this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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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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[–] [email protected] 301 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (12 children)
  • 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.

[–] [email protected] 71 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 9 months ago

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? ;-)

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 245 points 9 months ago (15 children)

PLEASE I BEG OF YOU, STOP USING DISCORD IN PLACE OF FORUMS AND PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE BOARDS!

[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (7 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (6 children)

Github has discussions. The code is already there anyways

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 156 points 9 months ago (11 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 118 points 9 months ago (7 children)

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?

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[–] [email protected] 135 points 9 months ago (12 children)

Discord separates and controls possibly useful information from the public internet. It's one of the worst platforms to use.

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[–] [email protected] 116 points 9 months ago (6 children)

Fuck Discord when it's used in lieu of a forum, documentation or proper support channels.

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[–] [email protected] 98 points 9 months ago (27 children)

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!!! 🤮

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (1 children)

This. I literally just joined. I have no idea what the server layout is or where all the important links are.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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!

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (11 children)

Discord is the worst. Requires a phone number, does not allow email aliases and logs your chats.

Matrix and SimpleX is way better

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (26 children)

I would accept discord/irc over mailing list. But nothing beats a proper forum website.
And no, subreddit is not a proper forum.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 9 months ago (2 children)

at least subreddits show up in google results, that's the only good thing about them.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I get the impression that opensource communities are missing out on contributors by even including discord in the mix 🧐

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago

FCK DSCRD!

(They should use lemmy instead :-P)

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (5 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (10 children)
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[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (20 children)

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:

  1. 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.

  1. 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

[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I would rather be pen pals than use discord

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (18 children)

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.

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