- cross-posted to:
- opensource@programming.dev
- foss@beehaw.org
- opensource@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- opensource@programming.dev
- foss@beehaw.org
- opensource@lemmy.ml
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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
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.
At this point, charging for the service is the only thing left to do to make it more shit…
You would think that people would learn not to put all their eggs into one corporate basket after Facebook fucked everyone over…
I have all the issues with Discord that you mention, but struggle to find a better alternative. Do you have any recommendations?
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.
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.
What about a lemmy community ? I noticed the Github «discussion» tab also.
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.
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 miss regular old web forums, mailing lists and that sort of thing. Discord / Slack / etc have zero discoverability. The ability to google your question is gone, and knowledge is ephemeral, when a chat is the central source of community.
A few weeks ago the community manager of the Helldivers Discord got upset and deleted the whole thing. Years of discussions and knowledge (and memes) gone.
Naturally you can’t even bring up the idea that a Discord community takes on a life past its “owner” once it reaches a certain size or level of activity. “Your container, your rules” say the defenders unironically, while not acknowledging that you neither own the “server” nor make all the rules.
I’ve been finding this out at work recently. Got lazy and started doing most of my conversations via teams instead of email and now having to find shit from like a year ago is practically impossible. Even some conversations I know contained what I’m looking for just have random gaps where posts have disappeared.
Teams are just shit like that. Although my company has migrated to 365 for our work apps, the team’s main communication is still Slack. With Slack I’m still able to find old messages easily and be able to link it in relevant context.
Thank you!!! I feel the same way and I felt like I was losing my marbles.
Discord is just way too ephemeral and the answers you get depend on who is logged on at the time. I don’t expect an immediate answer but I also don’t wanna wade through 14 conversations either.
yeah, discord do be like that
on hindsight they are trying to implement a “forum” like experience, where you can create a dedicated threads channel where you csn search previous threads, but it’s not exactly like a real forum, pretty useful tho
The search in their new forum system is really, really, really, very, very bad. It only searches for exact matches in post titles. So not very useful. I hope we’ll see more projects start to use GitHub discussions, but it depends on the commitment of the maintainers
i don’t understand discord’s popularity at all. it’s so annoying to use
It started getting popular years ago and that’s when me an my friends switched to it too (back when I didn’t know shit about privacy). You gotta keep in mind the alternatives back then were Skype, which was meant for 1 to 1 calls, had shit audio quality and issues all the time and TeamSpeak, which was complicated because you needed a server (we were kids, we only knew what a server was from Minecraft) and had a text chat that was only a small part of the bottom of the window that was full of connected and disconnected messages, so I actually didn’t even know you could write in that. TeamSpeak’s interface also isn’t exactly good-looking or very intuitive. Then came Discord, you could create a server for you and your friends for free, you saw who of your friends was online and playing what, you could see when someone was in a voice channel and could just join, you had multiple text chats where you could easily send a link or memes while playing and you could easily share your screen with the others. It was a major improvement over the other two. I know that it sucks from a privacy standpoint but there’s good reasons why people started using it.
I used ventrillo
I just got off a Mumble session. The technology is still here.
hey man get on vent
Man those were the days .
It was my replacement of Skype, which was leaning hard into its enshittification around that time.
Where discord never had to lean into it as it was born shit
What? Skype is better than discord
Not when discord launched. Discord had far better audio quality, multiple text and voice channels, and some moderation tools. Skype was basically a group chat with a group call function
I second this!
It’s especially disappointing to see FOSS people on Fediverse promoting it.
People love discord. When Microsoft tried to buy it, people freaked out. They turned down the multi billion dollar offer. IMO, I don’t believe the paid portion of the app is worth the money because it’s mostly cosmetic bullshit. They don’t give me a good reason to give them money
I also think discord nitro is kind of B.S . The only reason I still use discord is because my friends use it.
I wish there were similar features in Matrix clients like Element. Just the voice channels feature will be enough for me.
Revolt chat is a good alternative. It lacks in features but its pretty good for an FOSS project. I tried to convince my friends to use it but they crawled back to discord after 2 days.
They don’t give me a good reason to give them money
The constant harassment was enough to get me to pay for it. But guess what? After I paid for it, the harassment continued, trying to get me to give them even more money for products I don’t even understand. And that’s just not something I tolerate.
That + the inevitable data-mining + refusal to provide any sort of deletion tools = no more Discord for me. I use Revolt now when I need that sort of thing.
my main problem is issue cannot be searched on search engine
Chat and forum are different things and serve different purposes. Even matrix doesn’t solve the search problem. Use a forum for this.
yeah that is why discord should not be used for problem-solving or archival purpose. Hell, even mastodon,reddit and lemmy can be indexed properly on search engine.
The biggest problem with traditional forums is the fact that participation requires yet another account. This is the most significant thing that discord has going for it, nearly everybody already has a discord account. Federated forums mostly solve this issue tho
is the fact that participation requires yet another account.
You can literally connect most active forum engines to eg.: OpenID, XMPP, email or any/most kinds of online identifiers. Worst case scenario you can literally enable “sign in with Google”.
Irc was never searchable, but that was never an issue before.
Popular IRC channels usually have an searchable web archive. But yes, chat is not a good solution for stuff that needs to be documented.
The issue is that we used to have both irc and forums. Discord has taken on the role of both in 1. Unfortunately, that means that it also needs the remote search capabilities of a forum to not screw over the community, long term.
It’s amazing the number of times a 3+ year old discussion on either a forum, or Reddit has bailed me out of a hole. Everything like that on discord is cut off, unless you know it exists.
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.
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
Discord can
Well that’s pretty obvious.
and sometimes does monitor your chats.
Probably, although why would they? More likely they’ll just data mine everything an sell it on for AI learning program to nom nom on.
why would they?
People use it for things like planning terrorism, child enticement, and sharing CSAM. Discord probably wants to ban those people, and maybe aid in their prosecution.
Of course if you’re sharing something that’s actually private, Discord is a poor choice. So is email or DMs on Lemmy where the server admin could read the content.
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 is only good for coordinating game events and helping to facilitate gaming community engagement. I’m so sick of everyone pushing it as the central hub of everything social and the idea of entire projects centered around Discord is absolutely ludicrous.
Why should different chat programs be used for different purposes?
The whole idea is to… chat.
I guess you’re the kind of guy who has multiple phones when 1 would work perfectly well.
Yes, discord is for chatting, that’s correct. It’s not a tech support platform, nor is it a documentation repo, yet people commonly try to use it as such.
I think discord is great for the technical support side of things. It gives you a chance to talk through a problem in real time with someone more knowledgeable and ask follow up questions without waiting hours for a reply lile frequently happens in support forums. That being said it should absolutely not be the repository for documentation.
Or just don’t use Discord.
I think you misspelled “Please use the appropriate tool for a specific job”
Which certainly isn’t Discord
Depends what job, keeping a community ? Why not. Gaming with friends ? Yeah. Keeping track of a project ? There sure are many - even - free tools to manage that
you shouldn’t use discord at all … I think nowadays it’s the only app that uses plain text for all messages avoid discord
I use discord when playing video games with my daughter. It’s improved our experience immensely.
Audio chat, webcam and screen sharing are a great combination.
Can you recommend an alternative?
I’m not a fan of online games therefore can’t suggest you an alternative but I’m sure something better exists
chatting and making video with your daughter trough discord it’s the same like having any discord employee watching you (see privacy policy ) if you are confortable with that it’s fine . I’m supposing you are on lemmy to avoid reddit right ? do the same for discord.
deleted by creator
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.
Look at what just happened to Yuzu - Years of community just deleted because of a few lawyers.
I haven’t read the legal outcome, but wouldn’t this have happened anyways if the forums were in other places? The github got removed as well
basic news is: Yuzu and citra agreed to shut down with immediate effect incl. discords.
At least with an open platform youd have a chance to backup discussions or rehost. You’d probably still be dead in the water but it would beat the info being wiped.
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
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.
Or you can use Github SSO.
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.
Because it’s a decent all in one platform and they don’t want to deal with the alternatives.
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.
Same situation yet hardly anyone gives a shit.
I give a shit. Open source contributions shouldn’t require proprietary services if open alternatives (even if it requires more than a single service) suffice. In the case of Git forges, the alternatives are great–& the more you buy into the Microsoft GitHub-specific features the harder it will be to migrate which will lead to lock-in.
I give a shit.
There are not enough of you. Evidenced by ~95%+ of noteworthy FOSS projects being jailed in Github’s walled garden.
And certain projects I don’t deem it worth my time to contribute due to this fact. The unfortunate issue with that is usually there isn’t a good way to communicate that to the maintainers when they lock all coms to Microsoft GitHub & Slack/Discord. There are certain projects I have skipped on trying based on this too as to me it becomes an indicator of poor decision-making trying to capture hype/marketing rather than fostering goodwill of the free/ethical software movements. At least on Lemmy you get an upvote instead of harassed by asking for an open communication and/or contribution option 😅
not at all the same situation. Git itself is not proprietary so all the projects can survive without GitHub if the need arises. Additionally, you don’t need an account to view the repository or its discussions. There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue, however it doesn’t compare to discord, which is much, much worse.
Git itself is not proprietary so all the projects can survive without GitHub if the need arises. Ad
You’re neglecting the exclusion that’s inherent in Github when the need to bounce does NOT arise.
Also worth adding that during the war in Gaza some of us boycott Israel. Which implies boycotting Microsoft.
Additionally, you don’t need an account to view the repository or its discussions.
Advocating read-only access is comparable to endorsing only freedom 1 and 2, not freedom 0 or 4. Which is precisely what I’m talking about: FOSS projects that discard digital rights and partake in digital exclusion for some convenience frills.
There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue, however it doesn’t compare to discord, which is much, much worse.
Bug trackers have more of a monopoly on bug reports than discord has on discussions. There are countless decentralized discussions about free software all over the place – threadiverse, probably facebook, ad hoc phpbb forums, IRC, usenet, mastodon, mailing lists, conferences like FOSDEM … and rightfully so. Discussions don’t need the centralization that bug trackers do. General discussions also do not have the degree of importance to QA that bug tracking does.
Case in point, when bugs are reported outside of Github, they don’t get noticed by developers and triaged.
not sure what to answer, I made clear in my comment that github is also problematic, discord is simply worse, therefore they’re not the same like the original commenter said. I’m hoping both of them will fuck up like reddit and twitter did and more people will make effort to move away from it.
There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue
And if you insist on using Microsoft GitHub, this contribution concern can be mitigated by offering an alternative mirror or a mailing list/email address to send patches. One way to help prevent lock-in would be to use MS GitHub’s repository settings & straight-up disable non-portable features like “Discussions”, “Sponsors” & maybe even the “Issues” tracker favoring a third-party option or the issue tracker of the mirror along with disabling “Actions” choosing a third-party CI option or the CI that comes with the mirror (or require checks ran locally before pushing).
Having a bug tracker in that walled garden is the biggest problem. It demonstrates what I’m talking about: digital rights being disregarded.
like I said I agree, Discord is simply more terrible.
There’s not really much point in using a self hosted gitea or codeberg or sourcehut if you want the barrier of entry to be as low as possible for potential contributors. Maybe if some larger projects made the move. But GitHub has more features (like discussions), provides better hosting and ease of use. The focus of any open source project should be on development of the software, not the software which supports its development.
There’s not really much point in using a self hosted gitea or codeberg or sourcehut if you want the barrier of entry to be as low as possible for potential contributors.
But GitHub has more features (like discussions), provides better hosting and ease of use.
Bingo. Prioritizing convenience features above digital rights principles is exactly why Github’s walled garden dominates over forges that have a lower barrier of entry.
The focus of any open source project should be on development of the software, not the software which supports its development.
Again, people to setting aside their principles is exactly what I’m talking about.
It’s not so much a case of people setting aside their principles, it’s more like people considering stability, potential contributions and convenience alongside their principles.
Give Codeberg a few more years of stability and people might re-evaluate choosing GitHub. The controversy around Gitea forming a company and the fragmentation of development unsettles that trust.
Use discourse instead? It’s really the best in my opinion.
