[Cyberdog]

I've been using an unofficial Discord and Slack client called Ripcord for a while now. https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

It uses a dark theme by default, which is very appreciated. Another huge plus is that it's not Electron garbage like the official Slack and Discord clients, so you don't have to effectively run one or two other entire web browsers just to do a bit of chatting. On the other hand, it is Qt garbage instead, so it still doesn't integrate with macOS's look and feel very well, and a long-standing bug is that when disconnecting my laptop from a wired ethernet connection, it doesn't automatically reconnect everything once the system switches over to wifi. Neither of these have stopped me from preferring it over the official clients, though. I recommend anyone not satisfied with the crust and bloat of the official Slack and Discord clients to give it a try.

EDIT: But, yes, IRC is still the better choice when possible.

[amyjess]

As a KDE user, this looks really tempting. The only thing I'd be worried about is that using third-party clients is a violation of Discord's TOS, and I'd be terrified of getting banned for using it. Do you know if Discord has a history of banning Ripcord users, or is it something they look the other way on?

[Cyberdog]

I've never heard of them banning anyone for using this or some other unofficial client, no. I'd imagine a more effective approach to urge people to use the official client would be to simply block access from unofficial clients first before they start entirely banning accounts and pissing people off… but you never know, I guess.

[PhasmaFelis]

They've banned people for using modded clients in abusive ways, i.e. overriding spam/flood controls, which is reasonable. Unfortunately their official statement in response to those incidents was essentially "You can be be banned at any time for using modded or unofficial clients." They haven't actually done that to any legitimate users AFAIK, but their overreacting, user-hostile stance is worrisome, so I can see why amyjess is concerned.

[693471]

Well if their spam/flood control is done in the client they should ban themselves from their job and let someone competent take over

[amyjess]

It actually is. That's how slowmode works: if you send a message in a channel with slowmode, it sets a flag on your client telling it to not let you send anything for X seconds. No reason an alternative client can't just clear out that flag.

[PhasmaFelis]

Yup. Discord's client is pretty bad.

[Insanity]

If you want to be completely on the safe side, don't use ripcord.

That said, for what it's worth, I haven't known someone getting banned yet.

[lnx01]

Slack's dark mode is a bit late for me, and it's still not a native app. I switched to Pidgin with libpurple and libslack a while ago, and I'm not going back.

[basch]

Have you used volt? How do they compare resource usage wise? https://volt-app.com/

[joecot]

I'll be happy to give it a go once they put their Linux client back out.

[radiKal07]

Does Slack screen-sharing work?

[Cyberdog]

In Ripcord? Never tried it. If I had to guess, probably not. That might be something you need to fire up the official client for. But for simple chatting and stupid meme sharing, which is probably what 99% of Slack and Discord users are doing 99% of the time, it works great.