Hello. I'm looking for a more private (for obicous reasons) and fast discord client for android, since the app is terrible and preforms terribly on my relatively old phone. I can't change to something like matrix/signal, since I can't convert other people.
Discord is adding ads soon. Currently, they don't enforce the TOS violation of custom clients, but maybe after they add ads, they will begin to do so. I would be very careful with any of this.
Revolt is very interesting but it's basically going through a complete rebuild now and it's not fully featured yet. We all want people to switch to better software but Revolt needs some more time I think (unless you don't care about absence of native mobile clients and video calls). We don't want new users immediately getting frustrated and switching back to the big tech garbage
Other platforms with ads haven't really seen people move off those platforms. I feel like once it reaches that critical mass of being nearly ubiquitous it takes a massive problem to push people off of it. Look at SMS in the US and how it's refused to die compared to other markets because it has reached saturation and now the only challenge to that ubiquity is iMessage who basically lives off being a fake SMS service.
Privacy isn't the only reason to use free software. Some people have contacts on Discord that they don't want to lose touch with. Of course, like all proprietary silo networks, Discord is best avoided if possible.
They are "looking for a more private" client. With the centralized Discord service that does anything it wants with any message there is no such thing.
None of them exist on Android. You have Discord clients mods like the recommended pre-react version, Aliucord which while outdated (But still working and supported by the project !) fix the slowness issues of the current version.
Vencord has a proof-of-concept WPA app too but it's still mostly just browsing the main website so it ain't ideal.
I would like to point out Beeper https://www.beeper.com/, which is Matrix based and aim to easily use their self-hosted (Or your self-hosted !) bridges to different services, including Discord ! Not ideal outside of small servers or just DM's however (but you can customize which synced servers you want in it).
You could just also use your own VPS but i digress. It seems they plan on keeping their app proprietary with just the bridge tools to be able to be used with their app. (You could do use the individual matrix-bridges services however as an alternative but again, Beeper seems to be the only service that offer such hosting for direct usage)
@Persen They took an OSS licensed Element, and created a closed source fork, because the license allows that. Definitely not trustworthy. But no need to use their fork.
For similar reasons to your own, I tried a few different Discord frontends a while back so I could chat with one of my friends who lives abroad. I never found a winner. They either wouldn't connect or would be missing tons of features (for example: one of them only let you watch the chat, not participate in it). I also seem to remember reading somewhere that Discord is pretty aggressive when it comes to third party apps. It's their app or nothing. You might have better luck than I did, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.
And as others have mentioned, if you're looking for privacy, Discord ain't it. Sorry I couldn't give you a more helpful response.
Beeper is proprietary but their Matrix bridges are all free software, as far as I am aware. I think you can also use a free software client with Beeper's service (that's what people have said in the last Beeper thread I've seen).
well, i wouldnt go that far, as their privacy policy is better, and their server-side is open source.
But i wasnt really recommending using beeper (the app), i was recommending self-hosting the beeper bridges