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?
You must log in or register to comment.
- Terrible format for archiving knowledge
- Terrible tool for retrieving knowledge
- Locks community access behind a corporate license agreement
- Hands control of community 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.
Lemmy also doesn’t get indexed by web search engines. I have yet to find a single post from lemmy on google or DDG even when specifically searching
I’ve had Lemmy post first result in Google idk what your doing
What do you mean by specifically searching? Because it totally comes up for me.
Ooh! A post with claims backed by evidence!
That’s most likely due to low rankings. Lemmy doesn’t prevent it.
Use “site:lemmy.world” (for example) at the end of your search
Open source search engine SearcxNG works very well with Lemmy posts and comments.
So nice, right? Just being able to curate where your search engine pulls result from… I wish I’d discovered it sooner
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.
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? ;-)
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.
Perfectly summarized and the stance everyone should take for the wellbeing of any community. Look at cs.rin.ru for example.
A web forum is far better in most cases
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. ;-)
On the bright side:
Aggressive garbage collection and automatic thread locking are optional settings in most web forum software I’ve seen.
Lemmy shares some of the important parts of Usenet, and could develop into something that comes close.
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.
Discord separates and controls possibly useful information from the public internet. It’s one of the worst platforms to use.
I don’t even have discord.
PLEASE I BEG OF YOU, STOP USING DISCORD IN PLACE OF FORUMS AND PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE BOARDS!
Forums and boards belonged in the 90s. The paradigm that works for the 00s forward imo are /.-like and their descendants including Lemmy.
Actually, discord is trying to be forum-like again where special channels have posts instead of just linear chat (like forum boards) and threads can be spun off from channels as well (but I haven’t encountered this nor how it works). Ball’s on matrix’s court on whether to copy these features.
lemmy isn’t terrible, but you aren’t going to find diehard thinkpad enjoyers flashing them with coreboot here, and you certainly are likely to find much if any documentation on it here either. Maybe reddit. Forums though? Daily occurrence.
Those “forum” channels are locked behind community servers, for some reason. And also still not a replacement for forums. Still not publicly accessible. Threads also suck btw. Matrix likely wouldnt copy them, because forums exist.
You cannot search a discord without being a part of their ecosystem. Thats a walled garden and does not belong in open-source communities.
But Discord is too convenient.
convenient for what? forcing me to join a server, go through onboarding, and potentially even deal with not having enough spyware loaded on my information, at best waiting 10 minutes to say ANYTHING, and at worst not being able to say anything at all.
Not to mention these on boarding processes can explode and cause problems from time to time. Discord is only convenient for real time chatting, nothing else.
Do you know how crappy the discord client is? Even element with all its flaws behaves better.
For a quick question yes, but if you try to search a solution for a problem it’s actual hell, 1000s of BS messages and countless other problems just thrown in one timeline.
You can either search through it for hours or ask the question which was answered 10 times before.
It’s as inefficient as it gets
Also the dumb system that thinks it knows what you want to search and no exact term search feature. Yeah, the search is unusable.
Discord is more analogous to IRC than web forums.
and yet people insist on using it as a forum, wiki, issue tracker, and a support channel.
That’s the problem.
honestly, i dont know why this is so downvoted, this is basically just what discord is.
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.
Github has discussions. The code is already there anyways
You can even have threads and comments attached to specific lines of code in specific commits. Github is practically effortless to set up.
Microsoft is going to continue to increase their monetization of GitHub. It’s going to get worse, not better.
Just hoping we get some github alternative on fediverse, so far Ive seen codeberg but its hosted by a non profit org in berlin… Which is great but for e.g. I cant contribute to the code without creating an account on their instance
I really don’t know about these things, but I’ve heard that GitLab is a good alternative to GitHub?
it used to be but they’ve been leaning heavily into corporate clients and shutting off special treatment/support for foss software projects the past couple years
as relatively easily and cheaply
You pay more when using these types of software than if you hired an engineer to set up a complete forum ecosystem. Just not with money.
Matrix chat works pretty well too.
It’s ~ as convenient as Discord. More convenient in certain cases. And one might be able to easily use the API to create an Archive site for all discussions in there.In other cases, you have the ability of encrypted conversations, which of course you won’t be archiving. Right?
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.
Usually everyday people don’t setup forums, that’s the responsibility of the application owner(s) or provider.
By this do you mean official forums? If so I think this is kind of missing some of the independent forums for software (whether games or media players or the like) or other media, which some sorta-everyday people set up in the past. Many have migrated to Discord not only because it’s easy but, I think, because it’s simply more cost-effective.
Forums don’t seem to be cheap. Discourse’s own managed hosting goes for $50 a month, from one of their partners it’s $20, and looks like somewhere in-between if you try to spin it up yourself (e.g. Digital Ocean droplet runs $4 a month, then add in domain, and mail-provider (~$20-35)). Looking at that, it’s little wonder so many either opt for official forums, unofficial subreddits, Lemmy/Kbin communities, or Discord servers instead now.
Maybe if I dug around some more I could find some options for managed hosting (which makes more sense for regular people, I think, to deal with technical maintenance) for Discourse or the like that are cheaper, but I can’t imagine one may find much that beats free. Unless there is something, unfortunately I guess we’re kind of stuck with the situation as-is barring some pleasant exceptions.
90% of the projects that i use and other people care about are developed by people that have the technical ability to set up and host a web server. They likely have the cash. It’s not exactly outrageously expensive. If it’s small enough they dont have the cash for it, they don’t need it.
Im guessing the discord was more of a legacy thing, someone was like “hey im having a problem, can you contact me on discord?” and then suddenly we have the rust discord server.
Why not Lemmy?
Why is everyone hating Discord? It’s pretty neat platform when all the features used properly.
I would accept discord/irc over mailing list. But nothing beats a proper forum website.
And no, subreddit is not a proper forum.Everything beats a proper forum because most proper forums are basically dead since small projects won’t have many users and only a small number will sign up for a specific forum.
Forums used to be great since there was not much else, they still are good for large communities, but other than that, nope.
only a small number will sign up for a specific forum
Most people don’t have to sign-up, 90% of cases should resolve on just searching the problem. Good chances it was already asked and answered.
Most of the time, forums with few users aren’t dead, they’re just really slow, whenever you post a question - expect at least 12-hour delay. I’ve never seen a message on Discord answered 12 hours later - you either get somewhat instant response or it’s ghosted forever. Also good luck asking questions if there’s heated/rapid discussion in the room, or you have a little time and other responsibilities other than checking discord every couple minutes.That’s because when you ask a question on discord it’s only visible for a few seconds
So let people SSO into your forum with Github?
Sure, give it a try and let me know. I would expect that will fail too in these days.
For the main project I’m a maintainer on we do have forums too but they’re pretty dead, we mostly just use Discord because that’s what everyone else seems to be using.
Discord is absolute trash if you’re a user searching for solutions. It simply doesn’t turn up in web searches. Why would you want your users to ask the same questions again and again?
It just so happens to be where all our users end up anyway so for us it’s been okay for the most part. Having moderator commands for frequently asked questions, and automating frequently asked questions tends to help even more. Discord also seems to work well for projects far larger than ours, ones like RPCS3 etc.
After reading the comments on several communities including Lemmy, reddit, YouTube and several others, I don’t get the feeling that FOSS users are as enthusiastic about discord as you portray. Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps it’s a restriction that you impose on your users?
Besides, all the bells and whistles of Discord don’t solve the biggest gripe that I have with it - the searchability and discoverability of questions and answers. Despite the history recording in Discord, it acts essentially as an information black hole. People’s efforts in solving problems are just lost because they can’t be found again.
And finally, there’s one thing that corporate social media has proven time and again. Eventually all of them pivot for some reason or another. Perhaps they want to monetize the platform on unacceptable terms (like reddit recently). That will happen to discord too some day. They are holding the community content hostage. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that they won’t ever try to make money off it, cutting the community from it.
I mean, I don’t disagree with you, but our forums are dead. Our users do seem to like Discord, we also have a Matrix and IRC but those are dead too. Discord is where our users seem to flock to.
All I can really say is my experiences, and what I have seen in other cases too.
I wish Discord weren’t the giant that it was, and I wish it were open-source, but unfortunately that’s just how these things go sometimes I guess.
Again, I think another good example of this is RPCS3. They have forums that are pretty dead, and they have a Discord that has a ton of users in there.
Our users do seem to like Discord, we also have a Matrix and IRC but those are dead too. Discord is where our users seem to flock to.
What is really happening is that people are looking for documentation or support, seeing that the forum, the IRC and the Matrix are dead, that the only other thing is discord, and give up. Minus some fraction who already use it for other purposes (gaming, probably) and don’t mind using it.
But from your perspective, it looks like everybody is joining discord and liking it, because all of the other people just give up. It’s only a very particular demographic that uses discord. Most likely (I might be wrong, but this is what I guess) young, male, gamer, european descendent, and from a relatively wealthy western country. That’s a very small part of humanity.
If you as the maintainer go and use the forums, and maybe announce this in discord, the users will follow.
We have been using the forums. It’s been announced in Discord, we have a webhook that posts in our main Discord channel every time there’s a post in our main forum section. Every announcement goes to both the forums and the Discord, and the Discord announcements link to the forum posts.
We are using the forums. Our forums are still dead.
Like a survivorship bias?
I’m a member of a Discord that is the primary source of discussion and information about a piece of hardware, including technical & usage tips, firmware announcements, etc. It’s a terrible way to track this stuff.
That said, the only other forums that have decent communities around it are Reddit, Facebook, and Elektronauts - none of which are even close to as active, but in which many of us will post important info & tips to get the news out. Over 3 years into the project (which is not open source) it would be ridiculous to try shifting the whole community to a new platform. We’re kinda stuck.
Luckily the community as a whole seems to realise this, so we happily answer noob questions over and over and provide links to the appropriate resources, discussions, and pinned posts without snark or judgement. We’ve all been there. It’s the nature of the beast, it’s not efficient, and it’s not the end of the world.
Finally, with the state of search engines in decline due to monetisation, encroachment of AI bloat, and general enshittification, it’s a matter of time before very little real information will be easily searchable. Insular communities who decide to withdraw and do everything their own, better way will likely become the norm. The internet needs a reset anyway.
You’re the maintainer and presumably you control the discord server. You can decide to move things to a more available platform by removing Discord as an option.
Is it worth the risk to just stop having a Discord. Users that strongly care will use something else?
There is one possible explanation for that conundrum. There are two types of people who are looking for solutions:
-
Those who want quick answers. They don’t want to do the research - to see if the problem has been addressed before. They don’t care about if the question has been asked before.
-
Those who prefer searching for solutions. They don’t like joining any community just to search for those solutions.
Group 2 is going to be very invisible to you (maintainers), because they ask questions only if they can’t solve the problem themselves and nobody has asked it before. (I know this because that’s me). This group isn’t a minority.
Group 1 is the vocal type that you are more likely to interact with, since their first instinct is to ask. If you provide them a choice between forums and chat rooms, they always choose chats because that’s where they can get away with providing minimal background information on their questions and doing minimal to no research.
This doesn’t mean that the majority of your users are happy with chatrooms. It’s just that your observations are going to show this survivorship bias.
-
Why compare Discord to web forums when it’s more like IRC? What’s the searchability and discoverability of that?
I didn’t advocate for IRC. I’m strongly on the side of forums. But in case you want to compare, IRC is still a better deal than Discord. IRC has loggers and searchable web archives where it matters. Discord on the other hand is holding the conversation hostage. Someday the closed nature of discord will come to bite. The honeymoon isn’t going to last forever.
I just think it’s a bad argument. Telling somebody to use web forums instead of Discord is ignorant of why people use Discord in the first place.
I prefer mailing lists to forums, and forums to IRC, Slack to Discord and Discord is dead last just because it’s so fucking annoying. Forums can be annoying too but they are far more usable/searchable than the stream of consciousness, ephemeral nature of chat.
at least subreddits show up in google results, that’s the only good thing about them.
as yet
gotta love the modern internet…
yay.
over mailing list.
LKML
You brought back to me some good old memories with that Donald duck meme lol
FCK DSCRD!
(They should use lemmy instead :-P)
Discord is trash, but nobody seems to have presented anything better.
Other then it being closed garden that isn’t indexable on the web why do you think it’s trash?
The stuff before it were not good.
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?”
Nani? Where have you been since 1983?
I just wanna chat over the internet using some sort of relay. If only there were a solution.
You’ve just given a brilliant idea! Let’s build server-client type of chat thingie.
I propose naming it Internet Relay Chat!
That sounds hard and discord already has my retinal scans
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.
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.
Which one would you like them to use?
Matrix is the best platform IMO, and actual dev communities agree. (See: Github, Mozilla, KDE, Nix, the list goes on)
This is in addition to forums, git, wiki, etc, which those communities also provide.
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.
My only complaint about discord is that it requires a mobile phone number for an account, and you can’t use the same number for multiple accounts.
I want separate personal (with a silly account name) and professional (with my name) accounts, but only have one phone.
Is that new? I’ve definitely made multiple accounts and I only have one number.
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 don’t know if it is new, but it is in the help files when I tried to figure out why it required both confirming an email and the phone.
Dial in BBS
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.
Same. It makes it much easier for someone to doxx you.
Nobody besides you can see your phone number. How on Earth does it make you doxxable?
I was talking about this part:
I generally prefer not to have a shared identity across communities
That’s fair. I agree it should have an option to use a different identity per server while having your account centralized only on their service.
Yeah, I wasn’t very clear about what I meant.
🤔…is this a new requirement? I have 2 accounts. Neither with phone numbers and it’s never asked me for one
It’s decided by server. Most require it to cut down on spamming and trolls
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?
Wait I thought this was dependant on the Discord channel?
I’ve got a Discord account and I’m in a lot of different channels for FLOSS and other things, I’ve never set up a phone number. I have occasionally come across certain channels that I can’t join because they require me to have a phone number authentication, but the vast majority I’ve joined don’t seem to.
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.
I had the exact same experience. Was just trying to sign up for an account, not join anything
Maybe you guys should just not be so suspicious (sarqasm brother chill)
Sometimes it depends on discord itself finding you suspicious, for some definition of suspicious. perhaps a user agent whitelist? lack of Google cookie?
Its a moderation tool. Server admins can choose to only allow users who are verified by a phone number.
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.
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.
I’m in a ton of servers and it performs pretty okay for me. No real issues.
Around 98-99 here (100 is max for non nitro users),and I’m noticing a significant delay when loading.
I use the browser version of discord in firefox.
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.
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.
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.
Mattermost is open source and has a ton of integrations with other open source tools like Gitlab and CircleCI.
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!
Like surely that’s the obvious place to go?
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.
isn’t discourse (important to note that’s a completely different thing from discord) just a modern and much nicer version of phpbb?
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.
Discourse is a forum software. Maybe you are mixing it up with something else like disqus?
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.
I’ve developed the muscle memory of immediately disabling notifications for any new server I join.
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.
You sound like a frustrated maintainer, have you considered doing what I do with open source projects using discord as their means of communication?
Don’t take it seriously and move on.
