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ditch discord!

person backing up his car exploitable with the following four panels:

  1. person looking ahead. the text below him says, "wow a cool software. let’s check out the community"
  2. screenshot with the text > Community

    The main place where the community gathers is our Discord server. Feel free to join there to ask questions, help out others, share cool things you created with Typst, or just to chat.

  3. hand on gear shift zoomed in, switching to reverse
  4. person looking behind with the text “nevermind”.
Feathercrown ,

Discord makes for a bad forum because it’s not a forum! Stop using it as one! It’s good for small groups that need realtime communication-- friend groups, project groups, even classes of students. If you’re using it as a public forum you’re using the wrong tool!

laurelraven ,

This, exactly.

Discord sucks at what it wasn’t designed to do… Shocker. That doesn’t make it bad.

TrickDacy ,

It sucks at what it was designed to do also. One of the trashiest UIs I’ve seen, and buggy af. It’s barely gotten any better too.

CeeBee ,

I brought this up in a project Discord once and they told me “this is just the way projects do it now, get used to it”.

I left that server right away.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

They added forum-style posts a while ago, which greatly improves usability. But I won’t use it regardless, due to privacy issues.

boredsquirrel ,
@boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net avatar

Same as Matrix tbh.

Awesome in FOSS matrix rooms: there are threads, but people never use them. Its horrible, they dont even jump on the boat. You could literally have one message = one topic and everything in a separate thread…

MystikIncarnate ,

My biggest issue with discord is that I’ll get pinged, and have no fucking clue what pinged me.

Even if I get to the notification, often I don’t get it right away, and often I don’t open it right away either. So when I click on it, which, in most chat like apps will take you to that post/mention/whatever, it just takes me to the channel where I was mentioned. I’m left with no earthly idea why I’m in this chat or what was said that prompted the notification.

When I’m actively in discord, this works okay, since the mention which prompted the notification is likely the most recent thing said, or at least, close to it. The problem is, I’m almost never actively in discord.

I find that if I use discord all the time, which is rare, but happens… Then I don’t mind it so much. However, if I don’t use discord all the time, then it’s less than useless. I get notifications all the time and I just end up dismissing them because by the time I get to it, there’s no chance I’ll be able to figure out why I got the notification in the first place.

DMs and very very small communities are an exception, since the volume of messages is so low that generally, even if I get to the notification hours later, the message that prompted the notification is still one of the most recent handful of messages.

To this end, my list of pros and cons for discord are: Pros:

  • convenient (when in active use)
  • good voice chat
  • a lot of people use it Cons:
  • slow notifications
  • bad notification handling

I feel like the people who run any given community, who are centered around discord, don’t have problems with it, since they’re pretty much always on it. For someone who isn’t always plugged into discord, it’s a horrendous nightmare of missed messages and notifications that take you somewhere unexpected. Any complaints about this generally falls on deaf ears because the people in charge, who picked that the community should be in discord, use it so much that they don’t really have any issues with it.

Compare and contrast with a competing text-chat service like slack. In general slack doesn’t do voice, so there’s some differences there, but talking strictly about notifications and such: the notifications frequently arrive within seconds or minutes at most, when you select them, it takes you to the channel where the alert came from, scrolled to the post where the mention that prompted the notification is located, with the specific mention highlighted for clarity. From here, you can scroll back to get context, and scroll forward to see other replies. Contrasted with my experience in discord, you select the notification, you’re taken to the channel where the notification originated, and scrolled to a random point in the recent history of the channel. Does this section contain the mention? Maybe, but probably not. Nothing is highlighted. Good luck.

Faresh ,

Not defending it, but discord has an inbox menu, where you can see a list of messages that pinged you and jump to any of those messages. It is a button on the top right corner to the left of the question mark and to the right of the search field (desktop).

MystikIncarnate ,

I’ve been using that, and bluntly, that’s great, but why, when I click on a notification, does it not do the same thing?

boredsquirrel ,
@boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net avatar

Btw they have Github Discussions now

Daeraxa ,

I understand the mentality but depending on the project it can be a struggle. If I was going to set up a brand new software project then sure, I’d be going all in on Fediverse and open source platforms. Forge? Codeberg. Chat? Matrix. Forum? Discourse/Flarum or maybe just Lemmy. Microblog? Mastodon.

However it isn’t easy to be that idealistic all the time and sometimes there is a degree of needing to do stuff against your ideals. I’m part of the Pulsar editor team which is a fork of the Atom text editor that got discontinued and we had to get things moving as quickly as possible in the time period that GitHub set until they pulled their services completely (along with their package backend). We needed the least friction possible to get things in motion and get as many people from the community involved as possible.

We needed GitHub - unsurprisingly Atom had close ties with GitHub anyway so moving away wasn’t ever going to be quite that simple and we would have needed to migrate an awful lot of repos within the org. The entire Atom package system relies on GitHub - people published their packages to atom.io but the actual code was on GitHub - something not fixable in the short period we had. We also needed it because this is where the Atom community was gathered around - at a period where we needed things to be as simple as possible for people to find out about and get involved with the project, moving to another forge may have just been the end of it.

We also use GitHub Discussions for our forum - as we are already tied to GitHub for the time being we might as well use that platform as well - it is a lot easier than trying to maintain our own forums which wouldn’t be seeing that much activity. The team behind Zed found this out; they set up a Discourse forum and barely anyone used it so they just went back to GitHub Discussions.

We needed Discord because it was simply the most commonly used platform. Pulsar split off from Atom-community which was already on Discord so it was a natural move that meant little disruption or friction to anyone wanting to get involved with the new project. We have been looking to make a Matrix bridge but honestly there doesn’t seem to be all that much desire for it - we had some initial enthusiasm to create a Lemmy community but when we did it barely sees any activity (other than me posting updates there).

Would I love to move off of these platforms? Absolutely. However we simply have bigger fish to fry at this point in time for the project itself so it is going to be slow.

So whilst I love to be idealistic about what platforms we should be using I also heavily sympathise with those who use those “less than ideal” ones - there could well be some very good reasons behind it that might not be obvious to you.

MantidSys ,
@MantidSys@kbin.social avatar

Everyone in this comment section is yelling about how bad discord is, telling people to use forums or matrix instead. No one is asking "why?". Why aren't people using forums or matrix? Because the path to user growth isn't guilting people into the 'morally correct' choice, it's making a product they want to use.

Why are small communities using discord over forums? Well, we're talking about small projects, hobbies, and volunteer work. Hosting a forum costs both time and money - renting server space and configuring/managing both the forum and the server. Making a discord channel is instant and free. You want your favorite project to have a forum? Then take up the mantle of hosting and maintaining it yourself. You want all projects to use a forum? Develop a forum system that you absorb the hosting costs for. Neither of these exist, so communities use discord.

Why are small communities using discord over matrix? I'm in my 30s, I spend all day on my PC, I've taken a couple years of college courses in programming. Figuring out matrix was annoying for me. I had to figure out which client program to use, I had to navigate the less-than-ideal way of joining servers, and there was a difficulty curve for understanding the program's features and how to use it. It wasn't impossible, but it took effort. Discord doesn't. For every step of friction, a product will bleed users. Matrix is cumbersome to set up and use, and it's copying something that already exists and does it better for the end-user experience. It shouldn't be surprising that people prefer discord. Want that to change? Start contributing code to matrix and refine the user on-boarding process.

Instead of stating opinions, ask questions. That's how things get changed. No amount of moral grandstanding will change end-users, no matter how correct you might be.

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