Discord II

Discord is dead. Long live Matrix, TeamSpeak and Stoat! This topic has been on my mind since Discord announced that everyone is going to be on a teen account unless they verify their identity. In my original post about Discord, I talked about my frustration with this app and how it is rapidly straying from its original purpose. Now it has finally reached a breaking point, and not just for me. The proof lies in Stoat, which is essentially a Discord clone.

Stoat shows up as one of the first alternatives for Discord. Since Discord's announcement, the developers have been talking about how their one server running the app has been rather overwhelmed. People who respect their own privacy and cyber security are beginning to leave Discord, and Stoat seems to be one of the most popular options. Of course, I did mention the other two options.

I'm hosting both a Matrix and TeamSpeak server for my friends. Over this weekend, I've found that Matrix, like Stoat, still needs a lot of polishing. Matrix does not have its own version of group voice chat (instead it uses another service called Jitsi); it's also difficult to get one-to-one voice calls to work, but it has great support for encrypted group text messaging. TeamSpeak is superior for voice chat, but text messaging is limited to the voice chat you're currently connected to. There is no channel system like in Stoat or Matrix.

I think this whole Discord situation really highlights a problem that people have been trying to solve on the internet since its inception: communication. To put it plainly, it's difficult to make more than one computer communicate directly with each other over the internet without a middle man involved. Discord's service is centralized, meaning they store everything (text messages, account data, etc.) on their servers; Matrix is federated, meaning that individuals can host their own instances of the application that users connect to and store their data on (so like having separate versions of Discord).

Even the peer-to-peer voice communication framework used by Discord, Stoat and virtually any modern chat application (including Matrix), WebRTC, does not work without having external servers involved. In WebRTC, there are servers involved in the process of establishing a P2P connection between two clients. These servers are called STUN and TURN servers. TURN Is essential to have a reliable connection between devices because it helps connections traverse around users' NATs, essentially their home network, and to the individual device. STUN does the same thing, but takes up less bandwidth than TURN. Then you have ICE, which is a collection of publicly-maintained servers that establish the media connection between devices. Only after going through that entire process do you have a P2P connection.

To me, a true P2P process is something like the BitTorrent protocol. There is no convoluted process for establishing a connection between peers in BitTorrent. "Swarms" of hosts can directly connect to each other and share files without having to utilize external servers. The reason WebRTC has to be so much more complicated, I think, is because of the fact that is for synchronized, real-time communication. BitTorrent is just for bytes of data.

Anyways, Discord has proven that they don't care about users' privacy or security. That's why I've chosen to abandon it. The technology they built their app with, however, is not proprietary. WebRTC has many open-sources implementations in JavaScript, the scripting language of the web. What Discord has done is fragmented their user base into different apps, and maybe that's for the best. This proves that centralization is not a good idea. Discord knows that they're going to lose users, but they also know that the people who have used it for years have become so entrenched that they have nowhere else to go. To them, the users are just mines of data.

This must be a reckoning for Discord. The technology they use is not proprietary. This will only cause other apps to gain popularity, as is happening with Stoat. Perhaps in a year, maybe even in a few months, a slew of new WebRTC-enabled communication will become available, all thanks to Discord's push to become something more mainstream, while also catering to the rich and powerful. Discord isn't for people like you and me any more; it has become the Facebook of gaming.