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?
You must log in or # to comment.
- 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.
Perfectly summarized and the stance everyone should take for the wellbeing of any community. Look at cs.rin.ru for example.
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.
Removed by mod
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
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.
Discord is more analogous to IRC than web forums.
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.
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.
part of the problem is that discord as a platform for this, is like using NAT to make ipv4 work in the modern era. It’s just annoying.
Discord even if it allowed public scraping would be a nightmare, because it’s search function is practically helpless. Good luck finding a solution as well, that may or may not exist, and that question/answer has probably been brought up numerous times. There is probably specific context around it that we’re missing unless we decide to role play as a historian.
Not to mention, it’s a third layer of abstraction on top of something that should just be accessible.
I mean sure forums need maintenance, So do discords though, Hardware hosting is barely a problem. Basically anything and any internet connection can host a forum, cloudflare will probably sell it to you for pennies on the dollar even. (though i dont like cloudflare myself)
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).
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!!! 🤮
Slack is really nice and is at least usable for large projects and teams.
Ugh. Electron which can’t keep more than 5 pages in memory before having to load backwards in the chat.
Unless they use the free version and you want to search for old questions/answers/issues.
looking at you puppet labs slack
How the heck slack better or even have any more features than discord? Discord saves all history. Discord has threads that are easier to find than slack threads. Discord voice channels let you just hop in. Discord lets you direct reply.
I use slack for work, but Discord is great for what it is. The search is amazing.
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’re not as familiar with IRC as you think you are if you believe it doesn’t have (sometimes large) servers and it works in a peer-to-peer arrangement with each user contributing to the “power of the network”…
You need some kind of help or something?
1983
The greatest fucking year in the universe. Do you know what happened in that year?
Planets configured. Temperatures happened. Volcanoes contemplated. Wind occurred.
Yours truly was BORN!
Bow before me worms of conscience!
I found IRC loses chat flow more easily, as actual chat gets lost in the stream of blabber.
I am intrigued to see how threaded conversations in slack et al work, but haven’t been at a shop where slack was allowed as a tool due to data sovereignty and the CLOUD act.
But IRC was always something I approached reluctantly, and that’s been 31 years now.
The gold standard of threaded conversations is Zulip.
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. :/
The age is represented?
I dunno why but they wanted you to comment your name, age and location in a welcome channel. I did and they screenshot and shared it in the main channel. Most of the people are around 16-19 with a few 20-25yo. I didn’t know that til I joined though!
I was very weird to be there apparently.
I just wanted to take the piss out of Europeans. There’s no age-limit in that.
I just wanted to take the piss out of Europeans.
Please do, I enjoy banter, especially when it comes from the colonies
Colonies?! Colonies?!!!? I’m British you dirty Kraut! Wait, do you mean the Saxons?
Listen here you little shit! Don’t try and be funny. You’re German - it’s not in your nature!
Ouch. I’ve been called many things, but never that. Calling someone German who isn’t, is not banter, that is genuinely hurtful.
Being hurt by being called German although not being one hurts my German feelings.
That is truly weird…
Thanks for answering!
To.be fair, there are threads though. That one is on the users.
A bunch of the servers I’m on actively discourage the use of threads. No idea why. In a different server I’m on, an admin creates a thread for every post in general, so that people can talk about the post without cluttering up the main thread. I wish more servers followed that example.
Are we confusing threaded chat conversations with Threads, the FB/Snap Twitter with dreams of usurping federation to reach new ad contacts; or is it just me?
Nope, just threaded conversations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Remember IRC!
We use slack at work so I don’t just remember it, I use a fancy version
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)
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.
thats like saying “fix the government”
lol
For video calls, there is Jitsi integration.
Including screen caption?
Yes, I’m pretty sure.
Discord’s #1 unique feature is pluralkit
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’.
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.
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.
I would accept discord/irc over mailing list. But nothing beats a proper forum website.
And no, subreddit is not a proper forum.at least subreddits show up in google results, that’s the only good thing about them.
as yet
gotta love the modern internet…
yay.
I prefer mailing lists to forums, and forums to IRC, Slack to Discord and Discord is dead last just because it’s so fucking annoying. Forums can be annoying too but they are far more usable/searchable than the stream of consciousness, ephemeral nature of chat.
over mailing list.
LKML
For the main project I’m a maintainer on we do have forums too but they’re pretty dead, we mostly just use Discord because that’s what everyone else seems to be using.
Discord is absolute trash if you’re a user searching for solutions. It simply doesn’t turn up in web searches. Why would you want your users to ask the same questions again and again?
It just so happens to be where all our users end up anyway so for us it’s been okay for the most part. Having moderator commands for frequently asked questions, and automating frequently asked questions tends to help even more. Discord also seems to work well for projects far larger than ours, ones like RPCS3 etc.
After reading the comments on several communities including Lemmy, reddit, YouTube and several others, I don’t get the feeling that FOSS users are as enthusiastic about discord as you portray. Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps it’s a restriction that you impose on your users?
Besides, all the bells and whistles of Discord don’t solve the biggest gripe that I have with it - the searchability and discoverability of questions and answers. Despite the history recording in Discord, it acts essentially as an information black hole. People’s efforts in solving problems are just lost because they can’t be found again.
And finally, there’s one thing that corporate social media has proven time and again. Eventually all of them pivot for some reason or another. Perhaps they want to monetize the platform on unacceptable terms (like reddit recently). That will happen to discord too some day. They are holding the community content hostage. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that they won’t ever try to make money off it, cutting the community from it.
I mean, I don’t disagree with you, but our forums are dead. Our users do seem to like Discord, we also have a Matrix and IRC but those are dead too. Discord is where our users seem to flock to.
All I can really say is my experiences, and what I have seen in other cases too.
I wish Discord weren’t the giant that it was, and I wish it were open-source, but unfortunately that’s just how these things go sometimes I guess.
Again, I think another good example of this is RPCS3. They have forums that are pretty dead, and they have a Discord that has a ton of users in there.
Is it worth the risk to just stop having a Discord. Users that strongly care will use something else?
Our users do seem to like Discord, we also have a Matrix and IRC but those are dead too. Discord is where our users seem to flock to.
What is really happening is that people are looking for documentation or support, seeing that the forum, the IRC and the Matrix are dead, that the only other thing is discord, and give up. Minus some fraction who already use it for other purposes (gaming, probably) and don’t mind using it.
But from your perspective, it looks like everybody is joining discord and liking it, because all of the other people just give up. It’s only a very particular demographic that uses discord. Most likely (I might be wrong, but this is what I guess) very young, male, gamer, european descendent, and from a relatively wealthy western country. That’s a very small part of humanity.
If you as the maintainer go and use the forums, and maybe announce this in discord, the users will follow.
Like a survivorship bias?
I’m a member of a Discord that is the primary source of discussion and information about a piece of hardware, including technical & usage tips, firmware announcements, etc. It’s a terrible way to track this stuff.
That said, the only other forums that have decent communities around it are Reddit, Facebook, and Elektronauts - none of which are even close to as active, but in which many of us will post important info & tips to get the news out. Over 3 years into the project (which is not open source) it would be ridiculous to try shifting the whole community to a new platform. We’re kinda stuck.
Luckily the community as a whole seems to realise this, so we happily answer noob questions over and over and provide links to the appropriate resources, discussions, and pinned posts without snark or judgement. We’ve all been there. It’s the nature of the beast, it’s not efficient, and it’s not the end of the world.
Finally, with the state of search engines in decline due to monetisation, encroachment of AI bloat, and general enshittification, it’s a matter of time before very little real information will be easily searchable. Insular communities who decide to withdraw and do everything their own, better way will likely become the norm. The internet needs a reset anyway.
We have been using the forums. It’s been announced in Discord, we have a webhook that posts in our main Discord channel every time there’s a post in our main forum section. Every announcement goes to both the forums and the Discord, and the Discord announcements link to the forum posts.
We are using the forums. Our forums are still dead.
There is one possible explanation for that conundrum. There are two types of people who are looking for solutions:
-
Those who want quick answers. They don’t want to do the research - to see if the problem has been addressed before. They don’t care about if the question has been asked before.
-
Those who prefer searching for solutions. They don’t like joining any community just to search for those solutions.
Group 2 is going to be very invisible to you (maintainers), because they ask questions only if they can’t solve the problem themselves and nobody has asked it before. (I know this because that’s me). This group isn’t a minority.
Group 1 is the vocal type that you are more likely to interact with, since their first instinct is to ask. If you provide them a choice between forums and chat rooms, they always choose chats because that’s where they can get away with providing minimal background information on their questions and doing minimal to no research.
This doesn’t mean that the majority of your users are happy with chatrooms. It’s just that your observations are going to show this survivorship bias.
-
You’re the maintainer and presumably you control the discord server. You can decide to move things to a more available platform by removing Discord as an option.
Why compare Discord to web forums when it’s more like IRC? What’s the searchability and discoverability of that?
I didn’t advocate for IRC. I’m strongly on the side of forums. But in case you want to compare, IRC is still a better deal than Discord. IRC has loggers and searchable web archives where it matters. Discord on the other hand is holding the conversation hostage. Someday the closed nature of discord will come to bite. The honeymoon isn’t going to last forever.
I just think it’s a bad argument. Telling somebody to use web forums instead of Discord is ignorant of why people use Discord in the first place.
Everything beats a proper forum because most proper forums are basically dead since small projects won’t have many users and only a small number will sign up for a specific forum.
Forums used to be great since there was not much else, they still are good for large communities, but other than that, nope.
only a small number will sign up for a specific forum
Most people don’t have to sign-up, 90% of cases should resolve on just searching the problem. Good chances it was already asked and answered.
Most of the time, forums with few users aren’t dead, they’re just really slow, whenever you post a question - expect at least 12-hour delay. I’ve never seen a message on Discord answered 12 hours later - you either get somewhat instant response or it’s ghosted forever. Also good luck asking questions if there’s heated/rapid discussion in the room, or you have a little time and other responsibilities other than checking discord every couple minutes.That’s because when you ask a question on discord it’s only visible for a few seconds
So let people SSO into your forum with Github?
Sure, give it a try and let me know. I would expect that will fail too in these days.
I get the impression that opensource communities are missing out on contributors by even including discord in the mix 🧐
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.
FCK DSCRD!
(They should use lemmy instead :-P)
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.
