we love open source!!1!

sunnie@lemmy.ca to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 554 points –
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Logging into a non-indexible proprietary service just to be able to read the documentation definitely does not contribute to accessibility.

And often the documentation is nowhere to be seen.

Nonsense! All you have to do is individually search each channel on the discord server and you just might find a brief thread discussing your issue 6 months ago, and then you just have to scroll for three minutes to find the comment with the resolution

/s

I'm sorry but where is this random assumption that the documentation is on discord coming from?? It is extremely common for projects/organisations to have some kind of community discord, but I have never seen one that used it as their main documentation host. The discord are almost always just community hubs to chat with other community members.

I think the term documentation can and should include bug reports, community questions and answers, and project examples and guides that are often only shared in Discord servers in recent years.

Most of these servers would be better off as discussion forums, but spam and ancient software have really hurt them. Young web devs need to start giving a shit about open web again. Time to make something better than phpbb, wordpress, and discord.

Then I must be missing a lot of projects, because I don't know of any which use discord for any of these things, besides questions and answers. And even then, only for informal stuff. Anything more serious goes on GitHub (or alternatives) or forums.

I run into this most often for video game mods' and fan ROM hacks' support communities; they might host their projects on GitHub, but any and all technical support happens exclusively on their Discord server.

For that stuff, yeah, Discord is trash. But for communicating and support it's definitely not a bad choice.

Obviously something like a Lemmy or Reddit community does both and would be better, or even a forum board