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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!! 🤮
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?
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.
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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
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.
I refuse to use discord.
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.
This entire thread is just a bunch of old nerds screaming at the tide.
Hate stuff all you want. It isn’t going to change anything. “People should do this or that”. It must be exhausting to be so angry at something but do nothing about it.
Imagine using all this energy to really understand while people use Discord and try to make something better.
OR join these projects you apparently like and volunteer to do the extra work to publisher useful documentation. Unless of course you never intend to be useful to FLOSS and just want everyone else to do the work for you.
OR you can continue to complain and get nowhere while completely alienating an entire generation of developers. They’ll eventually forget you exist while they’re busy making the future happen.
I’m sure the folks that are doing the work aren’t hanging out on Lemmy complaining about kids these days.
Ummmm you know youre on lemmy right? The whole point of lemmy is that some company doesnt own everything and thats why people dont want to use discord. Its kind of ironic to use discord for a foss project when you think about it.
Oh noes, people see something that isn’t right and they’re saying something about it! Let’s give no real arguments and just toss some half baked insults, im sure that’ll work
Wow! You are so deluded, thinking of yourself as a cool new kid with cool new tech (Discord) fighting against old people. What you don’t get is that people are protesting the use of Discord for something it’s not suited to. There’s no generation gap in it. The best of the youngest developers I know have the same opinion. Perhaps it’s time for you to reflect on your own standing.
Why do you assume only “kids” use discord?
I’d understand your reaction if this were a defense of outdated bullshit that looked like it was invented in the previous century and looked the part like IRC, mailinglists, phpbb, usenet, … But matrix is from the 2010s. It has threads, video calls, voice channels, emojis, emoji reactions, and other stuff I don’t use. It’s evolving. There are many clients (web, mobile, desktop, CLI) for many OSes, etc. The only thing it doesn’t have is VC seed money and large amounts of marketing.
But that’s not the point. The point is opensource projects using closed source products that are controlled by a single, commercial entity.
OR join these projects you apparently like and volunteer to do the extra work to publisher useful documentation. Unless of course you never intend to be useful to FLOSS and just want everyone else to do the work for you.
That’s it: if they use discord these people (including me) won’t. “If you don’t use discord, you aren’t useful to opensource and want everyone else to do the work for you” is quite the take 😂
OR you can continue to complain and get nowhere while completely alienating an entire generation of developers. They’ll eventually forget you exist while they’re busy making the future happen.
L.O.L so the “previous generation” is just sitting around complaining? No work is ever done? The linux kernel is written by teenagers and 20 year olds, rust, PHP, javascript, W3C, firefox, conferences, etc. are all done by the next generation with absolutely no input from the previous generation (whatever that means)? At 40 people either drop dead or start shouting at clouds?
My sides.
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?
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:
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?
To me it looks like the features are about 80% there, can’t find the screen sharing, login with QR doesn’t exist. Not really sure how to even search for some features because the naming is so extremely bad. “matrix automation” “element bot”. E.g. this is a very poor collection: https://element.io/integrations Looks like custom emotes are still missing.
But let’s say all of that exists and works.
What other features are essential for an opensource community that only discord provides?
I think we’re talking about different things then. I don’t need something for an opensource community. I need something for ALL communities I’m a part of. Because I’m already in 40 of them and 5 of them are FOSS projects. So switching those over increases friction, if it’s not a total replacement.
As for forums, they are for async. Are you going to seriously tell me discord is a good forum replacement?
This is inverted. I don’t need to defend why the platform I’m on is good, (it’s not), you need to explain why forums are supposed to be better (they are significantly worse).
Documentation belongs on a dedicated website, Issues belong on some gitlab or something instance. If I have a question, I want the answer reasonably quickly or I’m just not going to use the software you’re providing. If I’m nice, I’ll leave a post on the bug tracker that the install/getting started documentation didn’t work.
Forums serve no purpose anymore.
Right now, I’m going to stop using element/matrix again for the forseeable future because there are no communities with public rooms I’m interested in.
I think we’re talking about different things then
You are in a comment thread with the title “FLOSS communities right now”. I don’t know what you were expecting…
Forums serve no purpose anymore.
So programming.dev is useless and serves no purpose? A budding community must be online 24/7 to provide support because “I want the answer reasonably quickly”? Not even a budding community, imagine a community with many people and the chat moving forward quickly enough for your question to be out of scrolling view within minutes due to other discussions going on. Even in that scenario there is “no purpose” for a forum?
We’re talking about discord and why people use that and not other technology. 99% of the people on discord are not involved with FOSS, but they are what make the platform attractive.
programming.dev is useless and serves no purpose?
No, this instance is federated and not a traditional forum.
A budding community must be online 24/7 to provide support
No, it’s fine if that support is given via the git platform, and it’s also fine if it takes a while. And it’s also fine if the question goes unanswered.
imagine a community with many people and the chat moving forward quickly enough for your question to be out of scrolling view within minutes due to other discussions going on. Even in that scenario there is “no purpose” for a forum?
Yes. Because it is functionally no different than a forum main page where so many new topics get created that questions people don’t get to get buried. And also, I’ve never seen that happen with chats. What I have seen is that people didn’t have time or interest to answer my question. Which is fine because they owe me nothing. But a forum would not have “solved” that.
We’re talking about discord and why people use that and not other technology. 99% of the people on discord are not involved with FOSS, but they are what make the platform attractive.
Dunno what to tell you, but I made meme about FLOSS communities using discord and you’re talking to me about the other “99%”. Not my problem if you go off-topic.
