person backing up his car exploitable with the following four panels:
- person looking ahead. the text below him says, “wow a cool software. let’s check out the community”
- 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. - hand on gear shift zoomed in, switching to reverse
- person looking behind with the text “nevermind”.
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Discord isn’t a forum and shouldn’t be used as one, but it’s a fantastic community chat room/hangout space. It’s my main hangout these days :-)
Discord has done for reproducible support what panty hose has done for finger fucking.
What is an acceptable community?
Discourse or some other threaded forum software that is visible to search indexers, and an actual issue tracker.
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.
Worst example I’ve ever seen is 3dVista - a fucking facebook group. Discord would have been amazing in comparison.
Had to see it to believe it. On their website, under Support > Forum, you’re redirected to their Facebook group. This is criminal.
but why?
Amongst many other reasons, my biggest is it’s not searchable by search engines.
If someone else is having the same problem as me with some software, and someone else has figured it out, it should show up on the first page of a Google search regarding it.
If it doesn’t, the tool the community is using is entirely unfit for purpose.
I don’t think you understand how terrible search engines are for niche communities. I’d bet most lemmy posts don’t show up. You’re far better off just joining the community and doing a search within discord than wasting your time scraping through bad search results.
If I know the community exists, I can narrow the search on Google
… Unless it’s on discord because in that case it’ll never show up
And if the community I’m looking for is regarding something I’m working on, I’m not putting discord on my work laptop, so shit outta luck
If I know the community exists, I can narrow the search on Google
Doesn’t work most of the time for my communities.
And if the community I’m looking for is regarding something I’m working on, I’m not putting discord on my work laptop, so shit outta luck
Sounds like a personal problem you don’t want to work around.
I’m sorry, you want everything that’s on your discord going through whatever monitoring software your work puts on your laptop?
A lot of places won’t even let you install third party software without going through IT—and I’ll bet you most IT departments aren’t going to authorise you installing discord.
This is a very common situation, not a personal problem.
Weird take.
Just like every other job you bring it up to the IT department and work around it.
Tell me you’ve never worked with a corporate IT department without telling me you’ve never worked with a corporate IT department.
It’s not a professional tool, and it’s clearly not positioned as one. There’s no way in hell you get that through any remotely professional IT department. Aside from many other reasons, they can’t lock it down from an information security perspective (effectively legally required to avoid falling foul of things like GDPR), that alone makes it a massive denied response.
that makes sense, thank you for explaining
You are right, when I was trying to get acquainted with Gentoo for instance, I found most of my problems solved in a forum or wiki, if they had discord I wouldn’t have gotten nowhere probably and would’ve just ditched it
Amongst many other reasons, my biggest is it’s not searchable by search engines.
That’s why we made forum.2009scape.org for our project. Yet the SEO is so bad that nobody finds anything we put there anyways.
At that point it still has an advantage over discord in that if I know it exists I can narrow the search on Google (if it’s still not showing up, then there’s a misconfiguration going on)
With discord I have to join the community and hope that discord search isn’t shit.
Oh and I’m not gonna install discord on my work laptop—so if I’m looking at something for work I’m shit outta luck
If you explicitly add site:ourforum or quotes around large blocks of text, our forum does show up, but to appear anywhere near the front page naturally is a full-time job and not something we have the resources to dedicate.
I think, unfortunately, things like GitHub discussions are the best place for users to find things off Google, but at the end of the day you’re still trusting a profit driven proprietary company
Yeah I’d agree it’s a bit shit that it often has to end up somewhere like GitHub, but it’s at least searchable, which (for me at least) is an absolute necessity for any community where people go to troubleshoot.
Tbh, using “site:blah” is what I’m referring to when I say about narrowing the search. Kinda just do that if I know roughly where I’m looking in order to cut through the shit, but I’ll put my hands up that maybe that’s not especially typical.
Amongst many other reasons, my biggest is it’s not searchable by search engines.
Well gee, I hope you don’t use texting, phone calls, emails, private forums, social media DMs, or talk to anyone IRL, because those aren’t searchable either!
This argument seems like reaching for something to complain about rather than having a legitimate problem with discord. If anything, you don’t like the “large group chat” paradigm, but that’s like hating a screwdriver because it’s not a hammer.
This is about the official community around a piece of software being shoved inside a opaque box. It’s shitty.
I have plenty of social groups on discord, that’s the correct usage of the tool.
Your example is more “everything is a nail when you’re holding a hammer”
cant speak for everyone but there are the ever present provacy concerns of all your messages being scraped to feed LLMs and other data structures, and any monopoly for communications that develops is bad in principle. Also running a chrome app is a no for some people.
Your comment intrigued me as there is one that is just about the opposite of yours with a slightly different take.
You are concerned with your data being used to feed a private LLM. the other comment was concerned with three conversations being hidden from the public, more specifically not searchable from the outside and therefore hiding a knowledge repository.
I get both takes but they seem to be in conflict with each other. LLMs are important for accurate and useful AI, but there should also be a way for an open community to block them from consuming their data. It seems we missed a step somewhere. Providing data to an LLM should be opt-in.
providing data to the public should be opt in.my messages to family and friends arent any domain but my own.
I can’t ditch discord. They won’t even let me in via browser because I “failed the captcha”.
(Not that they’d tell me this somewhere in their UI, this is the server response.)
Same. This happened to me so many times, I just can’t suffer it any more.
my failed attempts at registering on discord:
- use temporary email: locked out
- use real email with VPN: locked out
- use real email without VPN and Firefox: locked out
- use real email, no VPN, le lion(brave): registered. join a community. community requires phone verification. deny it. locked out.
every damn time they require a phone number.
Only the big ones
I’m not doubting that some servers do, but I’ve yet to run into one myself
Discord itself arbitrarily requires a phone number to register, which is already enough of a hurdle.
I’m pretty sure I never had to give them my phone number, though it has been more than a few years since I signed up
Phone verification is the worst!
Why so much hate post about discord lately? What’s happened?
Given that most of these projects are on GitHub, why not use the new GitHub discussions feature. MonoGame are ditching their forum in favour of it, because it’s cheaper (free) and easier to maintain. Though they still have a discord for chatting about game development and progress on their games.
Discord has recently introduced a forum-like thing but it’s not indexable by search engines and the built in search only works if you get the exact title. Basically rubbish.
How about Slack?
Mattermost is a FOSS alternative that works well
Or revolt, its more like discord and all the features are free:
Slack is great and free. Plus they actually care about your privacy and data. They just have a work vibe to them, which I don’t mind. Plus the tool integration is amazing.
One downside that slack shares with discord is it’s not searchable/visible to the greater web
Let’s pretend “a software” doesn’t sound as stupid as “a traffic”.
I personally don’t mind Discord. I do in fact like it. (If you want to convince me otherwise, please don’t)
But I really hate that OSS uses discord for their lack of documentation. I understand that documentation is hard and boring to create, but I don’t want to go on some discord to ask a bunch of questions that thousands of others have before. Instead I will try and find something using search engines and I will read the open and closed issues. If I don’t find anything, I give up on the software.
Discord seems okay for chat, but not good for information that is going to be retained and indexed. Isn’t this already known? Why is this news?
And making a wiki is super easy.
I don’t care if people use Discord to talk, it’s only when that’s where the documentation, faq, etc. is.
Yeah, even less nerdy people hate that. I’ve had friends who aren’t well-versed in fediverse/Linux culture complain about ROM hacks in particular doing this.
I do care about people using discord to talk when it’s the only place to talk and there’s 300 conversations on top of each other and 15000 messages/day. Also, Discord sucks for finding out who’s responding to you and its window seems to grab a random point in the chat and say “new messages”. I mean, I might have been 2000 messages behind but now I gotta scan them all to see if anybody actually responded.
I would take a busy forum any day.
Discord has threads and forums now. Most servers aren’t going to that many messages. I don’t think it is a real problem in the context of floss projects.
Until discord makes their search bearable to use, I would still rather use an actual forum over discord. It’s so irritating when I have to perform multiple searches to look up conversations people had on a topic because the stupid search function takes word order into consideration for what messages to show you. And since discord servers aren’t open to search engines, those can’t be used to alleviate that issue.
There’s also no easy way to narrow searches without memorizing their syntax, which of course they do not link to or make easy to find
Also on mobile it doesn’t let you type the syntax.
ditch discord!
make me
