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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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Discord separates and controls possibly useful information from the public internet. It's one of the worst platforms to use.
Fuck Discord when it's used in lieu of a forum, documentation or proper support channels.
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.
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.
yeah I've really noticed it's hard to find info and therefore use any project that does this.
and it must suck because anyone new, instead of finding the answer to their question in a forum archive from when it was first asked, has to log in and ask it again.
whenever I have dumb noob questions on setup and I see a discord link I give up a little.
And then to top it off users get annoying and angrily point at sticked posts, wikis and whatnot when people ask the same questions for the nth time.
This. I literally just joined. I have no idea what the server layout is or where all the important links are.
My biggest pet peeve is when you join a new server and you have 15 different steps you have to do before you can ask a question. Verify with a bot or two, send picture drinking verification can, send emoji here, ask for emoji there, introduce yourself, publish your whole biography, wait for the pope to bless your account, and then, maybe, you are allowed to use the #help channel. I'm not a discord user, I don't know what this all means ffs!
Discord is the worst. Requires a phone number, does not allow email aliases and logs your chats.
Matrix and SimpleX is way better
I get the impression that opensource communities are missing out on contributors by even including discord in the mix 🧐
FCK DSCRD!
(They should use lemmy instead :-P)
The people in this thread are open source power users who don't get and don't want the features that discord offers. It's no surprise you'd rather have your forum back. I don't think that's how it's going to work.
Privacy is good and what discord does is bad. But don't lecture me on how convient and nice it is to use or run something like matrix, if this is your idea of a user onboarding experience:
It’s confusing to me why people think discord is a good replacement for forums. It’s not even the same paradigm - it’s a chat program. Not being indexed by search engines is a major drawback as well.
I have no problems with discord as chat/supplement (and I remember setting up irc-discord bots in the past so you could totally have both) it's when discord is the only way to interact that it's annoying IMO. Part of the benefit of forums and git issues is searchability imo, can't really search discord externally for content and I definitely have found the search function annoying at best.
That said, video guides instead of manuals also annoys me, but that's a different issue.
I bought a keyboard kit recently and to my horror discovered all the “documentation” to build it is on Discord. The creator’s last message was that he was working on other things after losing interest, and was not monitoring it anymore. So all the channels are full of messages asking where he is, what the status is, is he coming back, etc. I had to scroll back through dozens of pages just to find the docs.
Maybe put up a wiki on GitHub or something? Especially if you don’t want to run a forum or plan on dipping. It’s not that hard.
While I understand why FOSS community hates Discord, I don't know an alternative that is better at everything.
Discord's main problems:
However alternatives we have are not ideal either:
Feel free to downvote me for this, but I think that Github for support & issue tracking and Discord for community hang out spot is currently the lesser evil approach until better Foss tools arrive
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 feel like so many people talk about how it's not searchable or other concerns but for me I don't really care so much because there's an even bigger deal breaker which is their license agreement, where you sign away the property rights of anything you post, giving away your entire open source project.. This alone should disqualify it for any work of any creative sort. They own things you give them. I would never use it for development because of this.
Since we are on the topic of disliking Discord, what Matrix clients do you humans use? I tried both Element and Nheko (the latter of which isn't electron based), and they both felt slow, clunky and unresponsive.
Half this thread is mad discord saves messages and the other half is mad that discord doesn’t save messages. You can’t make this shit up lmao.
I’ll eat all the downvotes but objectively discord is the best chatting service available to the public for discussion. Blows irc out of the water easily. The only point I’ll concede on is the phone number bullshit but otherwise I’d take it over anything else.
Never had issues using their search feature for dev discords. It’s keyword based; truly stupid simple and easy to follow.
And yes I’ve used irc actively. It’s delusional to think that is somehow easier to follow.
Using matrix would be better. Server plugins can publish channels like a public blog, viewable in a web browser.
every time I run into an issue with Proton-GE it makes me angry again: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom?tab=readme-ov-file#2-if-you-have-an-issue-that-happens-with-my-proton-ge-build-provided-from-this-repository-that-does--not--happen-on-valves-proton-please-do-not-open-a-bug-report-on-valves-bug-tracker-instead-contact-me-on-discord-about-the-issue