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?
- 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.
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.
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. ;-)
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
That’s most likely due to low rankings. Lemmy doesn’t prevent it.
PLEASE I BEG OF YOU, STOP USING DISCORD IN PLACE OF FORUMS AND PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE BOARDS!
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.
90% of the projects that i use and other people care about are developed by people that have the technical ability to set up and host a web server. They likely have the cash. It’s not exactly outrageously expensive. If it’s small enough they dont have the cash for it, they don’t need it.
Im guessing the discord was more of a legacy thing, someone was like “hey im having a problem, can you contact me on discord?” and then suddenly we have the rust discord server.
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.
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.
honestly, i dont know why this is so downvoted, this is basically just what discord is.
But Discord is too convenient.
convenient for what? forcing me to join a server, go through onboarding, and potentially even deal with not having enough spyware loaded on my information, at best waiting 10 minutes to say ANYTHING, and at worst not being able to say anything at all.
Not to mention these on boarding processes can explode and cause problems from time to time. Discord is only convenient for real time chatting, nothing else.
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.
Do you know how crappy the discord client is? Even element with all its flaws behaves better.
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.
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.
I feel like so many people talk about how it’s not searchable or other concerns but for me I don’t really care so much because there’s an even bigger deal breaker which is their license agreement, where you sign away the property rights of anything you post, giving away your entire open source project… This alone should disqualify it for any work of any creative sort. They own things you give them. I would never use it for development because of this.
Is this an actual thing or is it a misinterpretation of the standard boilerplate “you grant us a non-exclusive non-transferrable license to do the basic things that make a post visible to other people on the internet” message that every platform where you post stuff has?
I’m not personally knowledgeable on it, just going off what the investigation told why we stopped using it in our project really
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 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?
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
IRC isn’t controlled by a single (shady) company
Discord is a fucking plague. I loathe it for communities. As soon as there are more than 10 people in a room, no one can follow what anyone is saying. Threads? No dude, this isn’t the 90s! Let’s slack it up!!! 🤮
It also seems to attract a younger crowd - I had to state my age to join one server and the mod screenshotted my info and everyone laughed calling me “boomer”. I’m only 40 (Millennial) and it wasn’t a gaming or specifically teen-server. It was a silly ironic European Reddit server.
The subreddit seems to have a range of ages. The Discord server is a bunch of kids commenting capybara and cat emojis like it’s funny. :/
All chat tools after irc have been trash for large communities. That includes slack. Irc somehow still works with 1500 people in it. I can not explain how. With a logging bot the discussions can be archived for google searchabillity. I guess that could be true for a discord or slack also, But i never seen it implemented. In most slacks i can not search more then 60 days back.
Matrix works great, I am in multiple rooms including some with 1983, 1356 or 1120 people
I wonder if it works like IRC. The “plague” this entire time has been servers. As soon as the idea only works because somebody, somewhere, is maintaining a server, cloud or hardware, then you’re kinda sunk. The server is the bottleneck. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a AAA game launch only for the servers to be inadequate. It happens again and again and again, so I assume the business considerations push them toward having just enough server and maybe a little less, never extra, which costs money and cuts margins.
Somewhere there are a bunch of servers howling away in a room that are actually Discord, and Discord spends money to make them howl, so there’s never as much server as you want, which is why things start bogging down with too many people in the chat room at once.
Most importantly to a corporation, if you have to interact with their servers in order to do anything, then they can own the platform by owning the servers. So there’s always going to be a server, even if it’s not strictly needed. The same consideration goes through the head of the streamer who always wants to launch a Discord because it’s “free” but they can sell it to you and then have top level control of an entire community as an asset that can be sold to others. There’s always a server. There will be a server if the actual application doesn’t really need it.
The reason IRC works fine with 1500 people in a chat is because IRC uses the user’s machine for any sort of computation power it needs, and then everything else it is doing is just sending data across wires. There is no central server farm. I haven’t used IRC in a really, really long time, but if it hasn’t changed, then it also doesn’t support lots of picture posting, which helps. Most of the memory usage on my machine at idle is just too many Discord channels all needing to use my local RAM memory to store the umpteen thousand photos everyone has uploaded, all the memes and etc. The IRC I remember was text, and text uses so little data that it can be treated like zero data.
Lots of pictures are probably non-negotiable in the modern era. Heck, they’re pretty important for serious work tasks, like putting up a shot of the broken gadget, so the engineering team can get an eyeball on the failure, that means pictures are in, text-only isn’t viable. I don’t know if modern IRC supports this or not, it probably does if people are still using it at all.
But IRC is a piece of open-source software that you install on your machine, free to the user. It’s not a web app, it doesn’t live in a browser. The data of you interacting with others is being sent out to them and also back to you, where it shows up in your IRC client and the chat room. If 1500 people are using it, then 1500 people have each added some of their machine power to making it all work, so it scales, it always has as much hardware as it needs. Again, there’s no server in the middle to run out of capacity, so that problem is just bypassed.
Everything used to work like this, circa the late 1990s and early 2010s. Everyone was assumed to be on a PC of their own, and the only problem was how to connect them together to do stuff, like have deranged fan wars about shows. BBSs were already kind of old hat, and there’s that damn server again, every BBS has one. All the most clever apps of the 90s, even the web, managed to jump through hoops to avoid the necessity of a central server to get things done because then somebody has to pay for it, run it, maintain it and own it. We just want the wires, the lovely, lovely cables dragged across the sea at somebody else’s unthinkable expense. If you can eliminate the server somehow, then you win. And they did. Things like IRC and ICQ blew the hell up from using that model.
We really need to dig that entire concept back up and brush the dust off of it. I wonder if that’s what Matrix is.
Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go prune some pointless Discord channels. Oh, by the by, fucking nobody uses Slack, or knows what it is. Dudes on the internet all think it’s normal because tech offices seem to use it a lot, the rest of the world has never used Slack. Up until right now I was assuming that Discord and Slack are the same thing, owned by the same company, and Slack is just the “business casual” version of Discord. This doesn’t seem to be true, but that’s how unfamiliar I am with Slack, while being chronically online. There are probably more people around who still remember ICQ than have ever used Slack in their lives.
I love the Church of the Subgenius reference built into Slack’s name. From what I can tell, nobody who uses that thing actually gets any slack, it actively removes slack from your life and makes boss surveillance really, really easy for the boss, but you must always act as though Big Brother can hear, or you’re fucked. Good work Bob, nice joke. Anyway, I shut up now.
You need some kind of help or something?
deleted by creator
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?
deleted by creator
It really isn’t. At least not for what most people try to use it for.
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)
its missing all my friends inside of my computer though!
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.
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
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.
dude i give up completely, you think im joining a random discord full of a bunch of people i dont know with a culture of who knows what dialect?
Nah fuck that i’ll just go use some dudes random piece of scrapped together software that’s actually pretty based instead. To that guy who wrote the bash script for flashing windows ISOs under linux. Thank you.
discord is the best villain but also the worst platform ever
Since we are on the topic of disliking Discord, what Matrix clients do you humans use? I tried both Element and Nheko (the latter of which isn’t electron based), and they both felt slow, clunky and unresponsive.
I’ve actually had good experiences with Element except on mobile. Are you talking about mobile?
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
I refuse to use discord.
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.
