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.
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.
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.
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.
When you ask an LLM to write some prose, you could ask it "I'd like a Pulitzer-prize winning description of two snails mating" or you could ask it "I want the trashiest piece of garbage smut you can write about two snails mating." Or even "rewrite this description of two snails mating to be less trashy and smutty." In order for the LLM to be able to give the user what they want they need to know what "trashy piece of garbage smut" is. Negative examples are still very useful for LLM training.
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.
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.
i feel everyone has just forgotten about gitter? literally its entire schtick is being the communications platform for github and gitlab, and now it’s even been acquired by the matrix team!
Please, not phpBB. Whatever the merits of PHP as a language are now, phpBB came from a time when it was exhibit #1 of why the language was terrible.
Adding a community on a Lemmy instance is fine. Far less admin work on your part, too. Encourage your users to donate to the people who do run the instance.
It's real-time chat. That's fundamentally different, philosophically, from the way a forum/wiki works.
You can cludge forum-like features into it with stickies and bots and yada yada yada... or you could just use a platform that is designed from the ground up to be a permanent knowledge store instead of extended, glorified AOL chatrooms.
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.
WebCord is a beast! Maybe runs better for you.
Basically Discord desktop client experience, but privacy (well.. as much as you can have with discord) from the browser-version. (minus discord desktop client exclusive features of course)
Do you have trouble in other programs with Discord running, especially resource-intensive ones? That might have been a better way for me to phrase that.
Anectodal, but I do not. Obviously most channels I am not actively engaged on or have muted but I have over 40 servers I am part of - with no impact to other applications.
IMO Discord is the best platform for this right now, which is unfortunate. The little I’ve tried Matrix has not been very impressive (single chatrooms, slow, bad self-hosting experience IMO), IRC is a bit better (though very dated in many regards, esp. user management) but still doesn’t have the categories/channels that make discord nice. And most other chats are proprietary with discord just being the best one.
A phone number is not strictly required. They use it for some verifications, like suspicious activity. You can switch the number to whichever account needs it at the time, but only one login can have that phone number.
I can count the number of projects where I wanted immediate feedback from random people on no hands. I do not think there are enough hands in my state to count the number of projects I’ve crawled docs and commentary from search engines. My use case for a community is an asynchronous repository of knowledge and issue tracker. Discord does none of those things.
I’ve been around open source for 20+ years and can tell you right now that it don’t work that way. An issue tracker and a wiki is not a community.
Most older open source communities were built on irl connections and irc, with some mailing lists thrown in. Hell, we even funded conferences just around the software, not to sell a product but just because it’s good for everyone to be talking to each other.
The issue tracker tracks the status of things, the wiki is generally user focused. It’s not where development happens or thinks get built.
I agree with that. I think that there are people that want that deeper level. Most of your users are not going to fit into that, though. If you’re only supporting your power users, you will eventually wither and die as your power users leave.
I first bought a book with Red Hat Linux 6 or 7 in the early aughties (pre-RHEL/Fedora split). While I have actively participated in the technical improvements of project since then, I have typically stayed out of the social aspects.
Other than it being closed garden that isn’t indexable on the web
“Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
Discord is great for providing a community chatroom for both voice and text. It started, and still is, as the combination of IRC and Teamspeak/Ventrilo, now just with more bloat and memes. That people are trying to use the “IRCTeamspeak” as the entire information platform for their open source project is just mental, as it puts everything hidden behind a login requirement, unindexable and unsearchable on any search engine in an ever-changing stream of unrelated discussion.
Stick your bug reports and issues in a Github/Gitlab etc tracker, your information into a Wiki, and set up a forum. The discord can exist alongside these, but it cannot properly replace any of them.
I feel it maybe an administration issues. There are third-party bots allowing integration, channel/thread/role permissions which I find great but can be a hassle to set up.
A perfectly setup discord server with automation and webhooks, updates, permissions would be great. But setup of one is too complicated for the masses.
Segregating discord channels bases on roles, and staying on top of it with user influx - that would be perfect. Less than a percent (anectode) of channels can achieve simplicity like this.
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.
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.
I’ve got a Discord account, on a lot of different channels for FLOSS and other things, and I’ve never set up a phone number. I have occasionally come across certain channels that I can’t join without one, but the vast majority I’ve joined don’t seem to require it
Not to defend Discord, by the way. It’s fucking terrible and I despise this trend of telling people to come to your little private clubhouse to learn more about your software so I can sort through a bunch of obnoxious gif and image spam, while using an absolutely terrible search engine.
That is what the help files say, but when I tried to register a work account yesterday it did the verify you are human, then said there was something suspicious and sent the email verification, then said there was something suspicious and is now requiring a phone verification even though I did not enter a phone number.
At no point was I ever signed in and able to even pick a channel. This all happened while trying to log in for the first time through the browser at work with my work email. I guess that someone else might not hit that phone requirement as I only tried to do the registration once, but it is in no way limited to joining a particular channel.
Sometimes it depends on discord itself finding you suspicious, for some definition of suspicious. perhaps a user agent whitelist? lack of Google cookie?
I’ve had it happen on servers where that moderation option is not enabled. My worst experience was trying to join a friend group’s discord via an invite link shared with me. I was prompted to create an account with email, and I did. I was then shown a read-only view of the server: I could see all messages and other folks could see I joined and 👋 to me. I could not send messages myself, however, without verifying with a phone number. Further, I couldn’t use a Google voice number (my primary number) to verify, nor my “real” number which was associated to another account.
Ah, I’ve only had one guild require it and I told them to fly a kite XD…I thought this was becoming a general thing and I was going to be really annoyed
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