- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
- opensource@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
- opensource@lemmy.ml
You must log in or register to comment.
True. Sadly the article is over 2 years old and not much has changed since.
Because most opensource enthusiasts cry foul on the internet, want everything open-source, free and privacy centric but never contribute anything of value.
Did the author start a matrix instance yet? No?
Yes, not much has changed.
The author is the creator of sourcehut, literally a platform for collaborative open-source projects. I think he’s done a lot more useful than set up a new Matrix instance.
Discord is a wicked place, let us not go there
Use discourse instead? It’s really the best in my opinion.
Look at what just happened to Yuzu - Years of community just deleted because of a few lawyers.
How to make a discord account? I get so many captchas and would have to enter a phone number but all the free ones online don’t work.
Step one: don’t be a spam bot that fails the captcha
I created a discord server for an open source project of mine, but grew to dislike it. It got spammed multiple times, people are off topic and talking about their lives in channels that aren’t for that, and so I started pushing the community toward GitHub discussions.
Discord isn’t searchable, nor archivable, nor public, but GitHub is (I’m aware of another conflict with Microsoft for some people, but to me this is the easiest solution to get contributors and have an easy CI setup).
I haven’t had much success yet, but I’m slowly shutting down all links to the discord and will let it die (for outside contributors at least). I might keep it to stay in touch with a few developers, to refine issues and prepare migrations that aren’t ready to be turned into public discussions/ issues / pull requests.
Can someone point to the reasons why such talented people use discord for their projects?
Convenience probably.
Email is inconvenient?
Yes.
The correct answer was forum.
I merely suggested an alternative to forums because everyone said signing up was inconvenient
You don’t need to sign up for forums for them to be searched through.
The point is that Discord is an information black hole. It’s all contained within the server, unindexed, private, hidden, and entirely gone if the server gets deleted.
You would need to sign up to be able to participate, which seems to be the pain point from the beginning. That was the reason why I suggested email threads akin to what Linus and Co use for Kernel development, since those can be searched no problem, whilst almost everyone has email IDs
Or you can use Github SSO.
I don’t think participation is the problem. If you think about it, you wouldn’t want just anyone to post something on a platform without first engaging in said platform. That can only have a neutral or negative effect. People asking stupid questions or people cursing out users. The act of signup ensures that the would-be poster has to signup first and rationalize their post during that process.
Therefor, the problem must be something else, it is the information gateoff (amongst other things) that makes Discord and similar apps unfavorable for community management and information distribution.
same goes for those that create self hostable, privacy oriented services and bake in dropbox and/or google drive support… like WUT.
Because most selfhosters are too lazy or inexperienced to break away from cloud services. Docker is great but it has also enables a “just run this docker” mentality that mirrors the Windows “just run this exe.”
edit: I think that the opportunity to learn how a project works, how to debug problems and how to integrate a project into their own setup is obscured.
Because if I didn’t use Discord then I would be the only one in the community. Discord has a massive userbase especially with gamers. You give them a Discord link and there’s a decent chance you’ll see them join and post a message. Give them any other link and they’ll never make an account, they probably won’t even click the link to see it.
I provide links for Discord, Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, Steam group, and GitHub. I see lots of people come in on Discord, but 0 on the others except for myself lol.
Only the few actual contributors use the GitHub, don’t think I’ve ever seen a non-programmer submit a bug report on my GitHub or use the discussions or leave any comments on releases or anything.
I’m also on Moddb and NexusMods, got a few comments on Moddb, none on Nexusmods yet.
I also have Twitch and YouTube of course, I get small numbers of people commenting on those.
Nobody has even asked for any other type of community, Discord is just want they want. If I just wanted to talk to myself then I wouldn’t bother creating a community/forum at all.
Essentially, Discord is convenient for them.
TBH forums really are for the technical people, at least for the use cases I’m imagining. What incentive could we give that they join forums too?
Because it’s a decent all in one platform and they don’t want to deal with the alternatives.
The integrations and plugins, established workflows, support systems ticketing it’s all turnkey. I hate the platform and I wish people wouldn’t use it but I understand the draw.
Discord has a ticketing system?
There are bots that tie in and store tickets several of my software vendors use them. When you have a problem you drop into a certain channel and make a request it issues you a ticket with a link creates a new channel that’s just a conversation between you and support. At first it seems clergy but after you use it a couple of times it’s reasonably slick
Why not just use Slack that likely has better integrations?
A lot of people have discord, a lot less people have slack.
Slack is also starting to charge for those workflows. My slack bill at work is gone up 50% past what it was. And I’m now getting monthly warnings from using my integrations. They would like me to put a credit card into handle more jira tickets.
You also need to pay to just have message history preserved on slack. Discord that information is there for free for as long as the server/discord exists.
I’m not saying people should use discord, but people are using it because it’s free to use.
There are ticketing bots, yes.
Depends what you use it for, there’s some great servers for a lot of things. I don’t really care about platforms and basically use them all. Certain people really hate Discord but the alternatives don’t have many interesting things on them, and the people who use them aren’t a very diverse group. Checking all the right FOSS and feature boxes is nice but it’s not what actually makes a platform good to use.
Ahhh, yet another “Discord bad” post. Let’s see what alternatives they propose. After all, just telling me I made the wrong choice isn’t productive right?
There are great FOSS alternatives to Discord or Slack. SourceHut has been investing in IRC by building more accessible services like chat.sr.ht. Other great options include Matrix and Zulip. Please consider these services before you reach for their proprietary competitors.
Hahaha hahaha. Good fucking joke.
There’s a reason Discord is a million times more usable than all of those, and it’s not just network effect.
…
I’m well aware discord is going to enshittify itself eventually. It’s inevitable. However quite frankly as long as that hasn’t happened yet, it will remain by far the best option. I am not going to knee-cap my project by using a Discord “alternative” that barely works.
The day Discord dies will be a massive loss for the internet. That hasn’t happened yet. But it will. And it’s not going to be a loss just because of all the communities locked in on it. It’s going to be a loss because it’s the best damn community chat software and there’s no replacement.
as long as that hasn’t happened yet
Hasn’t happened yet? Have you seen the new mobile app? What usability?
Hey, you’re not gonna get me to disagree the new app is terrible. Ain’t some sort of wild gotcha here.
The fact of the matter is that even with the frog partially boiled it’s still better than the alternative.
The day Discord dies will be a massive loss for the internet.
What loss will that be? Discord’s value is the same as MSN Messenger - the history on Discord is already unusable for resolving issues, so when it’s gone people will just move to the next real-time communication platform that fills the same gap. It’s not a forum that people can search and find answers on years after discussions have happened and solutions have been posted.
See my other comments. There is still no suitable alternative to Discord that is as good at it for making communities people can easily access. The loss is not solely in the messages that get locked away (sure that sucks too). It’s the loss of the communities that can’t exist on platforms like Matrix or IRC.
Another community will take its place one day, so no real value will be lost.
There are a lot of people out there who uphold privacy and security as their own personal tenets. Many ToS or privacy policies do not meet their standard and thus, many tech workers or tech savvy hate things like discord. To each their own. Try to understand why and look beyond the “discord bad” to learn more.
I am fully aware why people go “Discord bad”. But weak arguments like “you miss out on all the contributors that have too bad of a PC to run Discord” do not outweigh the fact that Discord is a million times better for building a community. You’re suggesting to make the experience worse for 90% of people interested in a project to appease the <1%.
I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but it is.
I see what you’re saying. A similar comparison might be that that they don’t use discord just like how we are here on lemmy instead of reddit. I’m guessing reddit has the 90% of people still.
I’ve used Zulip a couple times and thought it had some neat features and worked well enough. What’s so bad about it that justifies a reaction like that?
When the OP article was posted in 2021, Zulip didn’t even have public access as an option. This basically would make it a non-starter for what the article author suggests it for, as that’s worse (having to make an account everywhere) than Discord, Matrix or IRC.
To be honest I don’t have too much experience with Zulip or Rocket or all of these other new platforms, but my current default assumption is that they will always be designed foremost for organizations rather than the “I am in 20 communities I am somewhat active in[1]” like Discord. Matrix always seems like the better choice here… but it’s got its own issues.
I also don’t put much regard into the author’s word here because unironically suggesting IRC in 2021 means they’re off their rocker.
[1] I know you can only join like 100 servers without nitro ok.
i agree with you that irc is not a good alternative, but [Matrix] is
I’ve evaluated Matrix multiple times, even tried to set up a homeserver once, and I can confidently say it’s an unusable mess compared to Discord.
If I wanted to set up a community like on Discord the experience would be worse than Discord 8-7 years ago. Is there a nice, GUI based system for managing permissions, administration and members in a group across 50 channels yet? No? Alright.
Also every time I try to set up Element on another device it takes like 5 attempts to get it to stop spouting errors about E2E stuff, and then still fails to decrypt messages.
I think you meant XMPP?
XMPP is dead and buried lets be honest
I mean, it hopefully wasn’t, it’s a much lighter, simpler and more efficient protocol and seems to stand as a perfect middle ground between IRC and nu-protocols.
Can’t wait for the day Discord backstabs everyone and people decide to get the fuck away from it. I seriously can’t stand having to search past troubleshooting messages, it’s a fucking mess, almost unusable. Whoever uses Discord as a Forum seriously needs a full force punch in the mouth.
Well that’s no better than searching IRC logs, which are something folks have absolutely done in the past. I still haven’t figured out why folks like discord so much though.
People like it cause when it first came out, it was considerably better than other popular voice chat software available for PC games at the time, like TeamSpeak and Ventrillo. But most importantly: it was free, unlike those other two. So people flocked to it and it blew up big, leading us to where we are today.
ooh… can we do a fedi-discord? But like, good?
you mean matrix?
I use Matrix. I even kind of like Matrix and have high hopes for its future.
But like, good?
Discord already backstabbed everyone with the usernames
Can’t wait for the day Discord backstabs everyone and people decide to get the fuck away from it.
I can’t wait either, then maybe all the communities that disappeared into discord that I feel unable to actually feel like I am a genuine member of and connect with anymore because I am not part of the conversations on discord will go somewhere where I can be a part of them again.
sigh
FUCK DISCORD
Discord can and sometimes does monitor your chats.
Source: CEO himself said that, in a hearing
Also a large portion is owned by Tencent with whom Discord is allowed to share all the data they want according to their ToS.
https://github.com/privy-cafe/discordspyware/blob/master/README.md
?
Good to know, I guess?
I love Immich and Sharkey but both use Discord. Sharkey even used Matrix in the beginning but eventually switched to Discord. I think their reasoning was that they were often attacked by trolls etc. and that Matrix didn’t had good options for moderation etc.
And while I love Matrix I fully agree. Yes there are moderation bots like Draupnir and they’re good but you will need to self host them and register a user for them and and and. It’s not as easy as with Discord or even Telegram bots. Also there are many Discord bots providing very fun elements like levels, reputations, roles etc. which simply do not exist or aren’t even possible in Matrix as it currently is.
On top of that we have the decentralization “problem” for end users who aren’t technical. They simply don’t care much about privacy and they don’t care if Discord stores every single message and picture in clear text forever on their servers. It’s easier to create a Discord account on a centralized platform than understanding Matrix understanding which server to choose, understanding which client to choose and understanding how encryption, key management etc. works. Yes decentralization is important and great but for the average user it’s still something that they do not really know which “overcomplicates” it for them.
And another point is that Matrix spaces are simply not the same as Discord servers. Channels are not as easy to manage because they are rooms on their own in Matrix and a space is not a server but rather a way to organize multiple rooms. Not every client supports spaces yet. Clients implement them differently. Then there’s Element and Element X on phones confusing people new to Matrix etc. In Discord several channels can be grouped in another category. In Matrix you’d use Subspaces for that giving you the same issue as with normal spaces.
And most clients don’t implement simple things on mobile like…sending multiple images at once. From the perspective of an end user that fact annoys the heck out of anyone wanting to send several pictures.
So yeah I think it’s a mixture out of those things.
Matrix especially needs better bot support with bots that could be used by everyone as it is with Discord instead of being only usable by server admins or the bots creators as it is with many Matrix bots. And it does need a better solution for spaces with rooms or another thing in the specs that replicates how Discord servers work so that it’s a “space” with actual “subchannels” without every space technically being it’s own room dangling around in limbo and just being “sorted” into the space.
And it needs better moderation tools.
Matrix isn’t the only alternative, there’s also rocketchat
The elephant in the room is IRC. Which continues to work fine and hosts huge FOSS communities. Self hosting it is even better as you can use a more modern version like ergo.chat than the large networks sadly utilize.
IRCv3 has a lot of features & is good, but if you need encrypted chat and/or want to support decentralization XMPP MUCs can fit the bill similar being just a bit less lightweight.
I use IRC in Matrix, and have used IRC since the 90s, but IRC lacks many modern features, even simple things like configurable push notifications and universal encryption, perhaps ergo is better? But then again, the reason I chose Lemmy was distribution, so…
Heh, push notifications and universal encryption are about the opposite of simple and fail to work on Matrix most of the time. Most of the actually simple and useful features for a public chat are supported by Ergo though.
What issues have you had? Using Element worked out of the box for me on both. Even spun up my own server with a docker compose and it worked fine there, too.
Large public rooms have constant issues with encryption, and since you can’t turn it off once enabled (yeah 🤦♂️) most public rooms are not e2ee. Besides the fact that e2ee doesn’t really make sense in public rooms as anyone can join.
Push notifications in Matrix clients only work with the help of Google’s or Apple’s centralized infrastructure. This is of course only partially the fault of Matrix, but XMPP for example can do it without pretty well.
push notifications also work degoogled on element and fluffychat, what do you mean?
But IRC doesn’t really support E2EE in 1:1 chats right? Because that’s something very important for me. I don’t want to use an app only for public channels I ideally would like to use it for everything. Including messaging the people I know.
You made me look again at IRC V3, seems like they support threads and emoji reactions. I might give it a try
Matrix sucks, that’s why most people won’t use it. I’m already giving my software away for free and providing free support for it, why would I want to take up even more of my free time running and maintaining a Matrix server as well?
Sure, I could use an already available Matrix server but I already have a Discord account, all my friends and contributors do as well and the entire thing is easy to set up and use, plus I’m already running the Discord client too.
On top of this, the argument about searchability is irrelevant. Projects have been giving support via IRC forever which has all the same problems. The best thing to do for any non-trivial support inquiries is to direct the user to lodge a support ticket and always has been.
Matrix just isn’t a compelling option, even if it had feature parity with Discord and was easier to use, it doesn’t have any real inertia anyway.
It could install itself and I still wouldn’t use it. Nobody I care about is on there and inertia is important too. This has been true since the dawn of real-time communications platforms and isn’t going to change either.
@Kushia 🤷♂️ I have the opposite situation, nobody I care about is on discord. So discord sucks? See the thing is if one matrix guy wants to talk to one discord guy, one of them needs to install a new app. And I think the world would be better if we all had more free/libre apps and less walled gardens, so I will strongly resist installing discord. Just yet another proprietary walled garden waiting for the rug-pull. Why? Just convince the other guy to use Matrix and over time our world will improve
The you’re free to use it, that’s the great thing about choice.
@Kushia Of course I am. Now I would appreciate if you didn’t come to the open-source community telling everyone how bad they are and that they are never gonna make it. That’s a pretty shit move man. Cheers.
I never said it’s never going to make it, I said I care about what works for the majority with the least amount of friction.
If you took that as a personal attack that’s on you.
From the article.
Free software matters — that’s why you’re writing it, after all. Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
Maybe you’ll take up more of your time answering lazy user’s questions than speaking with those that are helpful with solving issues.
Your argument about time is more in favor of Matrix, and even more so in favor of just using your code hosting’s issue tracker.
The article is wrong, you disrespect your users by forcing them to use a platform that they otherwise wouldn’t just to engage with you. Github isn’t free either, but the majority of us use it for free software too.
Matrix has great bots (moderation and otherwise). You just need to make your own matrix server or join one that has this stuff enabled. Developers arent „users“ they’re tech and they should absolutely be able to configure mod bots and such.
I get that matrix isnt as easy as discord and it never will be/should be. Corpo Media is an ad machine to make money. Thats why they‘re so streamlined. You can join matrix.org today and discuss with thousands of folks in many communities.
Feel like making your own? Then do it. It’s becoming easier day by day to host your own.
Ideally “users” wouldn’t only be IT guys but also an average person. Some of my friends use Matrix to message me. They certainly are no developers or have technical IT knowledge. They certainly don’t know how to set up a bot. With discord you just add a bot to your server (equivalent to a Matrix Space) and there you go. That’s user friendly. Matrix bots work yes. But they are by far not user friendly.
We‘re talking about wildly different things here.
- A „user“ is not the person making a server (discord or matrix for that matter)
- A developer (which are the people making FOSS projects, which were the topic) is absolutely a tech person
- A matrix bot can just be invited to your space
- Hosting your own bot is downloading a script, changing some values and starting it
- Matrix is a couple years old and written by hobbyists, discord is a for profit product with dark patterns to suck people into paying for basic features
Please dont use these ignorant arguments, its obvious that matrix is the better choice if someone can afford the time to get to know it or just joins a server.
There is a big difference between “is unable to maintain bots due to lack of skills” and “is unable to maintain bots due to lack of time and motivation”.
There is a big difference between maintain and download a docker-compose.yml and typing docker compose up -d
Don’t fret, it’s people with your mindset that will survive the impending AI tech employment apocalypse.
What about security updates? What about monitoring? What about the underlying infrastructure? What about even picking what software to use and configuring it?
I haven’t heard of
docker compose up guess-what-i-want-and-just-do-ityet, but I guess there is some LLM that can hallucinate one for you.Obviously, having discord gobble up your data is more comfortable in any case. Still, its not that hard, especially for a tool as popular as matrix. I‘m not saying its no work, I‘m saying its not much.
The biggest problem with Discord is that its an information black hole. Its not properly searchable and not indexed by search engines.
Discord is fine for casual chat, but horrible when used for forum-type discussions and even worse when used for documentation.
You see the same problems being discussed and solved again and again, but you cant just “link” someone the solution like you could with a forum thread cause its spread out over 3-10 chat messages that are interleaved in-between other topics being discussed in the same room
Anything of long-term value for the project (forum-type discussions, documentation etc) should not recide in Discord
I think a happy medium for this is to rely on GitHub issues for support, and then people can discuss each issue on GitHub or Discord
Both are proprietary, closed source from US-based, for-profit entites. Same problem arises.
I have all the issues with Discord that you mention, but struggle to find a better alternative. Do you have any recommendations?
What about a lemmy community ? I noticed the Github «discussion» tab also.
Forums. Phpbb, Mybb, hell even discourse is better than discord. If you’re specifically dealing with a coding project, most git repositories offer an issues page and wiki you can use.
Forums used to be a lot more common before Reddit kind of ate most public forums.
I guess that the Threadiverse is a substitute, but I dunno how long a given server will stay up.
And if you want something realtime, IRC & XMPP are low-resource chat options—with the latter being federated & can offer encryption for private rooms.
Sure, but those options solve literally none of the issues discussed above
There’s still been a time & place for realtime communications where the history preservation doesn’t quite matter… it can be some general recon of a problem to know what to even ask so as to not clog up the signal-noise for SEO or even if it’s mostly off-topic banter to relate to community members.
I’m thinking of a rapid alert on a problem in the project using IRC/XMPP/Matrix and then the project managers posting it in a forum about problems in the project.
There’s going to be a lot of shocked Pikachus when the inevitable enshittification hits, and suddenly they charge to host all the documentation and wiki pages. All that barely maintained stuff will just vanish overnight.
You would think that people would learn not to put all their eggs into one corporate basket after Facebook fucked everyone over…
At this point, charging for the service is the only thing left to do to make it more shit…
Chat in general is so flawed when talking about multiple topics at once. At least when people dont use matrix threads, spaces and rooms correctly.
Any non-trivial support enquiries should be directed to log a bug report/formal support request regardless of the community platform you’re using. Discord isn’t any worse than IRC in this regard and we’ve been offering support via the latter forever.
A solution would be to save the chat log as a text file. An LLM might be able to turn it into FAQ format with little oversight. Of course, someone would still have to volunteer the work.
Obviously, Discord doesn’t want that sort of thing since it lessens their hold on a community and the people in it. They could decide to cause trouble.
That just sounds like something a discord bot could do
from the article:
In short, using Discord for your free software/open source (FOSS) software project is a very bad idea. Free software matters — that’s why you’re writing it, after all. Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
Interesting to do a “s/Discord/Github/” replace on the above. Same situation yet hardly anyone gives a shit.
So yes, Drew DeVault is right. But he overestimates people’s commitment to free world digital rights principles and consistency thereof.
I think you misspelled “Please use the appropriate tool for a specific job”
I have never used Discord and never will. No project has ever been able to change my stance on it.
