I use Discord with friends for a weekly online D&D game in what’s basically a glorified conference calls. It’s fine for that use-case, but it fucking sucks for trying to do anything organized or having on-topic conversations or looking up any sort of stored information. I kind of hate it when game companies have shit on there and you have to search/sort through hundreds of unconnected chat snippets to find answers to questions.
Basically how I use Discord as well,. My favourite feature of Discord is when I get an "@everyone" ping from big servers and I click into the notification and the message disappeared into the void without fail.
All you idiots telling FOSS maintainers to do something else, know that we don’t want to maintain yet another server. Aside from Discord, Zulip is the next best thing.
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.
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 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. ;-)
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.
I get this post and everyone's comments here. You're not wrong. The issues is we often have to go where people already are. It's annoying, it's inefficient, but ultimately the best tool is worthless if no one comes over to it. Classic chicken-egg problem ultimately.
That’s not the case for open source projects. There are many projects that use Discourse as their primary support channel. There seems to be no dearth of users asking questions there.
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:
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.
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
Discord does have threads. I think the server admin has to enable them though. In rooms where it’s enabled, you can choose to post a thread or a regular message, and people can create a thread by replying to a regular message and choosing the option to make it a thread.
The most important downside for me is: I’m looking for some information about an issue I’m having or how to install or configure something and I find none. Because all the people talk behind closed doors and googling etc doesn’t help any more. Only solution is to join every Discord and platform before you start using your software and scrolling trough pages of chat messages.
I’d rather google for an error message and then be directed directly to an issue tracker where people discussed that specific problem.
Yep, that’s exactly why in the end of my comment I say that I currently believe a combination of Github+Discord to be best. Github for bug reporting, Discord if you want to socialize with the community, that’s what it does best
I’m somewhat fine with that. But you absolutely have to tell people to keep the discussions to random chatter and the absolute minimum then. (And internal talk maybe, if that’s of no interest to the public. Once it gets important or someone asks for advice that could be beneficial to others, the discussion on Discord needs to be interrupted and switch platforms. Or be copied to a Wiki after the fact.
Come on. That’s not even close to the amount of data that TikTok collects. TikTok needs to know how long you spend on EVERY video so it can recommend more like that. TikTok records EVERY interaction and time associated.
So you are suggesting forum software that supports single sign-on?
We are talking about an open source project, not a high school reunion. I don’t want to hang out with people, I want to have a discussion about a focused topic.
I want to ask a question and get an answer. If the question is not one that anyone online can currently answer, I want to be able to tell at a glance if anyone has talked about my question. If I don’t understand the answer, I want to ask a follow up question.
In the evening, I want to be able to take a look at new posts from that day, grouped by topic, to see if there is anything I find interesting or can weight in on.
With Discord (or any real time chat), it is hard to follow a single topic when more than one is being discussed. It is doubly hard to do so after the fact. I am aware that Discord has a forum feature. I have only seen one server ever enable it and no one posts anything to it.
Can’t you do everything you’ve listed on github though? Report bugs on issues tab, ask questions on discussions tab, following up is easy. Everything is also indexed by search engines and can be looked up later on.
I know, but this thread is about projects that don’t want to use GitHub as the center of discussion and use Discord instead. The Discussion tab need to be enabled.
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!!! 🤮
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?
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.
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.
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.
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. :/
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 use Discord mostly for arranging matches in Wiimmfi, but yesterday I used it to get help about an issue I had running Knightcrawler (selfhosted Torrentio for Stremio) with my specific setup and some kind people helped me out real quick.
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