4 pane comic of dolan on the left and spooderman on the right
pane 1 (dolan): cum join opensurce cummunity!
pane 2 (spooderman): shure! how joyn?
pane 3 (dolan): Here discord! (with discord logo)
pane 4 (spooderman with tears in eyes): y u do dis?
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- Terrible format for archiving knowledge
- Terrible tool for retrieving knowledge
- Locks community access behind a corporate license agreement
- Hands control of community-created content to a corporation
- Prevents indexing by web search engines
- Antithetical to interoperability
- Privacy-hostile
A web forum is far better in most cases. If you can’t manage to run your own, there are plenty of lemmy servers that will do it for you. Even an email list (with searchable archives) would be better than Discord.
If you have collaborative documents that outgrow the forum format, use a wiki.
If real-time chat is needed, irc or matrix.
A project hosting its community on Discord is a project that won’t get my contributions.
I recently went through these exact pains trying to contribute to a project that exclusively ran through Discord and eventually had to give up when it was clear they would never enable issues in their GitHub repos for “reasons.”
It was impossible to discover the history behind anything. Even current information was lost within days, having to rehash aspects that were already investigated and decided upon.
would never enable issues in their Git…
That’s a worrying sign for a project.
Did you clone their Git and start tracking issues there? ;-)
It’s the “see no evil” approach. If you didn’t report the issue while the admin was online, then they aren’t compelled to do anything about it. Convenient for the project maintainer who doesn’t actually like maintaining things. Awful for the rest of us.
A web forum is far better in most cases
It’s sad when a web forum is better than the tool you’re considering. Bumps, aggressive garbage collection, no Resurrection, it’s weird.
I’m old, I guess. I miss NNTP, mainly for the archived posts I could discuss with the authors for an updated take or revised solution or some clarification. And yes, I know there’s a good webUI front-end for an NNTP server as a back-end. ;-)
On the bright side:
Aggressive garbage collection and automatic thread locking are optional settings in most web forum software I’ve seen.
Lemmy shares some of the important parts of Usenet, and could develop into something that comes close.
The worst thing is that the mods can ban you for any or no reason, locking you completely out of the information they’re providing. That is beyond an unreasonable amount of power that they can have over a user, and you just KNOW they’re going to use that for political reasons.
Also the fact they can delete stuff in a way that makes them invisible to law enforcement, so a lot of illegal shit goes down there too. Combine that with the naturally hierarchal structure of discord leads to a lot of people using that power to abuse some of the more vulnerable members and of course once you call it out, poof goes the messages and poof goes your access to their server.
Lemmy also doesn’t get indexed by web search engines. I have yet to find a single post from lemmy on google or DDG even when specifically searching
What do you mean by specifically searching? Because it totally comes up for me.
Ooh! A post with claims backed by evidence!
That’s most likely due to low rankings. Lemmy doesn’t prevent it.
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So nice, right? Just being able to curate where your search engine pulls result from… I wish I’d discovered it sooner
Use “site:lemmy.world” (for example) at the end of your search
I’ve had Lemmy post first result in Google idk what your doing
Perfectly summarized and the stance everyone should take for the wellbeing of any community. Look at cs.rin.ru for example.
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While I agree, what might everyday people use to set up forums as relatively easily and cheaply as their Discord servers, and not have them riddled with ads or other clunky elements?
I’m pretty sure those that may have even been considering forums went to Discord because the only other options were more involved in terms of set up/maintenance and cost, the latter to get something without ads.
Github has discussions. The code is already there anyways
You can even have threads and comments attached to specific lines of code in specific commits. Github is practically effortless to set up.
Microsoft is going to continue to increase their monetization of GitHub. It’s going to get worse, not better.
Just hoping we get some github alternative on fediverse, so far Ive seen codeberg but its hosted by a non profit org in berlin… Which is great but for e.g. I cant contribute to the code without creating an account on their instance
I really don’t know about these things, but I’ve heard that GitLab is a good alternative to GitHub?
it used to be but they’ve been focusing heavily into corporate clients and shutting off special treatment/support for foss software projects the past couple years
I’ve been loving Source Hut, but they’re not ready to handle GitHub-level usage
what might everyday people use to set up forums as relatively easily and cheaply as their Discord servers, and not have them riddled with ads or other clunky elements?
Discourse is a clean open source forum software that is commonly used for application support and well suited for it.
Or if your a real die hard for the fediverse, you could set up a lemmy instance for application support. There’s even a phpBB frontend for an oldschool forum look and feel for it.
Usually everyday people don’t setup forums, that’s the responsibility of the application owner(s) or provider. In this case, the easy option is also the shitty option if measured by discoverability of the content.
Usually everyday people don’t setup forums, that’s the responsibility of the application owner(s) or provider.
By this do you mean official forums? If so I think this is kind of missing some of the independent forums for software (whether games or media players or the like) or other media, which some sorta-everyday people set up in the past. Many have migrated to Discord not only because it’s easy but, I think, because it’s simply more cost-effective.
Forums don’t seem to be cheap. Discourse’s own managed hosting goes for $50 a month, from one of their partners it’s $20, and looks like somewhere in-between if you try to spin it up yourself (e.g. Digital Ocean droplet runs $4 a month, then add in domain, and mail-provider (~$20-35)). Looking at that, it’s little wonder so many either opt for official forums, unofficial subreddits, Lemmy/Kbin communities, or Discord servers instead now.
Maybe if I dug around some more I could find some options for managed hosting (which makes more sense for regular people, I think, to deal with technical maintenance) for Discourse or the like that are cheaper, but I can’t imagine one may find much that beats free. Unless there is something, unfortunately I guess we’re kind of stuck with the situation as-is barring some pleasant exceptions.
Yeah, I was referring to official forums for technical support or feature requests and the like. I don’t really think that everyday people were usually the ones who setup forums, it is website operators and other techies who set those up. The people who setup an independent forum are not the same people who setup a discord community. Discord has a much lower barrier to entry that usually results in a lower quality information and moderation than a forum would.
I mean, yeah, forums are harder, for sure. $20-35 monthly for a mail provider seems to high to me; I would expect that to be about the yearly cost. But, I don’t really have much experience with an email provider for that use case. Really the problem lies in that a website operator and a community maintainer are 2 very different types of people that rarely intersect.
Why not Lemmy?
Matrix chat works pretty well too.
It’s ~ as convenient as Discord. More convenient in certain cases. And one might be able to easily use the API to create an Archive site for all discussions in there.In other cases, you have the ability of encrypted conversations, which of course you won’t be archiving. Right?
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Discord is more analogous to IRC than web forums.
and yet people insist on using it as a forum, wiki, issue tracker, and a support channel.
That’s the problem.
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But Discord is too convenient.
For a quick question yes, but if you try to search a solution for a problem it’s actual hell, 1000s of BS messages and countless other problems just thrown in one timeline.
You can either search through it for hours or ask the question which was answered 10 times before.
It’s as inefficient as it gets
Also the dumb system that thinks it knows what you want to search and no exact term search feature. Yeah, the search is unusable.
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Do you know how crappy the discord client is? Even element with all its flaws behaves better.
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You cannot search a discord without being a part of their ecosystem. Thats a walled garden and does not belong in open-source communities.
It’s awful. It goes by channel and the cursed interface make it hard to search because when you go back after viewing a post it starts at the very top again. Then people shit on you for not searching through loads of shit and normal chat channels to find a bunch of disjointed info woven into random unrelated banter.
I miss the days when I could search the problem, open a browser tab for each one that seems relevant, and close the tab when it turns out not to be, and have my search tab right where I left it. Discord just gives me an aneurysm every time I open it and try to bungle through the UI. Not to mention being asked to sign in almost every time I open it, and they moved the qr code log in option to be harder to find on the mobile app.
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it’s awful and I hate it. I generally prefer not to have a shared identity across communities, and there’s no way to create a usable discord identity without a phone number.
The worst part is that they act like you can set up an account without a number, but then it acts like there is ‘suspicious activity’ and requires you to verify with the phone immediately.
Just rant into this yesterday trying to set up a work account as my work phone is not a mobile phone with sms.
Was registering really suspicious?
Wait I thought this was dependent on the channel?
I’ve got a Discord account, on a lot of different channels for FLOSS and other things, and I’ve never set up a phone number. I have occasionally come across certain channels that I can’t join without one, but the vast majority I’ve joined don’t seem to require it
Not to defend Discord, by the way. It’s fucking terrible and I despise this trend of telling people to come to your little private clubhouse to learn more about your software so I can sort through a bunch of obnoxious gif and image spam, while using an absolutely terrible search engine.
That is what the help files say, but when I tried to register a work account yesterday it did the verify you are human, then said there was something suspicious and sent the email verification, then said there was something suspicious and is now requiring a phone verification even though I did not enter a phone number.
At no point was I ever signed in and able to even pick a channel. This all happened while trying to log in for the first time through the browser at work with my work email. I guess that someone else might not hit that phone requirement as I only tried to do the registration once, but it is in no way limited to joining a particular channel.
I had the exact same experience. Was just trying to sign up for an account, not join anything
Maybe you guys should just not be so suspicious (sarqasm brother chill)
Sometimes it depends on discord itself finding you suspicious, for some definition of suspicious. perhaps a user agent whitelist? lack of Google cookie?
Its a moderation tool. Server admins can choose to only allow users who are verified by a phone number.
I’ve had it happen on servers where that moderation option is not enabled. My worst experience was trying to join a friend group’s discord via an invite link shared with me. I was prompted to create an account with email, and I did. I was then shown a read-only view of the server: I could see all messages and other folks could see I joined and 👋 to me. I could not send messages myself, however, without verifying with a phone number. Further, I couldn’t use a Google voice number (my primary number) to verify, nor my “real” number which was associated to another account.
Same. It makes it much easier for someone to doxx you.
Nobody besides you can see your phone number. How on Earth does it make you doxxable?
I was talking about this part:
I generally prefer not to have a shared identity across communities
That’s fair. I agree it should have an option to use a different identity per server while having your account centralized only on their service.
Yeah, I wasn’t very clear about what I meant.
🤔…is this a new requirement? I have 2 accounts. Neither with phone numbers and it’s never asked me for one
It’s decided by server. Most require it to cut down on spamming and trolls
Ah, I’ve only had one guild require it and I told them to fly a kite XD…I thought this was becoming a general thing and I was going to be really annoyed
If you dm the mods they might let you in but idk. I tried it once but they couldn’t get it working
Discord separates and controls possibly useful information from the public internet. It’s one of the worst platforms to use.
Are you against IRC for the same reason?
IRC isn’t controlled by a single (shady) company
IRC allows archiving
How so?
You can easily log and archive things that happen on an open protocol, not so much a proprietary one like discord.
Is it possible to have a server/channel bot publicly export channel activity?
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Publicly_logged_channels https://www.w3.org/2002/03/RRSAgent
Wikimedia and W3C log their chats with bots developed by themselves. I admit though that I am not expert in this topic, but I know that LiberaChat’s policies forbid logging.
IRC archivers just idle on a server and record anything that comes by. You can do that with Discord. Matter of fact, I keep regular archive backups of a server we have that’s full of news
You can’t search an IRC channel for previous conversations, though? Isn’t that what we were talking about?
Nobody considers IRC to be a substitute for documentation.
Servers can be hosted by anyone; there is usually no account needed to join the chat; it would not randomly demand a phone number or an ID; it does not get pissed over people not using a very specific piece of bloated spyware… So nope, not against.
also, IRC logs are usually public and searchable. that’s actually how we got hunter2
You never saw an IRC chatroom archive?
Fuck Discord when it’s used in lieu of a forum, documentation or proper support channels.
Well…Forums need to be maintained. Discord is free and easy and fast to use.
Discord should allow the servers to be browsable. But you can only participate by logging in.Doesnt Disqus handle it like that as well? Same account on every website utilizing disqus?
easy and fast to use.
It just isn’t, if you don’t already have an account with them. And even then, I personally find ich horrible to use.
Honestly, you ever tried to look back through a long thread on Discord? It’s impossible. If you want to read the original message that started the thread, good luck, you’ll be scrolling all day and may never get there. How anyone can claim that’s “easy to use” is beyond me.
Discord works for quick discussions happening right now, and that’s it.
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Discord needs to be maintained too. The way rights for users are handled is confusing, even when you’re used to handling such.
And it isn’t fast to use. You have to register, you need the app which does not function well, it uses a lot of system resources, the list goes on.
Web admin ≠ Discord Admin
If someone at an IT company put down web admin for a moderate forum of ~500 users of which a 100 are weekly active users, serving a small CDN distributed over America and Europe (because side project not because logical), I’d be impressed a hundred fold over a Discord admin.
At best you’d be very good community manager/admin if you maintained and kept the server clean of a >1000 user server of which 500 are participating daily. At worst the interviewers would ask you why you’d maintain a kids voice channel.Also putting out a forum on a resumee is more impressive (assuming the topics are something you’d want to share).
The children do not yet know how much they yearn for the mines of listservs.
A new, novel solution to an already-solved problem that is worse in pretty much every way. But at least it is anathema to retention of institutional knowledge.
In short: just do a fucking PHPBB forum, it’s better than this shit.
In short: just do a fucking PHPBB forum, it’s better than this shit.
Or a wiki or IRC or Matrix or Lemmy or Mastodon, etc. There’s so many FOSS platforms for this kind of thing to choose from. How someone looks at all those options and then chooses Discord is beyond me.
Mattermost is open source and has a ton of integrations with other open source tools like Gitlab and CircleCI.
i feel everyone has just forgotten about gitter? literally its entire schtick is being the communications platform for github and gitlab, and now it’s even been acquired by the matrix team!
Like surely that’s the obvious place to go?
Please, not phpBB. Whatever the merits of PHP as a language are now, phpBB came from a time when it was exhibit #1 of why the language was terrible.
Adding a community on a Lemmy instance is fine. Far less admin work on your part, too. Encourage your users to donate to the people who do run the instance.
isn’t discourse (important to note that’s a completely different thing from discord) just a modern and much nicer version of phpbb?
It’s real-time chat. That’s fundamentally different, philosophically, from the way a forum/wiki works.
You can cludge forum-like features into it with stickies and bots and yada yada yada… or you could just use a platform that is designed from the ground up to be a permanent knowledge store instead of extended, glorified AOL chatrooms.
Discourse is a forum software. Maybe you are mixing it up with something else like disqus?
I thought they were talking about Discord. Discourse should rename itself for its own sake. It’s easy to get it confused with the two junk.
yeah I’ve really noticed it’s hard to find info and therefore use any project that does this.
and it must suck because anyone new, instead of finding the answer to their question in a forum archive from when it was first asked, has to log in and ask it again.
whenever I have dumb noob questions on setup and I see a discord link I give up a little.
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And then to top it off users get annoying and angrily point at sticked posts, wikis and whatnot when people ask the same questions for the nth time.
This. I literally just joined. I have no idea what the server layout is or where all the important links are.
My biggest pet peeve is when you join a new server and you have 15 different steps you have to do before you can ask a question. Verify with a bot or two, send picture drinking verification can, send emoji here, ask for emoji there, introduce yourself, publish your whole biography, wait for the pope to bless your account, and then, maybe, you are allowed to use the #help channel. I’m not a discord user, I don’t know what this all means ffs!
Even if you’re a Discord user it’s still annoying as fuck.
…And in addition, Discord itself can randomly nuke your account by asking for a phone number.
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My guess: The kids who used Discord for gaming grew up, and just went with the familiar thing when starting new communities and projects.
Also, Discord did heavy marketing early on, until it carved out a network effect. So here we are.
It’s good?
It’s terrible for secure/private communications, it requires hacks that violate the TOS and EULA to modify the client to get rid of ads and change themes, it’s not FOSS, and it locks features behind a paywall…
But it does what skype already did, so I’m glad we all have to migrate to the new fad site that strips even more of our dignity and privacy every 10 years that’ll die anyway because it offers nothing and has a terrible business model.
And forums was very good for secure communications?
It really isn’t. At least not for what most people try to use it for.
it makes me download 5 updates whenever i launch it then it looks just as shitty as before
It’s better. Not good. Better than other tools, at least in the eyes of the many people using it. But as I stated at another post, to me this speaks to the fact that we need better FOSS alternatives for whatever purposes discord is used. I don’t like Discord either, don’t get me wrong! But so many people using it means something’s missing and I don’t think it cab solely be explained by the lack of knowledge of existing solutions but at least partly by the existence itself.
Matrix is there :p Ready to use (i think it’s missing call and video options)
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Convince them :-)
It needs to be a big wave of migration, rather than convincing one individual at a time. Discord needs to shit the bed while there’s a tolerable/better alternative we can all agree on.
Tbh I don’t see that happening with matrix anyway. Even with discord going to shit.
Every platform that needs a guide is too complicated for the common folk.
This goes also for Lemmy. The users on Reddit that stayed either didn’t care about the whole API stuff or didnt understand the issue.
Hell even I use it sometimes because the content here is sparse and I don’t have any meaningful to contribute as a post (not even a repost lol)We are the exception and putting up with reading a bit and then deciding where to start the camp.
Discord, FAANG, streaming sites. All of them and more are simply to register, login and then use. At best you will set up 2FA.
Most of the folks I know (even my boss of an IT company) do not register 2FA and if only because they are forced to (Google and MS/O365 does it for example).I probably see another (commercial) platform rising before Matrix will become popular.
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For video calls, there is Jitsi integration.
Including screen caption?
Yes, I’m pretty sure.
Discord’s #1 unique feature is pluralkit
People act like the alternatives are any better but they really aren’t. Sure don’t get me wrong it sucks that you typically have to scroll through useless info to find what you’re looking for, but I put that on the server owner, you see the same issue on most forums too. Discord brings huge audiences that you wouldn’t normally see in small communities. It’s free, easy to setup and access, has a mobile app with toggle-notifications(and maybe just my settings but I’ve never gotten an ad notification or anything I haven’t purposely toggled). People here are acting like you have to start using it as your primary messaging app and that you can’t just take your messaging to another platform if your worried about chat logs.
There’s zero way dishes would become so popular if users didn’t like it.
The fact that it has chat, voice, streaming, automation, accessible api and oauth.
I mean please, these foss people can downvote all they want, but it’s a good application for communities.
uhh sure buddy
Literally the most popular community platform. People are clearly choosing it because there are much better alternatives out there
“millions of flies can’t be wrong!”
Cope
Do you just not understand the quote?
It’s bloated, filled with features no one needs for straight-forward work, has a somewhat obtuse UI and is buggy as hell. I don’t like Matrix much more than Discord. But even it has far fewer problems. I don’t know in which universe Discord is considered as ‘good’.
Discord is the worst. Requires a phone number, does not allow email aliases and logs your chats.
Matrix and SimpleX is way better
Requires a phone number
It’s just an email based user ID, I have multiple Discord accts and never used a phone number with it
Some discord servers can require a verified phone number, not any I know of, but it can be enabled.
I don’t know of any either and I’m on like 40+ servers probably. I’ve run our weekly dnd on it for years without issue after trying the other options. Get that it’s not good for tracking and documentation in any official capacity but it’s pretty damn good for active niche interest communities.
The music production servers I’m on are a perfect use of the platform IMO. There’s a server run by a guy who manufactures an open source tracker device, and there’s channels where people post works in progress, get help from others, there’s streaming events where people can submit songs they’ve made using the device, etc. There’s a bunch of people popular in the music scene who regularly help noobs. Always ongoing active discussions, everyone is polite, there’s a lot of knowledge shared in real time.
So when people are like “Discord sucks use my favorite platform instead,” I’m just like I don’t even care about the platform I just wanna be where some cool shit is happening and your platforms are fucking boring. Show me the cool servers on your platform then so I actually want to use it. It’s the idea of these platforms people like, and I like it too, my close social group uses a privately hosted Matrix service which I use every day, but I’ve never found a comparable community on these services outside of this use case.
Show me the music servers :D
The one I referenced there was the Dirtywave discord, highly recommend checking it out, and I think they have a channel for partner servers. The lines forum is also a great community if you’re in that musical space. I couldn’t name a good music discord for lets say traditional genres or general production, the thing I like about what I’ve found is it’s niche. Like once I posted a work in progress and someone active in a scene for the genre I was going for messaged me and we chatted about our approaches and traded some instrument and project files we’d built on the device, all though discord.
So to me I want that type of community, what platform it’s on isn’t really something I care about all that much.
That’s awesome! Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
I always daydream about a space where I can post music I made and people at my level hear it and give me pointers on how to make it better.
Hope I am not to ashamed to participate :D
They force you to enter your phone number if your IP address is fishy to them, or if your email provider is not popular.
Enforcing two factor because of suspicious indicators isn’t bad on it’s own though, it’s privacy concerns about Discord preceding this which makes it a bad thing in this context.
Using phone numbers as second factor authentication is neither secure, nor is it in good faith. Force the customer to use something more anonymous and secure - like Fido keys or even TOTPs. Sneaking in ways to force the customer to reveal their personal details, in the name of security is a sinister dark pattern.
Phone number is the weakest form of 2FA but it’s still an improvement. I’ve never had to use my phone in Discord though, I don’t how Discord would even verify someone’s phone number as legitimate. But like I said I have a couple Discord accounts with different emails, probably on 30-40 servers, and have never run in to this. So if they’re collecting personal details in this really granular and specific manner, it seems like they’re not doing a very good job at it.
Try DuckDuckGO aliase, it works for me
I get the impression that opensource communities are missing out on contributors by even including discord in the mix 🧐
I’m not sure I understand the problem. Is the problem that they’re not using matrix? Or do you prefer that it was still all on IRC? I don’t hate IRC but it’s definitely way less user friendly.
Another commenter mentioned that they have matrix, discord, IRC, and discourse, however everything but discord is dead. So, due to the network effect of just including discord, it reduces participation on other channels.
Communities that are “discord only” however exclude people like those in this comment section.I refuse to use discord for all the reasons people mentioned. Personally, matrix + lemmy/kbin/mbin = best. Other opensource direct communication solutions are acceptable too, like Zulip or RocketChat, but only if bridged with matrix. Then I just need one account. For async, discourse is alright, but not my favorite.
FCK DSCRD!
(They should use lemmy instead :-P)
The people in this thread are open source power users who don’t get and don’t want the features that discord offers. It’s no surprise you’d rather have your forum back. I don’t think that’s how it’s going to work.
Privacy is good and what discord does is bad. But don’t lecture me on how convient and nice it is to use or run something like matrix, if this is your idea of a user onboarding experience:
It’s confusing to me why people think discord is a good replacement for forums. It’s not even the same paradigm - it’s a chat program. Not being indexed by search engines is a major drawback as well.
I have no problems with discord as chat/supplement (and I remember setting up irc-discord bots in the past so you could totally have both) it’s when discord is the only way to interact that it’s annoying IMO. Part of the benefit of forums and git issues is searchability imo, can’t really search discord externally for content and I definitely have found the search function annoying at best.
That said, video guides instead of manuals also annoys me, but that’s a different issue.
Just reading that is giving me a headache. I’m sure it’s a good product but my god, I don’t have time for that.
This user is being extremely pedantic, I recently moved my discord server to a matrix instance and I promise you, it is not that hard. Download Element, make an account in the app, log in. It takes no longer than any other service.
We don’t ask for forums because we don’t want features of Discord. We ask for forums because we want features that Discord does not offer:
- Ability to search the discussions from a web search engine
- Proper segregation of threads - a question followed by related replies (similar to github discussions, issues and PRs)
- Ability to back up the discussion history, so that it doesn’t disappear if the server goes down.
- Ability to operate unimpeded if the silo operator decides to monetize the information by holding it hostage.
Note: Privacy is not what we need here. We need the solutions to open source problems to be public - especially, searchability.
Matrix is the protocol. Element is one of the (many) clients. Setting up an account on a server is as easy or easier than discord. Try it https://app.element.io
Matrix has video and voice rooms, screen-sharing, direct calls, threads, and very little fluff. An entire conference (FOSDEM) was hosted on a matrix server and people from any homeserver could connect. Admittedly, I don’t use other features, but those are all that I need. What other features are essential for an opensource community that only discord provides?
As for forums, they are for async. Are you going to seriously tell me discord is a good forum replacement?
The desired alternative is not Matrix simply because privacy-conscious, open-source ecosystem vs. proprietary solution is not the goal. Matrix would still generally be terrible for support. What people want is publicly searchable content that is ideally indexed like a wiki. Many will happily settle for issue boards or even forums though. Discord has pathetic search capabilities in comparison to any search engine and has no way to properly and publicly backup information that is posted to the platform. With a website of any kind, one could clone the site for mirroring or simply get a web archive service to crawl relevant sections.
I bought a keyboard kit recently and to my horror discovered all the “documentation” to build it is on Discord. The creator’s last message was that he was working on other things after losing interest, and was not monitoring it anymore. So all the channels are full of messages asking where he is, what the status is, is he coming back, etc. I had to scroll back through dozens of pages just to find the docs.
Maybe put up a wiki on GitHub or something? Especially if you don’t want to run a forum or plan on dipping. It’s not that hard.
Discord performance is inversely proportional to the number of servers you’re in. Until Discord addresses this, it’s a shit tool for this use case unless you participate in a tiny number of servers in one facet of your life. Unlike chat tools like Slack that allow you to focus one server or community tools like forums, Lemmy, or VCSaaS which don’t consume resources when you don’t use them, Discord just tanks everything. Since you can’t easily hop in and out (something community tools let you do because, you know, you’re not constantly polling the server), you can’t self regulate.
Every single gaming community, coding community, project, store, hobby group, friend group, and professional group (study group too) has their own Discord. It’s a goddamn nightmare because Discord does not prioritize basic community functionality. Voice and streaming kick ass, but I need some server management and resource optimization.
I’m in a ton of servers and it performs pretty okay for me. No real issues.
Do you have trouble in other programs with Discord running, especially resource-intensive ones? That might have been a better way for me to phrase that.
Anectodal, but I do not. Obviously most channels I am not actively engaged on or have muted but I have over 40 servers I am part of - with no impact to other applications.
Around 98-99 here (100 is max for non nitro users),and I’m noticing a significant delay when loading.
I use the browser version of discord in firefox.
WebCord is a beast! Maybe runs better for you.
Basically Discord desktop client experience, but privacy (well… as much as you can have with discord) from the browser-version. (minus discord desktop client exclusive features of course)
While I understand why FOSS community hates Discord, I don’t know an alternative that is better at everything.
Discord’s main problems:
- Not FOSS / Privacy respectful
- Hard/Impossible to index/search for data and organize tech support
However alternatives we have are not ideal either:
- Old-school web forums
- Great for info archival / organized tech support
- Separate accounts for every one of them, different sets of newsletters / email notifications. Basically, to efficiently be active on several forums you have to manually log in to each on regular basis and check what’s new
- Due to slower pace of communication, it’s harder to just log in and “hang out” with community, everybody is more of a pen pal.
- FOSS messaging applications (e.g. Matrix since that’s what most use)
- Info archival is even worse then on Discord. Every time I tried to search for anything useful on Matrix I would give up due to poor results and HUGE delays for every search
- Because most communities use a single Matrix chat, it’s a huge disorganized mess for any communication and tech support. There’s often 2-3 concurrent conversations in a single room and some just stop abruptly due to it getting confusing to keep up
- it’s FOSS and Private, though
Feel free to downvote me for this, but I think that Github for support & issue tracking and Discord for community hang out spot is currently the lesser evil approach until better Foss tools arrive
I would rather be pen pals than use discord
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So you are suggesting forum software that supports single sign-on?
We are talking about an open source project, not a high school reunion. I don’t want to hang out with people, I want to have a discussion about a focused topic.
I want to ask a question and get an answer. If the question is not one that anyone online can currently answer, I want to be able to tell at a glance if anyone has talked about my question. If I don’t understand the answer, I want to ask a follow up question.
In the evening, I want to be able to take a look at new posts from that day, grouped by topic, to see if there is anything I find interesting or can weight in on.
With Discord (or any real time chat), it is hard to follow a single topic when more than one is being discussed. It is doubly hard to do so after the fact. I am aware that Discord has a forum feature. I have only seen one server ever enable it and no one posts anything to it.
Can’t you do everything you’ve listed on github though? Report bugs on issues tab, ask questions on discussions tab, following up is easy. Everything is also indexed by search engines and can be looked up later on.
I know, but this thread is about projects that don’t want to use GitHub as the center of discussion and use Discord instead. The Discussion tab need to be enabled.
The most important downside for me is: I’m looking for some information about an issue I’m having or how to install or configure something and I find none. Because all the people talk behind closed doors and googling etc doesn’t help any more. Only solution is to join every Discord and platform before you start using your software and scrolling trough pages of chat messages.
I’d rather google for an error message and then be directed directly to an issue tracker where people discussed that specific problem.
Yep, that’s exactly why in the end of my comment I say that I currently believe a combination of Github+Discord to be best. Github for bug reporting, Discord if you want to socialize with the community, that’s what it does best
I’m somewhat fine with that. But you absolutely have to tell people to keep the discussions to random chatter and the absolute minimum then. (And internal talk maybe, if that’s of no interest to the public. Once it gets important or someone asks for advice that could be beneficial to others, the discussion on Discord needs to be interrupted and switch platforms. Or be copied to a Wiki after the fact.
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Come on. That’s not even close to the amount of data that TikTok collects. TikTok needs to know how long you spend on EVERY video so it can recommend more like that. TikTok records EVERY interaction and time associated.
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Spaces have been a thing for over 2 years now.
Spaces are just group chats in a trenchcoat
so are Discord’s “servers”.
Not really. They don’t show up in your dms, they don’t take 1 minutes to join after clicking the “join” button, they have great permission management.
Their licence grants intellectual rights to anything you give them. So there’s that.
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