Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects

starman@programming.dev to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 1277 points –
drewdevault.com
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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.

Mastodon and Lemmy could be indexed relatively easily, but as all social media it raises the problem of consent on broader decimation of content that's intended for a specific audience.

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".

Discourse is great. It needs flawless activity pub integrstion.

Irc was never searchable, but that was never an issue before.

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.

Popular IRC channels usually have an searchable web archive. But yes, chat is not a good solution for stuff that needs to be documented.