denast , 5 months ago

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.

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2. 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

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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