Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects

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

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.

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.

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