Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects

starman@programming.dev to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 1277 points –
drewdevault.com
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You set up a discord account once. When you want to join a project discord all you have to do is click the invite link and hit „accept“. Bam. Done. No need to join a forum. No need to keep track of another website and check if you got a personal message from someone or something. The benefit is that it is all one location.

It’s undoubtedly nice during that step of the process, but afterwards you’re on a platform that may not be well suited to the purpose. It’d be better just to make the new account on an actual forum. Granted, I use Bitwarden now, so I don’t sweat making new accounts anymore.

This makes me wonder if there is a centralized system for forums. We have stackexchange already, but that’s really designed to be a question and answer site.

Discourse, NodeBB and Flarum are all currently working on ActivityPub federation support. The first two have some basic support already available.

Edit: I read "decentralized". The "centralized" system for forums is obviously Reddit.

This makes me wonder if there is a centralized system for forums.

Is this not what Lemmy is, to a certain extent?

Lemmy is not a Forum…

No, but it has several forum-like features. Each Lemmy community is kind of like a mini-forum, with posts, threads, comments, etc. Lemmy is certainly more forum-like than Discord is.

I'd much rather have email for forums (Linux kernel style) than discord. I'll even take IRC