this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
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as much as i love Matrix: it is not a suitable alternative to Discord for non-tech people, and my friends will never switch to it, and i think it would behoove tech people to be a lot more humble about this. many people--most of my friends included--will sooner to switch to what comes after Discord than Matrix, and if need be i'm almost certainly going to follow them (although my main community will probably switch to a forum if i get my way).
in fact: my own first experience with Matrix ended in an account i can't use anymore for inscrutable reasons i don't understand, and getting restarted ate a ton of messages someone sent me that thankfully weren't too important. not a great first impression! comparatively i have never had issues with Discord on any meaningful level.
Honestly a forum is much better than the endless stream of live chat that is basically Discord and Matrix, et al.
for a lot of purposes yeah--in the example i used though it'd be a lot more about just having stability of community than anything, rather than some objection to live chatting. there's very, very little cost to self-hosting a small forum and we're a community of <100 people who mostly grew up on forums, so it's a fairly natural switch to make.
My main problem with live chat is its ephemeral nature. So you can end up having people asking the same thing that someone else asked but the previous answer is buried/lost. Forums are good because you can index and search.
Agreed. I think it has it's place, like, "we, a select and small group of people are doing this thing together right now and need someplace to chat about it in real time" or for very small groups of friends/family as an alternative to occasional group text messaging.
But, when I see FOSS teams use it as their primary mode of communication with each other and users, with multiple conversations going in parallel and talking over each other, I'm dumbfounded. How do they find that productive?
Hard agree. It's like Eternal September but on steroids
I'm really glad Discourse has caught on because of how nice its UI/UX is. Although I've seen complaints in the Arch Linux community that it's not as lightweight or no-javascript friendly as more traditional forum software.
UI/UX is incredibly important in on-boarding and retaining users.