FLOSS communities right now
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.
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 sad when a web forum is better than the tool you're considering. Bumps, aggressive garbage collection, no Resurrection, it's weird.
I'm old, I guess. I miss NNTP, mainly for the archived posts I could discuss with the authors for an updated take or revised solution or some clarification. And yes, I know there's a good webUI front-end for an NNTP server as a back-end. ;-)
On the bright side:
Aggressive garbage collection and automatic thread locking are optional settings in most web forum software I've seen.
Lemmy shares some of the important parts of Usenet, and could develop into something that comes close.
The worst thing is that the mods can ban you for any or no reason, locking you completely out of the information they're providing. That is beyond an unreasonable amount of power that they can have over a user, and you just KNOW they're going to use that for political reasons.
Also the fact they can delete stuff in a way that makes them invisible to law enforcement, so a lot of illegal shit goes down there too. Combine that with the naturally hierarchal structure of discord leads to a lot of people using that power to abuse some of the more vulnerable members and of course once you call it out, poof goes the messages and poof goes your access to their server.
Perfectly summarized and the stance everyone should take for the wellbeing of any community. Look at cs.rin.ru for example.
PLEASE I BEG OF YOU, STOP USING DISCORD IN PLACE OF FORUMS AND PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE BOARDS!
While I agree, what might everyday people use to set up forums as relatively easily and cheaply as their Discord servers, and not have them riddled with ads or other clunky elements?
I'm pretty sure those that may have even been considering forums went to Discord because the only other options were more involved in terms of set up/maintenance and cost, the latter to get something without ads.
Github has discussions. The code is already there anyways
You can even have threads and comments attached to specific lines of code in specific commits. Github is practically effortless to set up.
Microsoft is going to continue to increase their monetization of GitHub. It's going to get worse, not better.
Just hoping we get some github alternative on fediverse, so far Ive seen codeberg but its hosted by a non profit org in berlin... Which is great but for e.g. I cant contribute to the code without creating an account on their instance
I really don't know about these things, but I've heard that GitLab is a good alternative to GitHub?
it used to be but they've been focusing heavily into corporate clients and shutting off special treatment/support for foss software projects the past couple years
Discourse is a clean open source forum software that is commonly used for application support and well suited for it.
Or if your a real die hard for the fediverse, you could set up a lemmy instance for application support. There's even a phpBB frontend for an oldschool forum look and feel for it.
Usually everyday people don't setup forums, that's the responsibility of the application owner(s) or provider. In this case, the easy option is also the shitty option if measured by discoverability of the content.
By this do you mean official forums? If so I think this is kind of missing some of the independent forums for software (whether games or media players or the like) or other media, which some sorta-everyday people set up in the past. Many have migrated to Discord not only because it's easy but, I think, because it's simply more cost-effective.
Forums don't seem to be cheap. Discourse's own managed hosting goes for $50 a month, from one of their partners it's $20, and looks like somewhere in-between if you try to spin it up yourself (e.g. Digital Ocean droplet runs $4 a month, then add in domain, and mail-provider (~$20-35)). Looking at that, it's little wonder so many either opt for official forums, unofficial subreddits, Lemmy/Kbin communities, or Discord servers instead now.
Maybe if I dug around some more I could find some options for managed hosting (which makes more sense for regular people, I think, to deal with technical maintenance) for Discourse or the like that are cheaper, but I can't imagine one may find much that beats free. Unless there is something, unfortunately I guess we're kind of stuck with the situation as-is barring some pleasant exceptions.
Matrix chat works pretty well too.
It's ~ as convenient as Discord. More convenient in certain cases. And one might be able to easily use the API to create an Archive site for all discussions in there.
In other cases, you have the ability of encrypted conversations, which of course you won't be archiving. Right?
Why not Lemmy?
90% of the projects that i use and other people care about are developed by people that have the technical ability to set up and host a web server. They likely have the cash. It's not exactly outrageously expensive. If it's small enough they dont have the cash for it, they don't need it.
Im guessing the discord was more of a legacy thing, someone was like "hey im having a problem, can you contact me on discord?" and then suddenly we have the rust discord server.
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?
Wait I thought this was dependent on the channel?
I've got a Discord account, on a lot of different channels for FLOSS and other things, and I've never set up a phone number. I have occasionally come across certain channels that I can't join without one, but the vast majority I've joined don't seem to require it
Not to defend Discord, by the way. It's fucking terrible and I despise this trend of telling people to come to your little private clubhouse to learn more about your software so I can sort through a bunch of obnoxious gif and image spam, while using an absolutely terrible search engine.
That is what the help files say, but when I tried to register a work account yesterday it did the verify you are human, then said there was something suspicious and sent the email verification, then said there was something suspicious and is now requiring a phone verification even though I did not enter a phone number.
At no point was I ever signed in and able to even pick a channel. This all happened while trying to log in for the first time through the browser at work with my work email. I guess that someone else might not hit that phone requirement as I only tried to do the registration once, but it is in no way limited to joining a particular channel.
I had the exact same experience. Was just trying to sign up for an account, not join anything
Maybe you guys should just not be so suspicious (sarqasm brother chill)
Sometimes it depends on discord itself finding you suspicious, for some definition of suspicious. perhaps a user agent whitelist? lack of Google cookie?
Its a moderation tool. Server admins can choose to only allow users who are verified by a phone number.
I've had it happen on servers where that moderation option is not enabled. My worst experience was trying to join a friend group's discord via an invite link shared with me. I was prompted to create an account with email, and I did. I was then shown a read-only view of the server: I could see all messages and other folks could see I joined and 👋 to me. I could not send messages myself, however, without verifying with a phone number. Further, I couldn't use a Google voice number (my primary number) to verify, nor my "real" number which was associated to another account.
Same. It makes it much easier for someone to doxx you.
🤔...is this a new requirement? I have 2 accounts. Neither with phone numbers and it's never asked me for one
It's decided by server. Most require it to cut down on spamming and trolls
Discord separates and controls possibly useful information from the public internet. It's one of the worst platforms to use.
Discord is a fucking plague. I loathe it for communities. As soon as there are more than 10 people in a room, no one can follow what anyone is saying. Threads? No dude, this isn’t the 90s! Let’s slack it up!!! 🤮
Slack is really nice and is at least usable for large projects and teams.
Ugh. Electron which can’t keep more than 5 pages in memory before having to load backwards in the chat.
Unless they use the free version and you want to search for old questions/answers/issues.
looking at you puppet labs slack
How the heck slack better or even have any more features than discord? Discord saves all history. Discord has threads that are easier to find than slack threads. Discord voice channels let you just hop in. Discord lets you direct reply.
I use slack for work, but Discord is great for what it is. The search is amazing.
All chat tools after irc have been trash for large communities. That includes slack. Irc somehow still works with 1500 people in it. I can not explain how. With a logging bot the discussions can be archived for google searchabillity. I guess that could be true for a discord or slack also, But i never seen it implemented. In most slacks i can not search more then 60 days back.
Matrix works great, I am in multiple rooms including some with 1983, 1356 or 1120 people
I wonder if it works like IRC. The "plague" this entire time has been servers. As soon as the idea only works because somebody, somewhere, is maintaining a server, cloud or hardware, then you're kinda sunk. The server is the bottleneck. I don't know how many times I've seen a AAA game launch only for the servers to be inadequate. It happens again and again and again, so I assume the business considerations push them toward having just enough server and maybe a little less, never extra, which costs money and cuts margins.
Somewhere there are a bunch of servers howling away in a room that are actually Discord, and Discord spends money to make them howl, so there's never as much server as you want, which is why things start bogging down with too many people in the chat room at once.
Most importantly to a corporation, if you have to interact with their servers in order to do anything, then they can own the platform by owning the servers. So there's always going to be a server, even if it's not strictly needed. The same consideration goes through the head of the streamer who always wants to launch a Discord because it's "free" but they can sell it to you and then have top level control of an entire community as an asset that can be sold to others. There's always a server. There will be a server if the actual application doesn't really need it.
The reason IRC works fine with 1500 people in a chat is because IRC uses the user's machine for any sort of computation power it needs, and then everything else it is doing is just sending data across wires. There is no central server farm. I haven't used IRC in a really, really long time, but if it hasn't changed, then it also doesn't support lots of picture posting, which helps. Most of the memory usage on my machine at idle is just too many Discord channels all needing to use my local RAM memory to store the umpteen thousand photos everyone has uploaded, all the memes and etc. The IRC I remember was text, and text uses so little data that it can be treated like zero data.
Lots of pictures are probably non-negotiable in the modern era. Heck, they're pretty important for serious work tasks, like putting up a shot of the broken gadget, so the engineering team can get an eyeball on the failure, that means pictures are in, text-only isn't viable. I don't know if modern IRC supports this or not, it probably does if people are still using it at all.
But IRC is a piece of open-source software that you install on your machine, free to the user. It's not a web app, it doesn't live in a browser. The data of you interacting with others is being sent out to them and also back to you, where it shows up in your IRC client and the chat room. If 1500 people are using it, then 1500 people have each added some of their machine power to making it all work, so it scales, it always has as much hardware as it needs. Again, there's no server in the middle to run out of capacity, so that problem is just bypassed.
Everything used to work like this, circa the late 1990s and early 2010s. Everyone was assumed to be on a PC of their own, and the only problem was how to connect them together to do stuff, like have deranged fan wars about shows. BBSs were already kind of old hat, and there's that damn server again, every BBS has one. All the most clever apps of the 90s, even the web, managed to jump through hoops to avoid the necessity of a central server to get things done because then somebody has to pay for it, run it, maintain it and own it. We just want the wires, the lovely, lovely cables dragged across the sea at somebody else's unthinkable expense. If you can eliminate the server somehow, then you win. And they did. Things like IRC and ICQ blew the hell up from using that model.
We really need to dig that entire concept back up and brush the dust off of it. I wonder if that's what Matrix is.
Now if you'll excuse me I need to go prune some pointless Discord channels. Oh, by the by, fucking nobody uses Slack, or knows what it is. Dudes on the internet all think it's normal because tech offices seem to use it a lot, the rest of the world has never used Slack. Up until right now I was assuming that Discord and Slack are the same thing, owned by the same company, and Slack is just the "business casual" version of Discord. This doesn't seem to be true, but that's how unfamiliar I am with Slack, while being chronically online. There are probably more people around who still remember ICQ than have ever used Slack in their lives.
I love the Church of the Subgenius reference built into Slack's name. From what I can tell, nobody who uses that thing actually gets any slack, it actively removes slack from your life and makes boss surveillance really, really easy for the boss, but you must always act as though Big Brother can hear, or you're fucked. Good work Bob, nice joke. Anyway, I shut up now.
You’re not as familiar with IRC as you think you are if you believe it doesn’t have (sometimes large) servers and it works in a peer-to-peer arrangement with each user contributing to the “power of the network”…
You need some kind of help or something?
I found IRC loses chat flow more easily, as actual chat gets lost in the stream of blabber.
I am intrigued to see how threaded conversations in slack et al work, but haven't been at a shop where slack was allowed as a tool due to data sovereignty and the CLOUD act.
But IRC was always something I approached reluctantly, and that's been 31 years now.
It also seems to attract a younger crowd - I had to state my age to join one server and the mod screenshotted my info and everyone laughed calling me "boomer". I'm only 40 (Millennial) and it wasn't a gaming or specifically teen-server. It was a silly ironic European Reddit server.
The subreddit seems to have a range of ages. The Discord server is a bunch of kids commenting capybara and cat emojis like it's funny. :/
The age is represented?
I dunno why but they wanted you to comment your name, age and location in a welcome channel. I did and they screenshot and shared it in the main channel. Most of the people are around 16-19 with a few 20-25yo. I didn't know that til I joined though!
I was very weird to be there apparently.
I just wanted to take the piss out of Europeans. There's no age-limit in that.
Please do, I enjoy banter, especially when it comes from the colonies
Colonies?! Colonies?!!!? I'm British you dirty Kraut! Wait, do you mean the Saxons?
Listen here you little shit! Don't try and be funny. You're German - it's not in your nature!
Ouch. I've been called many things, but never that. Calling someone German who isn't, is not banter, that is genuinely hurtful.
Being hurt by being called German although not being one hurts my German feelings.
Not if you knew my nationality. I'll give you a hint: we have much more than you of the following: languages, gold, mountains.
Oh a fellow swiss-bro. Although according to this: https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/gold-reserves Germany has 3 times as much gold.
That's what we want them to think!
That is truly weird...
Thanks for answering!
To.be fair, there are threads though. That one is on the users.
A bunch of the servers I'm on actively discourage the use of threads. No idea why. In a different server I'm on, an admin creates a thread for every post in general, so that people can talk about the post without cluttering up the main thread. I wish more servers followed that example.
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.
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.
Mattermost is open source and has a ton of integrations with other open source tools like Gitlab and CircleCI.
i feel everyone has just forgotten about gitter? literally its entire schtick is being the communications platform for github and gitlab, and now it's even been acquired by the matrix team!
Like surely that's the obvious place to go?
Please, not phpBB. Whatever the merits of PHP as a language are now, phpBB came from a time when it was exhibit #1 of why the language was terrible.
Adding a community on a Lemmy instance is fine. Far less admin work on your part, too. Encourage your users to donate to the people who do run the instance.
isn't discourse (important to note that's a completely different thing from discord) just a modern and much nicer version of phpbb?
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.
dude i give up completely, you think im joining a random discord full of a bunch of people i dont know with a culture of who knows what dialect?
Nah fuck that i'll just go use some dudes random piece of scrapped together software that's actually pretty based instead. To that guy who wrote the bash script for flashing windows ISOs under linux. Thank you.
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!
Even if you’re a Discord user it’s still annoying as fuck.
...And in addition, Discord itself can randomly nuke your account by asking for a phone number.
Discord is the worst. Requires a phone number, does not allow email aliases and logs your chats.
Matrix and SimpleX is way better
It's just an email based user ID, I have multiple Discord accts and never used a phone number with it
Some discord servers can require a verified phone number, not any I know of, but it can be enabled.
They force you to enter your phone number if your IP address is fishy to them, or if your email provider is not popular.
Enforcing two factor because of suspicious indicators isn't bad on it's own though, it's privacy concerns about Discord preceding this which makes it a bad thing in this context.
I would accept discord/irc over mailing list. But nothing beats a proper forum website.
And no, subreddit is not a proper forum.
at least subreddits show up in google results, that's the only good thing about them.
as yet
gotta love the modern internet...
yay.
I prefer mailing lists to forums, and forums to IRC, Slack to Discord and Discord is dead last just because it’s so fucking annoying. Forums can be annoying too but they are far more usable/searchable than the stream of consciousness, ephemeral nature of chat.
LKML
I get the impression that opensource communities are missing out on contributors by even including discord in the mix 🧐
I'm not sure I understand the problem. Is the problem that they're not using matrix? Or do you prefer that it was still all on IRC? I don't hate IRC but it's definitely way less user friendly.
Another commenter mentioned that they have matrix, discord, IRC, and discourse, however everything but discord is dead. So, due to the network effect of just including discord, it reduces participation on other channels.
Communities that are "discord only" however exclude people like those in this comment section.
I refuse to use discord for all the reasons people mentioned. Personally, matrix + lemmy/kbin/mbin = best. Other opensource direct communication solutions are acceptable too, like Zulip or RocketChat, but only if bridged with matrix. Then I just need one account. For async, discourse is alright, but not my favorite.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
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.
FCK DSCRD!
(They should use lemmy instead :-P)
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.
Is this an actual thing or is it a misinterpretation of the standard boilerplate "you grant us a non-exclusive non-transferrable license to do the basic things that make a post visible to other people on the internet" message that every platform where you post stuff has?
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'm in a ton of servers and it performs pretty okay for me. No real issues.
Around 98-99 here (100 is max for non nitro users),and I'm noticing a significant delay when loading.
I use the browser version of discord in firefox.
WebCord is a beast! Maybe runs better for you.
Basically Discord desktop client experience, but privacy (well.. as much as you can have with discord) from the browser-version. (minus discord desktop client exclusive features of course)
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
I would rather be pen pals than use discord
So you are suggesting forum software that supports single sign-on?
We are talking about an open source project, not a high school reunion. I don't want to hang out with people, I want to have a discussion about a focused topic.
I want to ask a question and get an answer. If the question is not one that anyone online can currently answer, I want to be able to tell at a glance if anyone has talked about my question. If I don't understand the answer, I want to ask a follow up question.
In the evening, I want to be able to take a look at new posts from that day, grouped by topic, to see if there is anything I find interesting or can weight in on.
With Discord (or any real time chat), it is hard to follow a single topic when more than one is being discussed. It is doubly hard to do so after the fact. I am aware that Discord has a forum feature. I have only seen one server ever enable it and no one posts anything to it.
The most important downside for me is: I'm looking for some information about an issue I'm having or how to install or configure something and I find none. Because all the people talk behind closed doors and googling etc doesn't help any more. Only solution is to join every Discord and platform before you start using your software and scrolling trough pages of chat messages.
I'd rather google for an error message and then be directed directly to an issue tracker where people discussed that specific problem.
Yep, that's exactly why in the end of my comment I say that I currently believe a combination of Github+Discord to be best. Github for bug reporting, Discord if you want to socialize with the community, that's what it does best
Mattermost
Spaces have been a thing for over 2 years now.
Spaces are just group chats in a trenchcoat
Their licence grants intellectual rights to anything you give them. So there's that.
Using matrix would be better. Server plugins can publish channels like a public blog, viewable in a web browser.
I'm still struggling to find a decent client for matrix though
Cinny and Hydrogen are good
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.
I gave up on matrix, was too complicated of a setup and the site was throughly unhelpful for newcomers. I eventually got it but, the permission system was somehow worse then IRC and due to the federation aspect of it you can't modify the standard at all because then the other clients/servers can't recieve you.
Element, Beeper, FluffyChat, NeoChat, Cinny, Thunderbird
Thunderbird has matrix support now? 🤯
On my phone I switched to Element X because Element would take up to a minute to sync messages. I'm willing to put up with the reduced feature set, as long as actual messages fucking arrive in time!
I've heard this about Element from a lot of people and I have to wonder: Is that the mobile client or on an actual PC? Because I use it on my phone and it's actually more reliable than the Discord mobile app.
Fluffychat or Gomuks
I think I will try Gomuks, since I now also tried Fluffychat, but scrolling felt weird and on a touchpad had the tendency to swipe left on messages to reply instead of scrolling down and I was unable to resize or close the channel info and channel list, or change its font size (there also appears to be no settings button). Maybe the CLI based clients will be more suited for me, since I also don't mind using irssi for IRC (but it should be noted I also have no problems with graphical IRC clients like hexchat or others, which work perfectly fine on my machine).
it had some stability issues, alternatively, also weechat's quite decent since it has quite long history of development
Schlidichat!
Matrix clients are slow and clunky because the protocol is heavy and overloaded. Upcoming sliding-sync feature will make them a bit more responsive.
Talking about specific clients, my favorite is Fractal. It's still missing some features though (like spaces). But it's getting updated fast.
I refuse to use discord.
I use discord for chatting with friends, and voice chatting for games. Nothing important should happen there
Rolling your own ts3 server with old client gang.
Mumble
Oooh I forgot about mumble!
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
Am I the odd one out for actually liking discord? Or is most of this hate specifically for using discord for FOSS projects? As a replacement for MSN Messenger/Skype/Ventrillo Discord is actually pretty great for hanging out with friends
Replacement for TS3, Skype, whatever = Good
1st party quick support channel = Good
Community maintenance = Good
Documentation = Not good
Basically Github issues replacement = Bad
Knowledgebase = Bad
@Kedly
@onlinepersona
It's a private silo with no public indexing by search. Makes it terrible for technical topics fine for a chat platform.
It's a bad hybrid of chat and forum. None of the advantages of rich forum posts and typically too may participants for it to be easy to follow. Noticeable if you are not in the main timezone as the others.
Discord has threads and topics, but these features are a bolted on afterthought instead of core functionality so it just doesn't work as well
Ah, so the hate is mostly for it being used for things that it wasnt really built for. I can get that
Exactly!
Discord is an OK chat app. But it's TERRIBLE as a support forum. It's precisely the latter that everyone is complaining about.
I also need to point out here that anything posted to discord is now their intellectual property by law. That's quite a deal breaker and honestly should not work with any open source projects
For chatting with friends it's fine! The hate is when it's used for public documentation and communication, because it isn't public.
the hate is because discord actively makes it harder to find and get support for anything. It's adding extra steps to something that doesnt need them.
I use discord to chat with my friends and weird people online, not to complain about the nonfunctional nature of software to people i dont know.
my problem with it(apart from the fact that it's not libre) is that the chats aren't end to end encrypted
Lemmy communities with discord channels are really quite something.
Oh my fuck I'm so glad these characters died out. Dolan memes were the bane of my existence while they were a thing.
gooby pls
*gooby
fak u (it's been so long)
Even worse if there's a github page, but they've disabled issues and discussions.
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:
https://matrix.org/docs/chat_basics/matrix-for-im/
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.
We don't ask for forums because we don't want features of Discord. We ask for forums because we want features that Discord does not offer:
Note: Privacy is not what we need here. We need the solutions to open source problems to be public - especially, searchability.
The desired alternative is not Matrix simply because privacy-conscious, open-source ecosystem vs. proprietary solution is not the goal. Matrix would still generally be terrible for support. What people want is publicly searchable content that is ideally indexed like a wiki. Many will happily settle for issue boards or even forums though. Discord has pathetic search capabilities in comparison to any search engine and has no way to properly and publicly backup information that is posted to the platform. With a website of any kind, one could clone the site for mirroring or simply get a web archive service to crawl relevant sections.
https://usemumble.neocities.org
Matrix is the protocol. Element is one of the (many) clients. Setting up an account on a server is as easy or easier than discord. Try it https://app.element.io
Matrix has video and voice rooms, screen-sharing, direct calls, threads, and very little fluff. An entire conference (FOSDEM) was hosted on a matrix server and people from any homeserver could connect. Admittedly, I don't use other features, but those are all that I need. What other features are essential for an opensource community that only discord provides?
As for forums, they are for async. Are you going to seriously tell me discord is a good forum replacement?
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Just reading that is giving me a headache. I'm sure it's a good product but my god, I don't have time for that.
This user is being extremely pedantic, I recently moved my discord server to a matrix instance and I promise you, it is not that hard. Download Element, make an account in the app, log in. It takes no longer than any other service.
Wdym, that's 10 whole paragraphs with 27 whole sentences, what do I look like some kind of old person (like idk 29? Gross) who can read more than one line at a time? I, The TikTok generation, am incapable of sustaining concentration for more than 30sec at a time! It's too hard even though it explicitly lays out each step to make it easier and even includes a couple screenshots!
I know you're being sarcastic but think about it...it's not far from reality
Matrix isn't competing with the experience of setting up another account on a different platform, with email, username, passwords, recovery key, display theme, notifications settings, content warnings, etc..
It's competing with being able to click on a link to join a subgroup of a social network that people are already a part of and already signed into.
Sorry, I'm a bit thick. What was confusing about the documentation?
Am I... A power user?
I use Discord with friends for a weekly online D&D game in what’s basically a glorified conference calls. It’s fine for that use-case, but it fucking sucks for trying to do anything organized or having on-topic conversations or looking up any sort of stored information. I kind of hate it when game companies have shit on there and you have to search/sort through hundreds of unconnected chat snippets to find answers to questions.
Basically how I use Discord as well,. My favourite feature of Discord is when I get an "@everyone" ping from big servers and I click into the notification and the message disappeared into the void without fail.
I've developed the muscle memory of immediately disabling notifications for any new server I join.
Its awful, history isnt kept, requires account creation on a non FLOSS app. It sucks. Forums were better.
discord is the best villain but also the worst platform ever
Me when Thunders (Lemmy client I contribute to) entire dev team is on matrix: happy noises
Absolute chads those madlads
Is this loss?
Laughs in matrix and element
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.
the irony here is that discord quite literally has quantum state messages/posts, unless you NAIL the search perfectly, you're gonna get everything but the exact message you wanted. I mean sure the keywords make sense, but try searching for two or three keywords in a server with tens of thousands of message, or better yet, not knowing what specific keywords to use.
i can't tell you the amount of times i've tried searching for an embed with words only to realize that apparently, discord is completely incapable of searching through embed names.
Discord is alright as a chat platform, would actually be better if it were a universal platform base, like matrix, or get this, IRC. Not being stuck on a shitty broken electron app would nice from time to time.
The search has issues but I don't fuck with irc channels because there is literally NEVER anyone there. I don't understand IRC, either. I'm young, sorry
IRC would have been the best tool if it did session logging instead of requiring the use of bouncers. IRC is text-only, nonproprietary and completely distraction-free.
But you don't have to use IRC. There are more modern federated protocols like Matrix and XMPP that do session logging. There are quite a lot of FOSS communities on them that are very active.
However, the main complaint here isn't about Discord vs other chat protocols. It's about the use of Discord as a community support forum. Unlike forums like Discourse, Discord messages aren't searchable on the web. If a person asks a question on it and gets a solution, it's then lost forever. Another person with the same question has to ask again. It completely defeats the utility of FOSS - of reusing someone else's solutions.
Telegram would be much better if you want some chat based discusstions. Search indexable forums are the best to find help
I'm not sure you understand what "objectively" actually means... Care to provide your data in support of your objective conclusion?
So, what do we use? Matrix? Element? Idk?
IRC has also been working for me for at least 25 years
IRC is the vim of chat.
Element is just a client, while Matrix is the chat protocol. But yeah, I have recently switched my discord server to a matrix instance and its been pretty great. Some pushback by users who didn't care about privacy or security, but overall the tech is solid. We didn't like that discord was moderating private chats and they don't offer any type of encryption.
Mailing list! (/s... unless?)
And Lemmy/kbin obviously
Open source communities have been around longer than the internet, so they can manage fine without discord.
Also don't you just join by submitting code or bug reports or other things?
I think the point here is that anything that can be indexed by search engines or archival crawlers would be better, so not Matrix either. Forums, for example. Like what happens if the Discord community gets deleted due to whatever circumstances? All of that gathered knowledge will be just gone with no way to recover or search for it.
For synchronous communication? Element, Zulip, Rocketchat (or if you really must, IRC 🤮 ), just something opensource and privacy respecting.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Anything else that can:
Discourse is a great choice - it meets both criteria. Even phpbb meets the requirements.
Even Zulip is objectively better than Discord. It meets point 1 very well. I don't know how well it does in point 2.
You brought back to me some good old memories with that Donald duck meme lol
What is a better alternative then?
I use Discord mostly for arranging matches in Wiimmfi, but yesterday I used it to get help about an issue I had running Knightcrawler (selfhosted Torrentio for Stremio) with my specific setup and some kind people helped me out real quick.
Matrix
XMPP
Discourse
I don't even have discord.