this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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Never understood why anyone would want to pay 100$ a year for discord, the paid version doesnt give you that much imo
Which is a good monetation system. Premium users barely get anything but still enough to pay, while free users can do pretty much everything too.
Discord makes money by selling data, premium is just extra
I don't think they're selling any data from what I've heard. For now. The owner has a past of selling out.
I spam 500mb uploads... it kinda makes sense to me
Personally, Discord has facilitated a long distance relationship with my now wife, and nearly ten years of weekly TTRPG games. I don't mind the cost because they cannot provide that service for free forever, and I think it's worth it for what I get out of it. The other benefits they add for paying are almost just bonuses to me after that.
you could also pay to host some shit like mumble.
It cannot be overstated how much of a boon Discord's lack of friction is for connecting with people and forming communities. It is mind-flatteningly easy to get onto Discord and into a community, and while the content of those communities is woefully unindexed deep web, forever sequestered, the external discoverability of the communities themselves is exceptional.
You will not ever reach the same people with the same ease of use as Discord if you use a hosted alternative.
the only "feature" that discord has is that other people use it.
If you're communicating with your wife over it, i can assure you the barrier to entry is the amount of time it takes to set up a mumble server, and the money that hosting it will cost. Configuring a mumble client takes like 12 seconds.
There is friction in form of having to create an account and avoiding getting suspended or asked for a phone number, which t today seems about as easy as carding.
Mumble does not look like a replacement for all the things I use Discord for.
certainly not, but it's a solid VOIP replacement. The best one on the market.
personally the $3 a month nitro is worth it for me, considering how much I use it. I know Lemmy hates anything capitalist but a coffee a month isnt that much
I pay $30 a year for Nitro Basic. It's only $2.50 a month and worth it to me with how much I use it.
Same, I call it my "shitposting tax"
To support the developers and pay for a product you use all the time? Same reason you pay for any software/game.
I agree with you in principle for supporting developers directly through something like OpenCollective....
... but ask Mozilla how much their Firefox devs get for each financial donation.
The company is the heart of the software and it would not exist without the company most likely. True the execs get probably a larger share of any payments but it's just the way the world works. It's a piece of software produced by the company, not the developers.
Yes that is the sad reality of it, but I don't think it justifies sending money to the company in the first place. They're backed by VC and are already predisposed to screw you financially in the longrun. Why accelerate this with donations
Lol. Read their EULA
You don't wanna pay $100 for a bunch of useless stickers and random features that don't need to be in a chat program? Whaaaaaat? That's weird. ^/s^
For $100, you could rent a VPS for a year and host whatever chat service you want on it, with whatever rules you want.
that's true. however, you're gonna have a tough time finding something to run on there that isn't worse than discord by any reasonable metric.
like, buddy, i get it. i also selfhost. but let's not lie to ourselves. google drive is LIGHTYEARS ahead of collabora, matrix is a buggy mess, jellyfin -- okay, well jellyfin is actually unironically better than netflix, but that's assuming you have the technical chops to run a seedbox and the money to bulid a sufficiently beefy transcoding server (either that or put up with external video players, excessive bandwidth usage, and in some cases stuttering bc of software decoding), and you can either overlook the moral issues or buy everything on blu-ray, and ChatGPT and friends might suck total ass but they can still run circles around anything you can load into ollama.
this is also ignoring the fact that you would need the technical know-how to self-host, which as techies we tend to underestimate. is docker easy for us? yes. is it easy for joe random who may or may not have ever intentionally opened his browser devtools? no. plus there's still configuration files to think of. but even if you're using one of those easy vps services that does all that for you, you're still selfhosting a freaking chat platform. assuming you want to talk to anyone who isn't an LLM, you're going to have to either convince them to join your chat platform and then do moderation, or federate, in which case, what can you get from a single user instance that you can't get by joining someone else's instance and saving yourself a LOT of hassle?