use as a user. It certainly doesn’t help that the organization in charge of the protocol like to change it frequently with no regard for other chat applications in the ecosystem, leading to a very inconsistent experience depending on what apps everyone might be using to access the chat. Matrix also supports E2EE, but we don’t need that for a group chat. Also, if you want E2EE my opinion is that Signal is a far better option.
XMPP or IRC: These are old-school, but well established. They are, in my opinion, the only good and successful chat protocols and I would prefer one of these over Matrix. However, they’re also a little harder for others to adopt and they don’t generally support the features most people have come to expect from modern chat applications.
Pretty much every option other than Discourse Chat means higher initial and continuing costs for me, so I’m heavily in favor of it. However, I’d like to hear what everyone thinks. Would you chat on t/suki? What chat client would you prefer and why?
I’d love to see an alternative to discord as well. i’ve come to really dislike vendor lock-in recently so something with federation capabilities would be the best. Unfortunately the only options i’ve seen are the ones you already listed, which is not very encouraging
I’ve had good experiences with discourse chat on another forum I’m in - it just works from my end, just had to notice the chat button at the bottom of the screen
dunno what its like in terms of privacy? discord felt private for a long time even if it never truly was.
I like the idea of chat, especially when I consider the path Discord is taking. I’m not too picky about how it works or looks, so the easiest option is fine by me.
I believe it has the same amount of “privacy” as Discord. That is, chat would only be available to users who are logged in and could be scraped by anyone with access. There’s no E2EE, so anyone with admin access could technically snoop on any conversation on the server. Other than requiring login to view, it’s not much different privacy-wise from the forum itself.
On the bright side, there’s a built-in chat retention policy unlike Discord, which I find really attractive (I’ve complained about the lack of this on my server before). By default, it only keeps chat channel messages for 90 days and indefinitely for chat direct messages. That means even if someone does get access, they won’t be able to scrape everything everyone might have said in a casual context.
That said, I think it would be better to retain all chat messages for only 90 days, to nudge people in the direction of the existing private messages (you can think of these as private topics) for conversations that people want to refer to in the future. Private messages are just like topics and stay around indefinitely, but only accessible by two people and come with all the niceties of writing any other post. There’s a much more in-depth conversation about this quirk on meta.discourse.org. That way, we can treat chat as being completely ephemeral and topics as not ephemeral, which I think would be better UX.
Honestly, I’m not sure federation is that attractive in this use case. Like, I think it would be okay to say that you need an account here to chat here. But, it would be really nice if you could use anything you wanted to access the chat, like how you can use any client you want for IRC and XMPP to connect to any number of chat servers you want to be in.
If Discourse Chat supported federation or interoperability – like if it actually supported XMPP under the hood – I would be so excited. However, I think the improved UX from having a tightly integrated chat with the forum is worth it over hosting a separate chat service and that seems to be how the Discourse team feels too.
Though, I wish Discourse Chat also supported voice chat, video calls, screen share… just hanging out in a voice channel on Discord is nice. Maybe I want too much
A thought occurred to me, but does discourse support RSS feeds? A lot of the social media i use has been fragmenting recently and i’ve been looking at some RSS clients to try and get the chaos under control.
category as a way to have more casual conversations. It’s a great way to engage with others and become more comfortable with the community, and chat is a natural evolution of that.
Discourse Chat: At the moment, this is my favorite option. It’s easy for me to add and maintain, since it’s a core feature of Discourse that is already installed. I just need to enable it! It’s tightly integrated with Discourse, which makes it attractive. One integration I like is the ability to select part of a conversation and seamlessly start a topic to have a deeper conversation about it. Discourse also wrote a blog post about why they made it and what it’s capable of. It’s not interoperable, but I think the benefits outweigh that.
Revolt: This is basically open-source Discord. However, I’m not really a fan of Discord and Revolt’s design, since I see it as the digital equivalent of suburbia. Every server is essentially a tiny fiefdom and counter to my quest to turn t/suki into a digital third place. As far as I can tell, It also has no interoperability – even with other Revolt instances. You can only join one Revolt instance at a time on your phone, so if you wanted to join multiple Revolt servers you’d have to sign out and back in every time you wanted to look at servers in a different instance. They are also open to the possibility of federating, but they haven’t committed to it and it’s not on their roadmap. That said, Discord is very successful and it’s nice to see an open-source option available for this kind of UX. If it had better interop, I would be pretty enthusiastic about hosting an instance of it.
Matrix: It’s an open communication protocol and you can use any chat client you want! However, I know from experience that the server is a pain to administer and also a pain to use as a user. It certainly doesn’t help that the organization in charge of the protocol like to change it frequently with no regard for other chat applications in the ecosystem, leading to a very inconsistent experience depending on what apps everyone might be using to access the chat. Matrix also supports E2EE, but we don’t need that for a group chat. Also, if you want E2EE my opinion is that Signal is a far better option.
XMPP or IRC: These are old-school, but well established. They are, in my opinion, the only good and successful chat protocols and I would prefer one of these over Matrix. However, they’re also a little harder for others to adopt and they don’t generally support the features most people have come to expect from modern chat applications.
