The biggest problem with Discord is that its an information black hole. Its not properly searchable and not indexed by search engines.
Discord is fine for casual chat, but horrible when used for forum-type discussions and even worse when used for documentation.
You see the same problems being discussed and solved again and again, but you cant just "link" someone the solution like you could with a forum thread cause its spread out over 3-10 chat messages that are interleaved in-between other topics being discussed in the same room
Anything of long-term value for the project (forum-type discussions, documentation etc) should not recide in Discord
There's going to be a lot of shocked Pikachus when the inevitable enshittification hits, and suddenly they charge to host all the documentation and wiki pages. All that barely maintained stuff will just vanish overnight.
At this point, charging for the service is the only thing left to do to make it more shit...
You would think that people would learn not to put all their eggs into one corporate basket after Facebook fucked everyone over...
Chat in general is so flawed when talking about multiple topics at once. At least when people dont use matrix threads, spaces and rooms correctly.
I have all the issues with Discord that you mention, but struggle to find a better alternative. Do you have any recommendations?
Forums. Phpbb, Mybb, hell even discourse is better than discord. If you're specifically dealing with a coding project, most git repositories offer an issues page and wiki you can use.
And if you want something realtime, IRC & XMPP are low-resource chat options—with the latter being federated & can offer encryption for private rooms.
Sure, but those options solve literally none of the issues discussed above
There’s still been a time & place for realtime communications where the history preservation doesn’t quite matter… it can be some general recon of a problem to know what to even ask so as to not clog up the signal-noise for SEO or even if it’s mostly off-topic banter to relate to community members.
I'm thinking of a rapid alert on a problem in the project using IRC/XMPP/Matrix and then the project managers posting it in a forum about problems in the project.
I could see a bot that could escalate a post with a 🐛 reaction from a maintainer & post an issue. I do feel sometimes tho it is nice to get chat to help the one in need shape the question in a way that folks can help as often they may not know what they are looking for or the root cause. The issues tho is that often those in chat & the asker don’t like the context switch of going to the forum later rather than just answering it here & now--even tho this comes at a detriment to the community as the answer slips into the void.
Forums used to be a lot more common before Reddit kind of ate most public forums.
I guess that the Threadiverse is a substitute, but I dunno how long a given server will stay up.
What about a lemmy community ?
I noticed the Github «discussion» tab also.
Any non-trivial support enquiries should be directed to log a bug report/formal support request regardless of the community platform you're using. Discord isn't any worse than IRC in this regard and we've been offering support via the latter forever.
I think a happy medium for this is to rely on GitHub issues for support, and then people can discuss each issue on GitHub or Discord
Both are proprietary, closed source from US-based, for-profit entites. Same problem arises.
A solution would be to save the chat log as a text file. An LLM might be able to turn it into FAQ format with little oversight. Of course, someone would still have to volunteer the work.
Obviously, Discord doesn't want that sort of thing since it lessens their hold on a community and the people in it. They could decide to cause trouble.
That just sounds like something a discord bot could do
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.
i don't understand discord's popularity at all. it's so annoying to use
It started getting popular years ago and that's when me an my friends switched to it too (back when I didn't know shit about privacy). You gotta keep in mind the alternatives back then were Skype, which was meant for 1 to 1 calls, had shit audio quality and issues all the time and TeamSpeak, which was complicated because you needed a server (we were kids, we only knew what a server was from Minecraft) and had a text chat that was only a small part of the bottom of the window that was full of connected and disconnected messages, so I actually didn't even know you could write in that. TeamSpeak's interface also isn't exactly good-looking or very intuitive. Then came Discord, you could create a server for you and your friends for free, you saw who of your friends was online and playing what, you could see when someone was in a voice channel and could just join, you had multiple text chats where you could easily send a link or memes while playing and you could easily share your screen with the others. It was a major improvement over the other two. I know that it sucks from a privacy standpoint but there's good reasons why people started using it.
COVID got people used to video/audio communication, then the other platforms enshitified while discord remained as shit as they always were.
Same as any of the modern enshittified services. It used to be really good. Once they got a large userbase it was time to extract value from the users. The users never have the self-respect to leave, so there they stay.
Because that's where people are?
How familiar are you with IRC?
I was told by someone that IRC is kind of what discord is built on. Maybe the answer is someone in that relation, if what i was told is accurate or not
Discord copies a lot of concepts from IRC, like servers and threads are almost identical. But it isn't technically based on IRC. Maybe your friend mixed it up with Twitch chat which is actual IRC only slightly modified.
It's especially disappointing to see FOSS people on Fediverse promoting it.
People love discord. When Microsoft tried to buy it, people freaked out. They turned down the multi billion dollar offer. IMO, I don't believe the paid portion of the app is worth the money because it's mostly cosmetic bullshit. They don't give me a good reason to give them money
I also think discord nitro is kind of B.S . The only reason I still use discord is because my friends use it.
I wish there were similar features in Matrix clients like Element. Just the voice channels feature will be enough for me.
Revolt chat is a good alternative. It lacks in features but its pretty good for an FOSS project. I tried to convince my friends to use it but they crawled back to discord after 2 days.
They don't give me a good reason to give them money
The constant harassment was enough to get me to pay for it. But guess what? After I paid for it, the harassment continued, trying to get me to give them even more money for products I don't even understand. And that's just not something I tolerate.
That + the inevitable data-mining + refusal to provide any sort of deletion tools = no more Discord for me. I use Revolt now when I need that sort of thing.
it's mostly cosmetic bullshit.
They don't give me a good reason to give them money
Don't give them ideas please
It's incredible, yes, even more considering that Discord has been complicit on spam attacks on the Fediverse.
Can't wait for the day Discord backstabs everyone and people decide to get the fuck away from it. I seriously can't stand having to search past troubleshooting messages, it's a fucking mess, almost unusable. Whoever uses Discord as a Forum seriously needs a full force punch in the mouth.
Discord can and sometimes does monitor your chats.
Source: CEO himself said that, in a hearing
Also a large portion is owned by Tencent with whom Discord is allowed to share all the data they want according to their ToS.
Well that's no better than searching IRC logs, which are something folks have absolutely done in the past. I still haven't figured out why folks like discord so much though.
People like it cause when it first came out, it was considerably better than other popular voice chat software available for PC games at the time, like TeamSpeak and Ventrillo. But most importantly: it was free, unlike those other two. So people flocked to it and it blew up big, leading us to where we are today.
ooh... can we do a fedi-discord? But like, good?
you mean matrix?
I use Matrix. I even kind of like Matrix and have high hopes for its future.
But like, good?
Can’t wait for the day Discord backstabs everyone and people decide to get the fuck away from it.
I can’t wait either, then maybe all the communities that disappeared into discord that I feel unable to actually feel like I am a genuine member of and connect with anymore because I am not part of the conversations on discord will go somewhere where I can be a part of them again.
As someone deeply involved in Foss for many years and with multiple large Foss services running on my back, these constant requests for purity from outsiders will go nowhere until volunteers people step up to do the hard work of setting up and maintaining the infrastructure and management of such Foss solutions in the place of the core developers
? What's the difference between setting up a free forum (they're everywhere) versus setting up Discord channels? It's the exact same process.
a free forum
"Oh great, I'll have to create another fucking account" - me, already having some 300 accounts in my key-vault...
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make unless you're saying no one has to create a Discord account, or have to download an app, or have to find an invite to locate the server. My keys are auto-generated and auto-saved, simple 20 second process. Forums are also a lot easier to sign up for than Discord, if you're worried about making another account I don't know what to tell ya because every service requires it.
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
Should we tell him that he doesn't need more than 1 discord account?
I'm probably way out of the loop but from the perspective of devs getting to contribute, don't stuff like Discourse ship with "login with your Github account" already? Or Google, or Facebook, or...
Also, please, it's 1 click nowadays to make your browser remember your logins for you, if it comes down to laziness
Ease, convenience, existing userbase, familiarity, choose a few
I guess we have different perspectives. Ease, convenience = forums, existing userbase? = Do you prefer Reddit for this reason?, familiarity = forums lol, search-ability = forums, privacy = forums, etc etc.
Forums are not the same as real-time. And yes for most of the people using discord, forums wouldn't cover the same niche.
I think you might just be blinded by Discord for some reason. I'm not sure what "niche" you're referring to with Discord that can't be provided with forums (unless you're worried about cosmetics I guess?). There are forums with real-time communications like chat, notifications, direct-messaging. I'm not trying to argue, getting your perspective is always helpful and might show something I'm missing, but your responses seem vague and not really a counter-point.
I've used matrix and spaces before. Nowhere close as convenient as a discord server. In fact I even had a matrix to discord bridge so I can get the best of both worlds until I had to hide all my matrix channels because of uncontrolled spam
Meanwhile the OCaml IRC chat gets spam from Discord Crypto bots due to bridging with that proprietary platform.
I'm on board with this, but I may be biased because I also don't like using Discord for anything else. Every time someone sends me a Discord invite I feel a little defeated, because it is usually after I have agreed to participate in something.
I feel that way about Teams/Sharepoint/Office. I'm happy to serve on a board or committe, until I find out they're using Teams or Sharepoint. Microsoft's SSO is a fucking mess. Put in your email to get a one-time code, get that code and enter it, then it logs you in and asks for an email address to be added to the account. Add the same email address you just got the code via, and it tells you it can't use that email address. But if I don't use that email address, it won't let me into the Sharepoint docs.
It's just a fucking nightmare. I fucked around with one committee trying to get the accounts deleted and done the Microsoft ^TM^ way and finally gave up and bowed out of that group.
It's an upgrade over Skype, but a downgrade over forums and irc. I setup a discord for some tech troubled friends because I didn't think they could handle anything else and even that was trying for some of them.
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
Can someone point to the reasons why such talented people use discord for their projects?
Because it's a decent all in one platform and they don't want to deal with the alternatives.
The integrations and plugins, established workflows, support systems ticketing it's all turnkey. I hate the platform and I wish people wouldn't use it but I understand the draw.
Discord has a ticketing system?
There are ticketing bots, yes.
There are bots that tie in and store tickets several of my software vendors use them. When you have a problem you drop into a certain channel and make a request it issues you a ticket with a link creates a new channel that's just a conversation between you and support. At first it seems clergy but after you use it a couple of times it's reasonably slick
Why not just use Slack that likely has better integrations?
A lot of people have discord, a lot less people have slack.
Slack is also starting to charge for those workflows. My slack bill at work is gone up 50% past what it was. And I'm now getting monthly warnings from using my integrations. They would like me to put a credit card into handle more jira tickets.
You also need to pay to just have message history preserved on slack. Discord that information is there for free for as long as the server/discord exists.
I'm not saying people should use discord, but people are using it because it's free to use.
same goes for those that create self hostable, privacy oriented services and bake in dropbox and/or google drive support... like WUT.
Because most selfhosters are too lazy or inexperienced to break away from cloud services. Docker is great but it has also enables a "just run this docker" mentality that mirrors the Windows "just run this exe."
edit: I think that the opportunity to learn how a project works, how to debug problems and how to integrate a project into their own setup is obscured.
I get that people want a "simple way to chat" and Discord does that well, I guess. I mean, everyone's talking about the forum aspect but what's the alternative for chat? Mumble?
Just, please, don't hide documentation in the Discord. A neocities page costs literally $0. Please. Think of the poor SEO consultants!
Yeah I'm indifferent to discord as a platform. It'll eventually be enshitified and people will move on.
The bummer is that it's enabling people to be poor at documentation in a whole new way.
That said, if Discord went away tomorrow most software projects would still have garbage documentation, because most software projects are ephemeral at BEST.
I don't mind Discord being a centralized platform for open source project discussion, if and only if the only roles it serves specifically play to its one strength, which is real time discussion. Asking for live support (from the dev if they are there, or the community if they are not) and doing live bug triage are the two big use cases.
Should contact for these things be real time? Maybe, maybe not. Async discussion like you get on forums or via email can do the job. But if you value real-time chat, Discord does it well.
Everything else? Do it elsewhere. Do not make Discord your only bug tracker. Do not make it your only wiki. Do not make it your only source of documentation. Do not make it the only place you broadcast updates or announcements. Do not make it your only distribution platform for critical downloads. And for the love of god please do not make it the only way to contact you. I don't care if you allow Discord to additionally do these things using integrations, that's fine, just stop trying to contort Discord into your only way of doing these.
Is Discord the only capable option for real time chat? No. But it has several things going in its favor, namely how one can reasonably expect a good sum of their target user base is already using it independently for other purposes, in addition to its numerous QoL features.
It can also better integrate into the dev's personal routine if they already use it independently. Like, do I have an email address? Yeah. Do I read my email on any reasonable interval? Hell no. My email inbox is little more than a dustbin for registration confirmations and online order receipts. I've had email for decades and I think I can count the number of non-work, non-business conversations I've held over it in that whole span of time on one hand. Meanwhile, I'm terminally online on Discord. So if I'm gonna be a small independent FOSS project developer, am I gonna want to interface with everyone over email? No. I'll still make it an option, because being only contactable on Discord is cringe, but it will not be fast. Discord will be my preferred channel.
Should I put more effort into being contactable on other platforms, because it's the right thing to do? Meh. I have no duty of stewardship to be available on platforms available to anyone in particular. I maintain this hypothetical project for free, on my own time, of my own volition, and I provide it to you entirely warranty-free. I have the courtesy to make all static resources available in sensible public places, and I provide email as a slow, async way to reach me. But if you want to converse with me directly in real time, you can come to me where I'm hanging out.
Using discord as your only store/distribution point for information is obnoxious.
How would you even use discord for that stuff? It sounds way harder than just using the proper tools.
You'd certainly think so. But never underestimate a user's ability to jury-rig a piece of software into doing something it wasn't designed to do, ignoring any and all obviously better solutions as they do so.
I don't think I've ever actually seen documentation published on Discord and nowhere else. But I do very often see no documentation whatsoever except a "just ask around on the Discord" link serving the role.
Discord probably isn't used as a robust ticketing system either; usually if anything it's a bot that will push all tickets to an actual GitWhatever issue, which is fine. But again, what I do see often is projects with no ticketing system whatsoever, and a Discord link to just dump your problems at. If the issue tracker on the repo isn't outright disabled, it's a ghost town of open issues falling on deaf ears.
Announcements can be pretty bad. Devs can get into a habit of thinking the only people who care about periodic updates are already in the Discord server, so they don't update READMEs, wikis, or docs on the repo as often as they should, allowing them to go out of date.
Fwiw I've also seen several projects that have Discord servers with none of these problems, because they handle all those other parts properly.
Devs ITT biting every single argument in the article and then saying "but it's easy" is extremely ironic
I love Immich and Sharkey but both use Discord. Sharkey even used Matrix in the beginning but eventually switched to Discord. I think their reasoning was that they were often attacked by trolls etc. and that Matrix didn't had good options for moderation etc.
And while I love Matrix I fully agree. Yes there are moderation bots like Draupnir and they're good but you will need to self host them and register a user for them and and and. It's not as easy as with Discord or even Telegram bots. Also there are many Discord bots providing very fun elements like levels, reputations, roles etc. which simply do not exist or aren't even possible in Matrix as it currently is.
On top of that we have the decentralization "problem" for end users who aren't technical. They simply don't care much about privacy and they don't care if Discord stores every single message and picture in clear text forever on their servers. It's easier to create a Discord account on a centralized platform than understanding Matrix understanding which server to choose, understanding which client to choose and understanding how encryption, key management etc. works. Yes decentralization is important and great but for the average user it's still something that they do not really know which "overcomplicates" it for them.
And another point is that Matrix spaces are simply not the same as Discord servers. Channels are not as easy to manage because they are rooms on their own in Matrix and a space is not a server but rather a way to organize multiple rooms. Not every client supports spaces yet. Clients implement them differently. Then there's Element and Element X on phones confusing people new to Matrix etc. In Discord several channels can be grouped in another category. In Matrix you'd use Subspaces for that giving you the same issue as with normal spaces.
And most clients don't implement simple things on mobile like...sending multiple images at once. From the perspective of an end user that fact annoys the heck out of anyone wanting to send several pictures.
So yeah I think it's a mixture out of those things.
Matrix especially needs better bot support with bots that could be used by everyone as it is with Discord instead of being only usable by server admins or the bots creators as it is with many Matrix bots. And it does need a better solution for spaces with rooms or another thing in the specs that replicates how Discord servers work so that it's a "space" with actual "subchannels" without every space technically being it's own room dangling around in limbo and just being "sorted" into the space.
And it needs better moderation tools.
Matrix isn't the only alternative, there's also rocketchat
The elephant in the room is IRC. Which continues to work fine and hosts huge FOSS communities. Self hosting it is even better as you can use a more modern version like ergo.chat than the large networks sadly utilize.
You made me look again at IRC V3, seems like they support threads and emoji reactions. I might give it a try
IRCv3 has a lot of features & is good, but if you need encrypted chat and/or want to support decentralization XMPP MUCs can fit the bill similar being just a bit less lightweight.
Matrix sucks, that's why most people won't use it. I'm already giving my software away for free and providing free support for it, why would I want to take up even more of my free time running and maintaining a Matrix server as well?
Sure, I could use an already available Matrix server but I already have a Discord account, all my friends and contributors do as well and the entire thing is easy to set up and use, plus I'm already running the Discord client too.
On top of this, the argument about searchability is irrelevant. Projects have been giving support via IRC forever which has all the same problems. The best thing to do for any non-trivial support inquiries is to direct the user to lodge a support ticket and always has been.
Matrix just isn't a compelling option, even if it had feature parity with Discord and was easier to use, it doesn't have any real inertia anyway.
From the article.
Free software matters — that’s why you’re writing it, after all. Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
Maybe you'll take up more of your time answering lazy user's questions than speaking with those that are helpful with solving issues.
Your argument about time is more in favor of Matrix, and even more so in favor of just using your code hosting's issue tracker.
In short, using Discord for your free software/open source (FOSS) software project is a very bad idea. Free software matters — that’s why you’re writing it, after all. Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
Interesting to do a “s/Discord/Github/” replace on the above. Same situation yet hardly anyone gives a shit.
So yes, Drew DeVault is right. But he overestimates people’s commitment to free world digital rights principles and consistency thereof.
not at all the same situation. Git itself is not proprietary so all the projects can survive without GitHub if the need arises. Additionally, you don’t need an account to view the repository or its discussions. There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue, however it doesn’t compare to discord, which is much, much worse.
I don't care about the wall around the garden as much as I care that the wall was made by a deranged clown with no UI design experience.
There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue
And if you insist on using Microsoft GitHub, this contribution concern can be mitigated by offering an alternative mirror or a mailing list/email address to send patches. One way to help prevent lock-in would be to use MS GitHub’s repository settings & straight-up disable non-portable features like “Discussions”, “Sponsors” & maybe even the “Issues” tracker favoring a third-party option or the issue tracker of the mirror along with disabling “Actions” choosing a third-party CI option or the CI that comes with the mirror (or require checks ran locally before pushing).
like I said I agree, Discord is simply more terrible.
Having a bug tracker in that walled garden is the biggest problem. It demonstrates what I’m talking about: digital rights being disregarded.
Git itself is not proprietary so all the projects can survive without GitHub if the need arises. Ad
You’re neglecting the exclusion that’s inherent in Github when the need to bounce does NOT arise.
Also worth adding that during the war in Gaza some of us boycott Israel. Which implies boycotting Microsoft.
Additionally, you don’t need an account to view the repository or its discussions.
Advocating read-only access is comparable to endorsing only freedom 1 and 2, not freedom 0 or 4. Which is precisely what I’m talking about: FOSS projects that discard digital rights and partake in digital exclusion for some convenience frills.
There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue, however it doesn’t compare to discord, which is much, much worse.
Bug trackers have more of a monopoly on bug reports than discord has on discussions. There are countless decentralized discussions about free software all over the place -- threadiverse, probably facebook, ad hoc phpbb forums, IRC, usenet, mastodon, mailing lists, conferences like FOSDEM … and rightfully so. Discussions don’t need the centralization that bug trackers do. General discussions also do not have the degree of importance to QA that bug tracking does.
Case in point, when bugs are reported outside of Github, they don’t get noticed by developers and triaged.
I give a shit. Open source contributions shouldn’t require proprietary services if open alternatives (even if it requires more than a single service) suffice. In the case of Git forges, the alternatives are great--& the more you buy into the Microsoft GitHub-specific features the harder it will be to migrate which will lead to lock-in.
I give a shit.
There are not enough of you. Evidenced by ~95%+ of noteworthy FOSS projects being jailed in Github’s walled garden.
And certain projects I don’t deem it worth my time to contribute due to this fact. The unfortunate issue with that is usually there isn’t a good way to communicate that to the maintainers when they lock all coms to Microsoft GitHub & Slack/Discord. There are certain projects I have skipped on trying based on this too as to me it becomes an indicator of poor decision-making trying to capture hype/marketing rather than fostering goodwill of the free/ethical software movements. At least on Lemmy you get an upvote instead of harassed by asking for an open communication and/or contribution option 😅
There's not really much point in using a self hosted gitea or codeberg or sourcehut if you want the barrier of entry to be as low as possible for potential contributors. Maybe if some larger projects made the move. But GitHub has more features (like discussions), provides better hosting and ease of use. The focus of any open source project should be on development of the software, not the software which supports its development.
There’s not really much point in using a self hosted gitea or codeberg or sourcehut if you want the barrier of entry to be as low as possible for potential contributors.
But GitHub has more features (like discussions), provides better hosting and ease of use.
Bingo. Prioritizing convenience features above digital rights principles is exactly why Github’s walled garden dominates over forges that have a lower barrier of entry.
The focus of any open source project should be on development of the software, not the software which supports its development.
Again, people to setting aside their principles is exactly what I’m talking about.
If you're desperate for a discord-like experience (because lets face it, irc and mailing lists arent very flashy anymore!) you can try:
rocket chat - General purpose chat platform, very similar discord
mattermost - developer-centric platform, similar to slack
Matrix - open protocol, has a bunch of desktop clients
Yes you wont have voice/vodeo chat for these but IMO that's rarely useful anyway. And if you DO need it then you can use stuff like teamspeak or zoom***
***yes i know the issues with these options but for devs you dont really ever need to use meetings for very long and sometimes using a shitty free service with all you need is better than self hosting your own. Maybe Nextcloud talk can work?
Some good arguments made for FOSS voice/meeting apps, and why VC and meetings are more important to the FOSS workflow than I thought :)
Jitsi Meet for zoom replacement
Jitsi is amazing. Even during 2020 it always has worked way better than Zoom for me, and I haven't even tried hosting it myself.
How about Revolt? It's open source and it's pretty much a Discord clone.
I think you misspelled "Please use the appropriate tool for a specific job"
Which certainly isn't Discord
Depends what job, keeping a community ? Why not. Gaming with friends ? Yeah. Keeping track of a project ? There sure are many - even - free tools to manage that
I have never used Discord and never will. No project has ever been able to change my stance on it.
On the other end I have a lot of first-hand experience of Discord's abuses and that's precisely why I have my stance on it.
This article has a few primary arguments for not using Discord—
because it is proprietary software
because it has poor accessibility
because control over moderation and other administrative tools is ultimately in the hands of Discord rather than the community.
I know this opinion is going to be unpopular but here I go anyway.
Other than the accessibility argument, I find these arguments quite weak. Yes, Discord is proprietary software, but the reason it's used is because a lot of people are familiar with it and many people already have Discord accounts.
Although I'm a firm supporter of free software, I also believe that it's more important to use the right software for the job than to idealistically use inferior software just because it happens to be open-source. And yes, I regard most of the alternatives to Discord listed in the article to be inferior solely because they are unfamiliar to users. Sometimes, the superior choice happens to be proprietary and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. That's the way it is sometimes; you can't win every fight, as much as you'd like to.
If your goal is to foster a community of regular users and make it easy for normal users to interact with contributors, there is no choice that will hamper that goal more than using an obscure alternative software that nobody's heard of.
With respect to chat logs and administration tools... for the most part, nobody cares. Discord's tools are sufficient for most groups and few people consider the drawbacks to outweigh the other benefits.
The strongest argument for me is that discord is commercial, borne of venture capital spent on operating at a loss for years to gain users. It is therefore bound for a turn towards profit and enshittification, sooner, rather than later.
The flip-side of that argument is that "librefosschat" alternative might also be dead next year when it runs out of money :/
At least commercial vc enshitiffied stuff tends to get ridden into the ground, so there is a long offramp.
Not really. Something you can self-host, like irc, xmpp or matrix, has an infinite offramp.
Very true, but self-hosting isn't free either, so there are maintenance/moderation/etc costs that take away time from the project. Small projects often just cant justify selfhosting.
But if your service is hosted by a third party, you really do want to be sure they will be around in the near future. And its not just chat that this applies to, git hosting, web hosting, ci/cd etc.
You don't need to selfhost most of those. There's IRC and webpage providers everywhere (you can literally walk into a cpanel hosting and click the button that says "make me a Wordpress", for example). After all, I'm sure your product has an email account, yet you are not selfhosting your e-mail, do you? And you release your software via what, Github? Flatpak? Lemme see, are you selfhosting those too?
Idk about infinite, if they stop getting updates they will eventually get phased out and if you can't download the application it's also dead. All that aside the sun is going to go super nova eventually.
Also a lot of people don't want to self host. I doubt you self host your own Lemmy instance for instance.
IRC works since decades, same for XMPP. I think that is a pretty strong indication that it will continue to work just fine.
And not everyone needs to self host, like one in a thousand is more than sufficient for a community to have their own self-hosted chat system.
Decades is far from infinite
You are not infinite either 😅
I host my own matrix instance.
I wouldn't mind hosting my own lemmy instance either, but as it's a public platform anyway I don't have the same qualms about using an instance hosted by someone else. So I opted not to take on any more work on that.
Not everyone needs to self host, you might get away with knowing someone who does. And no, I wouldn't accept a nextcloud account hosted by just anyone, but my siblings and parents happily utilize ones provided by me.
And back when teamspeak, mumble, ventrilo, minecraft servers, cs servers, etc. all had to be "self-hosted" there were plenty of service providers who would do all the technical work for the layman, in exchange for direct payment. Making all those services quite accessible to anyone.
That was so much better than how today we "pay" by getting datamined.
Unless I'm misreading this, your argument seems to be that software freedom is irrelevant in the face of technical superiority or popularity. That's exactly the opposite of "firm support" in my view.
I'll offer a counterpoint to the "best tool for the job" thing: before git existed, Linux development relied on a proprietary VCS called Bitkeeper. Licenses for Bitkeeper were "graciously" donated for gratis by the Bitkeeper developer. Andrew Tridgell, who was not party to the Bitkeeper EULA, telneted to a Bitkeeper server and typed "help". The Bitkeeper developer, in retaliation, revoked the Linux developers' gratis license to use the proprietary "best tool for the job." This was what forced Linus to develop git, which became the most widely used VCS in the free software world. (read: Thank You, Larry McVoy by Richard Stallman)
Proprietary tools can seem to be useful in the moment but developing a dependency on them, and encouraging their use, is dangerous. Discord might seem like "the best tool for the job" until it enshittifies, just like its predecessors did, and just like its successors inevitably will. We've seen it happen often enough.
True, but managing expectations is needed tho, mainly about exit strategy:
If a community needs to leave, the content on Discord must be considered "not important", "not transferable" and "not archive worthy".
If Discord changes freemium, limits users or otherwise applies enshittification just leave your stuff and start over.
It would be easier to leave if you started by using a platform that made that seamless. Freenode gets bought & communities say to point your bouncers/clients to Libera.chat or OFTC. If you were on XMPP on a decentralized account, your account stays, but now there’s a new MUC to join. With Discord, if Discord goes down, so does the client & the whole server… folks need to relearn a bunch of stuff & it’s not a clean break.
This is also inevitable as we are talking about a US-based, VC-funded service & we have the entire track record of these types of services declining. Why not start with something that’s more likely to not suck in 5 or 10 years even if it doesn’t have all the same features so long as you can still chat in realtime.
Agree, wholeheartedly and reasons I want to avoid Discord et al.
I do communicate my expectations rather cynically in case a community is starting and does have a choice in the beginning.
Gonna add that while Discord is inaccessible if your hardware is crap, it's the ONLY platform accessible to plural people
If your logic is that a piece of software is inferior to another because it is less popular and familiar than go back to reddit
It's getting a bit annoying honestly how people are telling other developers how to run their projects. And often these people don't even contribute anything
I personally hate discord, but I do use slack. Using discord or slack however doesn't make your code any less open source
If people want this, they can set up something for my projects, and convince users to go. If it's successful I'd join too. Otherwise, it's really just focusing on things that dont actually matter much. I've personally been part of a project which died because we focused too much on infrastructure
We shouldn't be mixing FOSS projects with proprietary communication platforms. There are a lot of FOSS enthusiasts who want their setup to be entirely free and open, including Discord into the mix basically goes against the whole philosophy.
Great, well those FOSS enthusiasts can contribute something to the project if they want to dictate how it is run, or/and they can set it up and moderate it.
Again, projects need to be super careful not to get caught up in overheads than actually producing results. One of my projects we spent so much time jerking around with choosing source code systems and such, that we didn't really produce anything. You start nitpicking features, servers, long term reliability, etc, instead of just picking what you're familiar with which might be closed source but super popular.
I we go extreme, a hardcore FOSS user could even argue developers shouldn't use VS Code and argue they should use another tool. Well, if you're more productive with VS Code and produce more/better code though, use that, because its the results that matter.
The fact is, most projects get 0 donations and people do them as a hobby. If people seriously want this, they can contribute donations to projects to get them to switch
And often these people don't even contribute anything
Because you are not giving a portion of your audience an open, privacy-respecting way to contribute.
Go ahead and deploy and maintain "an open, privacy-respecting way to contribute" and I'm sure plenty of FOSS devs will be happy to migrate
Exactly. You should consider it too… at a bare minimum have a bridge. If you are a small project that doesn’t have the funds Libera.chat & OFTC exist to be used for this exact purpose.
In fact, my most popular project made Slashdot front page 20 years ago, and I was actually using IRC. No help.. Just submitted issues or suggestions. The only donations I got were from people I knew. And donations aren't common for most projects honestly until they get much bigger, or they are operating an online service
There is nothing stopping people setting up communication channels and such on IRC and such though if they don't want to use the others
But I also don't want to make zillions accounts, one for each project, just for a quick question.
You mean pretty much a single GitHub account?
Also your quick question may have already been asked and answered but difficult to find on Discord. Or if it hasn't been asked yet, now a future person can't discover the same question easily. So either way you're just wasting other people's time.
That "Discord" can be replaced with any IM platforms. Slack, Martix, Gitter, you name it. They are still hard to search. By no means I like the idea of using IM platforms as a support portal/community. I still think forums-like platforms are the best, yet I don't want to create another account to engage with a project that I use.
Github, Lemmy and Stack Exchange enables one account for multiple projects/topics, which I quite like. Or mailing lists. That can do as well.
Thanks for the clarification and I believe I misunderstood your original comment.
To add to your list there is an often underutilized feature of GitHub for discussions too.
Yes I know of and use the bridged Matrix Room.
But bridges can't mimic or replicate every function which has effect on dialogue between users on both sides.
This is why the ‘primary’ or ‘base’ server needs to be non-proprietary & open, not the other way around.
This article is two years old, and perhaps discord have improved their accessibility, since this user find it more accessible then matrix. Yes, it's a single usercase, but worth mentioning nonetheless.
I think there are other arguments against Discord that haven't been mentioned: data privacy. I know there was an instance where Discord collected user without their consent, and that is enough for me to avoid the platform.
I much rather use matrix or the horridly old IRC protocol than Discord. Or forums. Or just plain old issues!
Discord collects every message you ever send in cleartext.
So does lemmy, so does matrix if that's what the admin wants to do.
Lemmy is public and my matrix server doesn't.
Yeah, e2ee on activitypub platforms isn't widely implemented yet, but it's likely it will be.
I don't see discord making that jump.
You can even request your entire metadata blob to see for yourself.
That's how joining a server and being able to see history works
IRC has the same problem as discord when it comes to using it for support. It can't be searched. The same questions will get asked over and over again.
With forums and issue trackers, users can find a solution to previously solved issues with a simple web search.
Besides the privacy, Discord is also complicit in spam attacks against the Fediverse.
I have an existing community of thousands of users on discord, attempts to migrate to other platforms have failed. What would you suggest?
The community was inherited and existed when I became maintainer.
Set up a Matrix bridge and promote it too. You can't force a community but you can inform and give choice.
We tried that. Did nothing but divide the community, cause increased cost, increased administrative burden, increased spammers and detracted efforts from actually working on the project. Ultimately, about five legitimate community members continued to used it over three to six months.
Matrix is IMHO a bad choice as it attracts the same demographic as Discord (glossy webclient) but is much more janky. Realistically speaking it is a poor Slack clone once you look beyond the technical aspect of federation which few people care deeply enough about to endure the buggy and half-broken user experience of Element.
I have had great success bridging to IRC (and XMPP). Yes, it will not fully replace Discord, but it allows a very dedicated group of people to participate in a community on their own terms and with great lightweight clients.
I agree though that any kind of bridge increases the risk of spam. But you should really try to get community members on board to deal with this kind of thing. Developing a software and running a community alone is not a good idea.
For you, I suggest sticking to Discord. I am of the mind that your effort should be focused on your community instead of enforcing a FOSS philosophy upon a group that may not have any interest in doing so.
If you are creating a new community, this is a different conversation, of course.
To me, I
Matrix for synchronous chat
Threadiverse/Fediverse community for announcements and discussion
Discourse for forums (smaller possible channels)
OpenSource based Software forges like Forgejo (codeberg.org) or gitlab (gitlab.com) for issue tracking, code repo, Dev artfacts, and CI/CD.
The exciting things for these lay in the future though:
ForgeFed to federate between forges like codeberg, gitlab, and independent instances of those software, plus federate to whole fediveriverse!
With the fediverse plugin for discourse
the commune app's to take matrix chats and growing them into full posts on fediverse is super exciting to me too
All of these helping to meet people where they are at in Free internet instead of the techno feudal states. There should be work to bridge to those people too, but I hope we can the Free internet better more.
I created a discord server for an open source project of mine, but grew to dislike it. It got spammed multiple times, people are off topic and talking about their lives in channels that aren't for that, and so I started pushing the community toward GitHub discussions.
Discord isn't searchable, nor archivable, nor public, but GitHub is (I'm aware of another conflict with Microsoft for some people, but to me this is the easiest solution to get contributors and have an easy CI setup).
I haven't had much success yet, but I'm slowly shutting down all links to the discord and will let it die (for outside contributors at least). I might keep it to stay in touch with a few developers, to refine issues and prepare migrations that aren't ready to be turned into public discussions/ issues / pull requests.
It's pretty strange to see an accessibility argument against Discord when Discord is the only platform that's accessible to plural people. Like, the arguments against Discord are good, but it's ignoring the tradeoff that other platforms lack the crucial accessibility feature that only discord has.
Discord is a disease.
Matrix is free and works much better and you can run your own server
Still has a lot of the same underlying issues discord has. It's not indexable being the biggest. The reality is that services like stack overflow or an issue tracker like bugzilla, or your local git services issues section or discussion section, hell even something like discourse or even mailing lists, just work better. If someone made an im service that could be indexed by search engines and the like, now we'd be talking. Opensorce design and discussion doesn't really benefit that much from closed ecosystems and end to end encryption in most cases.
I guess though at least with matrix someone could make a service that acts as a client and indexes content from a list of channels or something...
Discord, matrix, slack and telegram are where documentation goes to die in the current state of things though.
The same applies to Android OS development. All of it.
Android requires a very powerful 1000 USD desktop or laptop computer with 20 gigs of ram and 200 gigs of SSD hard drive space just to compile.
This is unacceptable.
Meanwhile, mainline phone linux, like dreemurrs archlinux or postmarketos, can be developed using the same phone it runs on!!!!!!!!
All you need is a 20 USD bluetooth keyboard.
It is fully awesome.
Imagine a world where anybody with just a smartphone and a bluetooth keyboard could be an OS developer!
Android dev here. It does not require 20 gigs of RAM.
Use discourse instead? It's really the best in my opinion.
Can we just bring bitchx back?
Look at what just happened to Yuzu - Years of community just deleted because of a few lawyers.
I haven't read the legal outcome, but wouldn't this have happened anyways if the forums were in other places? The github got removed as well
basic news is: Yuzu and citra agreed to shut down with immediate effect incl. discords.
At least with an open platform youd have a chance to backup discussions or rehost. You'd probably still be dead in the water but it would beat the info being wiped.
The biggest problem with Discord is that its an information black hole. Its not properly searchable and not indexed by search engines.
Discord is fine for casual chat, but horrible when used for forum-type discussions and even worse when used for documentation.
You see the same problems being discussed and solved again and again, but you cant just "link" someone the solution like you could with a forum thread cause its spread out over 3-10 chat messages that are interleaved in-between other topics being discussed in the same room
Anything of long-term value for the project (forum-type discussions, documentation etc) should not recide in Discord
There's going to be a lot of shocked Pikachus when the inevitable enshittification hits, and suddenly they charge to host all the documentation and wiki pages. All that barely maintained stuff will just vanish overnight.
At this point, charging for the service is the only thing left to do to make it more shit...
You would think that people would learn not to put all their eggs into one corporate basket after Facebook fucked everyone over...
Chat in general is so flawed when talking about multiple topics at once. At least when people dont use matrix threads, spaces and rooms correctly.
I have all the issues with Discord that you mention, but struggle to find a better alternative. Do you have any recommendations?
Forums. Phpbb, Mybb, hell even discourse is better than discord. If you're specifically dealing with a coding project, most git repositories offer an issues page and wiki you can use.
And if you want something realtime, IRC & XMPP are low-resource chat options—with the latter being federated & can offer encryption for private rooms.
Sure, but those options solve literally none of the issues discussed above
There’s still been a time & place for realtime communications where the history preservation doesn’t quite matter… it can be some general recon of a problem to know what to even ask so as to not clog up the signal-noise for SEO or even if it’s mostly off-topic banter to relate to community members.
I'm thinking of a rapid alert on a problem in the project using IRC/XMPP/Matrix and then the project managers posting it in a forum about problems in the project.
I could see a bot that could escalate a post with a 🐛 reaction from a maintainer & post an issue. I do feel sometimes tho it is nice to get chat to help the one in need shape the question in a way that folks can help as often they may not know what they are looking for or the root cause. The issues tho is that often those in chat & the asker don’t like the context switch of going to the forum later rather than just answering it here & now--even tho this comes at a detriment to the community as the answer slips into the void.
Forums used to be a lot more common before Reddit kind of ate most public forums.
I guess that the Threadiverse is a substitute, but I dunno how long a given server will stay up.
What about a lemmy community ? I noticed the Github «discussion» tab also.
Any non-trivial support enquiries should be directed to log a bug report/formal support request regardless of the community platform you're using. Discord isn't any worse than IRC in this regard and we've been offering support via the latter forever.
I think a happy medium for this is to rely on GitHub issues for support, and then people can discuss each issue on GitHub or Discord
Both are proprietary, closed source from US-based, for-profit entites. Same problem arises.
A solution would be to save the chat log as a text file. An LLM might be able to turn it into FAQ format with little oversight. Of course, someone would still have to volunteer the work.
Obviously, Discord doesn't want that sort of thing since it lessens their hold on a community and the people in it. They could decide to cause trouble.
That just sounds like something a discord bot could do
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
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.
i don't understand discord's popularity at all. it's so annoying to use
It started getting popular years ago and that's when me an my friends switched to it too (back when I didn't know shit about privacy). You gotta keep in mind the alternatives back then were Skype, which was meant for 1 to 1 calls, had shit audio quality and issues all the time and TeamSpeak, which was complicated because you needed a server (we were kids, we only knew what a server was from Minecraft) and had a text chat that was only a small part of the bottom of the window that was full of connected and disconnected messages, so I actually didn't even know you could write in that. TeamSpeak's interface also isn't exactly good-looking or very intuitive. Then came Discord, you could create a server for you and your friends for free, you saw who of your friends was online and playing what, you could see when someone was in a voice channel and could just join, you had multiple text chats where you could easily send a link or memes while playing and you could easily share your screen with the others. It was a major improvement over the other two. I know that it sucks from a privacy standpoint but there's good reasons why people started using it.
I used ventrillo
Man those were the days .
I just got off a Mumble session. The technology is still here.
It was my replacement of Skype, which was leaning hard into its enshittification around that time.
Where discord never had to lean into it as it was born shit
But it can always get worse. When they run out of money, some of the stuff that used to be free will begin to cost you something.
COVID got people used to video/audio communication, then the other platforms enshitified while discord remained as shit as they always were.
Same as any of the modern enshittified services. It used to be really good. Once they got a large userbase it was time to extract value from the users. The users never have the self-respect to leave, so there they stay.
Because that's where people are?
How familiar are you with IRC?
I was told by someone that IRC is kind of what discord is built on. Maybe the answer is someone in that relation, if what i was told is accurate or not
Discord copies a lot of concepts from IRC, like servers and threads are almost identical. But it isn't technically based on IRC. Maybe your friend mixed it up with Twitch chat which is actual IRC only slightly modified.
I second this!
It's especially disappointing to see FOSS people on Fediverse promoting it.
People love discord. When Microsoft tried to buy it, people freaked out. They turned down the multi billion dollar offer. IMO, I don't believe the paid portion of the app is worth the money because it's mostly cosmetic bullshit. They don't give me a good reason to give them money
I also think discord nitro is kind of B.S . The only reason I still use discord is because my friends use it.
I wish there were similar features in Matrix clients like Element. Just the voice channels feature will be enough for me.
Revolt chat is a good alternative. It lacks in features but its pretty good for an FOSS project. I tried to convince my friends to use it but they crawled back to discord after 2 days.
The constant harassment was enough to get me to pay for it. But guess what? After I paid for it, the harassment continued, trying to get me to give them even more money for products I don't even understand. And that's just not something I tolerate.
That + the inevitable data-mining + refusal to provide any sort of deletion tools = no more Discord for me. I use Revolt now when I need that sort of thing.
Don't give them ideas please
It's incredible, yes, even more considering that Discord has been complicit on spam attacks on the Fediverse.
Can't wait for the day Discord backstabs everyone and people decide to get the fuck away from it. I seriously can't stand having to search past troubleshooting messages, it's a fucking mess, almost unusable. Whoever uses Discord as a Forum seriously needs a full force punch in the mouth.
Discord can and sometimes does monitor your chats.
Source: CEO himself said that, in a hearing
Also a large portion is owned by Tencent with whom Discord is allowed to share all the data they want according to their ToS.
https://github.com/privy-cafe/discordspyware/blob/master/README.md
Well that's no better than searching IRC logs, which are something folks have absolutely done in the past. I still haven't figured out why folks like discord so much though.
People like it cause when it first came out, it was considerably better than other popular voice chat software available for PC games at the time, like TeamSpeak and Ventrillo. But most importantly: it was free, unlike those other two. So people flocked to it and it blew up big, leading us to where we are today.
ooh... can we do a fedi-discord? But like, good?
you mean matrix?
I use Matrix. I even kind of like Matrix and have high hopes for its future.
But like, good?
I can’t wait either, then maybe all the communities that disappeared into discord that I feel unable to actually feel like I am a genuine member of and connect with anymore because I am not part of the conversations on discord will go somewhere where I can be a part of them again.
sigh
FUCK DISCORD
As someone deeply involved in Foss for many years and with multiple large Foss services running on my back, these constant requests for purity from outsiders will go nowhere until volunteers people step up to do the hard work of setting up and maintaining the infrastructure and management of such Foss solutions in the place of the core developers
? What's the difference between setting up a free forum (they're everywhere) versus setting up Discord channels? It's the exact same process.
"Oh great, I'll have to create another fucking account" - me, already having some 300 accounts in my key-vault...
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make unless you're saying no one has to create a Discord account, or have to download an app, or have to find an invite to locate the server. My keys are auto-generated and auto-saved, simple 20 second process. Forums are also a lot easier to sign up for than Discord, if you're worried about making another account I don't know what to tell ya because every service requires it.
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.
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
Should we tell him that he doesn't need more than 1 discord account?
I'm probably way out of the loop but from the perspective of devs getting to contribute, don't stuff like Discourse ship with "login with your Github account" already? Or Google, or Facebook, or...
Also, please, it's 1 click nowadays to make your browser remember your logins for you, if it comes down to lazinessEase, convenience, existing userbase, familiarity, choose a few
I guess we have different perspectives. Ease, convenience = forums, existing userbase? = Do you prefer Reddit for this reason?, familiarity = forums lol, search-ability = forums, privacy = forums, etc etc.
Forums are not the same as real-time. And yes for most of the people using discord, forums wouldn't cover the same niche.
I think you might just be blinded by Discord for some reason. I'm not sure what "niche" you're referring to with Discord that can't be provided with forums (unless you're worried about cosmetics I guess?). There are forums with real-time communications like chat, notifications, direct-messaging. I'm not trying to argue, getting your perspective is always helpful and might show something I'm missing, but your responses seem vague and not really a counter-point.
I don't want real time. Does me no good in my time zone.
Discourse has somewhat decent chat built in these days.
Just do a matrix space
https://matrix.org/docs/communities/getting-started/
I've used matrix and spaces before. Nowhere close as convenient as a discord server. In fact I even had a matrix to discord bridge so I can get the best of both worlds until I had to hide all my matrix channels because of uncontrolled spam
Meanwhile the OCaml IRC chat gets spam from Discord Crypto bots due to bridging with that proprietary platform.
Open source projects improve over time. Corporations improve being able to make money over time, eventually leading to enshittification.
I know which one I'll support
I'm on board with this, but I may be biased because I also don't like using Discord for anything else. Every time someone sends me a Discord invite I feel a little defeated, because it is usually after I have agreed to participate in something.
I feel that way about Teams/Sharepoint/Office. I'm happy to serve on a board or committe, until I find out they're using Teams or Sharepoint. Microsoft's SSO is a fucking mess. Put in your email to get a one-time code, get that code and enter it, then it logs you in and asks for an email address to be added to the account. Add the same email address you just got the code via, and it tells you it can't use that email address. But if I don't use that email address, it won't let me into the Sharepoint docs.
It's just a fucking nightmare. I fucked around with one committee trying to get the accounts deleted and done the Microsoft ^TM^ way and finally gave up and bowed out of that group.
It's an upgrade over Skype, but a downgrade over forums and irc. I setup a discord for some tech troubled friends because I didn't think they could handle anything else and even that was trying for some of them.
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
Can someone point to the reasons why such talented people use discord for their projects?
Convenience probably.
Because it's a decent all in one platform and they don't want to deal with the alternatives.
The integrations and plugins, established workflows, support systems ticketing it's all turnkey. I hate the platform and I wish people wouldn't use it but I understand the draw.
Discord has a ticketing system?
There are ticketing bots, yes.
There are bots that tie in and store tickets several of my software vendors use them. When you have a problem you drop into a certain channel and make a request it issues you a ticket with a link creates a new channel that's just a conversation between you and support. At first it seems clergy but after you use it a couple of times it's reasonably slick
Why not just use Slack that likely has better integrations?
A lot of people have discord, a lot less people have slack.
Slack is also starting to charge for those workflows. My slack bill at work is gone up 50% past what it was. And I'm now getting monthly warnings from using my integrations. They would like me to put a credit card into handle more jira tickets.
You also need to pay to just have message history preserved on slack. Discord that information is there for free for as long as the server/discord exists.
I'm not saying people should use discord, but people are using it because it's free to use.
same goes for those that create self hostable, privacy oriented services and bake in dropbox and/or google drive support... like WUT.
Because most selfhosters are too lazy or inexperienced to break away from cloud services. Docker is great but it has also enables a "just run this docker" mentality that mirrors the Windows "just run this exe."
edit: I think that the opportunity to learn how a project works, how to debug problems and how to integrate a project into their own setup is obscured.
It has pluralkit
True. Sadly the article is over 2 years old and not much has changed since.
I get that people want a "simple way to chat" and Discord does that well, I guess. I mean, everyone's talking about the forum aspect but what's the alternative for chat? Mumble?
Just, please, don't hide documentation in the Discord. A neocities page costs literally $0. Please. Think of the poor SEO consultants!
Yeah I'm indifferent to discord as a platform. It'll eventually be enshitified and people will move on.
The bummer is that it's enabling people to be poor at documentation in a whole new way.
That said, if Discord went away tomorrow most software projects would still have garbage documentation, because most software projects are ephemeral at BEST.
I don't mind Discord being a centralized platform for open source project discussion, if and only if the only roles it serves specifically play to its one strength, which is real time discussion. Asking for live support (from the dev if they are there, or the community if they are not) and doing live bug triage are the two big use cases.
Should contact for these things be real time? Maybe, maybe not. Async discussion like you get on forums or via email can do the job. But if you value real-time chat, Discord does it well.
Everything else? Do it elsewhere. Do not make Discord your only bug tracker. Do not make it your only wiki. Do not make it your only source of documentation. Do not make it the only place you broadcast updates or announcements. Do not make it your only distribution platform for critical downloads. And for the love of god please do not make it the only way to contact you. I don't care if you allow Discord to additionally do these things using integrations, that's fine, just stop trying to contort Discord into your only way of doing these.
Is Discord the only capable option for real time chat? No. But it has several things going in its favor, namely how one can reasonably expect a good sum of their target user base is already using it independently for other purposes, in addition to its numerous QoL features.
It can also better integrate into the dev's personal routine if they already use it independently. Like, do I have an email address? Yeah. Do I read my email on any reasonable interval? Hell no. My email inbox is little more than a dustbin for registration confirmations and online order receipts. I've had email for decades and I think I can count the number of non-work, non-business conversations I've held over it in that whole span of time on one hand. Meanwhile, I'm terminally online on Discord. So if I'm gonna be a small independent FOSS project developer, am I gonna want to interface with everyone over email? No. I'll still make it an option, because being only contactable on Discord is cringe, but it will not be fast. Discord will be my preferred channel.
Should I put more effort into being contactable on other platforms, because it's the right thing to do? Meh. I have no duty of stewardship to be available on platforms available to anyone in particular. I maintain this hypothetical project for free, on my own time, of my own volition, and I provide it to you entirely warranty-free. I have the courtesy to make all static resources available in sensible public places, and I provide email as a slow, async way to reach me. But if you want to converse with me directly in real time, you can come to me where I'm hanging out.
Using discord as your only store/distribution point for information is obnoxious.
How would you even use discord for that stuff? It sounds way harder than just using the proper tools.
You'd certainly think so. But never underestimate a user's ability to jury-rig a piece of software into doing something it wasn't designed to do, ignoring any and all obviously better solutions as they do so.
I don't think I've ever actually seen documentation published on Discord and nowhere else. But I do very often see no documentation whatsoever except a "just ask around on the Discord" link serving the role.
Discord probably isn't used as a robust ticketing system either; usually if anything it's a bot that will push all tickets to an actual GitWhatever issue, which is fine. But again, what I do see often is projects with no ticketing system whatsoever, and a Discord link to just dump your problems at. If the issue tracker on the repo isn't outright disabled, it's a ghost town of open issues falling on deaf ears.
Announcements can be pretty bad. Devs can get into a habit of thinking the only people who care about periodic updates are already in the Discord server, so they don't update READMEs, wikis, or docs on the repo as often as they should, allowing them to go out of date.
Fwiw I've also seen several projects that have Discord servers with none of these problems, because they handle all those other parts properly.
Devs ITT biting every single argument in the article and then saying "but it's easy" is extremely ironic
I love Immich and Sharkey but both use Discord. Sharkey even used Matrix in the beginning but eventually switched to Discord. I think their reasoning was that they were often attacked by trolls etc. and that Matrix didn't had good options for moderation etc.
And while I love Matrix I fully agree. Yes there are moderation bots like Draupnir and they're good but you will need to self host them and register a user for them and and and. It's not as easy as with Discord or even Telegram bots. Also there are many Discord bots providing very fun elements like levels, reputations, roles etc. which simply do not exist or aren't even possible in Matrix as it currently is.
On top of that we have the decentralization "problem" for end users who aren't technical. They simply don't care much about privacy and they don't care if Discord stores every single message and picture in clear text forever on their servers. It's easier to create a Discord account on a centralized platform than understanding Matrix understanding which server to choose, understanding which client to choose and understanding how encryption, key management etc. works. Yes decentralization is important and great but for the average user it's still something that they do not really know which "overcomplicates" it for them.
And another point is that Matrix spaces are simply not the same as Discord servers. Channels are not as easy to manage because they are rooms on their own in Matrix and a space is not a server but rather a way to organize multiple rooms. Not every client supports spaces yet. Clients implement them differently. Then there's Element and Element X on phones confusing people new to Matrix etc. In Discord several channels can be grouped in another category. In Matrix you'd use Subspaces for that giving you the same issue as with normal spaces.
And most clients don't implement simple things on mobile like...sending multiple images at once. From the perspective of an end user that fact annoys the heck out of anyone wanting to send several pictures.
So yeah I think it's a mixture out of those things.
Matrix especially needs better bot support with bots that could be used by everyone as it is with Discord instead of being only usable by server admins or the bots creators as it is with many Matrix bots. And it does need a better solution for spaces with rooms or another thing in the specs that replicates how Discord servers work so that it's a "space" with actual "subchannels" without every space technically being it's own room dangling around in limbo and just being "sorted" into the space.
And it needs better moderation tools.
Matrix isn't the only alternative, there's also rocketchat
The elephant in the room is IRC. Which continues to work fine and hosts huge FOSS communities. Self hosting it is even better as you can use a more modern version like ergo.chat than the large networks sadly utilize.
You made me look again at IRC V3, seems like they support threads and emoji reactions. I might give it a try
IRCv3 has a lot of features & is good, but if you need encrypted chat and/or want to support decentralization XMPP MUCs can fit the bill similar being just a bit less lightweight.
Matrix sucks, that's why most people won't use it. I'm already giving my software away for free and providing free support for it, why would I want to take up even more of my free time running and maintaining a Matrix server as well?
Sure, I could use an already available Matrix server but I already have a Discord account, all my friends and contributors do as well and the entire thing is easy to set up and use, plus I'm already running the Discord client too.
On top of this, the argument about searchability is irrelevant. Projects have been giving support via IRC forever which has all the same problems. The best thing to do for any non-trivial support inquiries is to direct the user to lodge a support ticket and always has been.
Matrix just isn't a compelling option, even if it had feature parity with Discord and was easier to use, it doesn't have any real inertia anyway.
From the article.
Maybe you'll take up more of your time answering lazy user's questions than speaking with those that are helpful with solving issues.
Your argument about time is more in favor of Matrix, and even more so in favor of just using your code hosting's issue tracker.
from the article:
Interesting to do a “s/Discord/Github/” replace on the above. Same situation yet hardly anyone gives a shit.
So yes, Drew DeVault is right. But he overestimates people’s commitment to free world digital rights principles and consistency thereof.
not at all the same situation. Git itself is not proprietary so all the projects can survive without GitHub if the need arises. Additionally, you don’t need an account to view the repository or its discussions. There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue, however it doesn’t compare to discord, which is much, much worse.
I don't care about the wall around the garden as much as I care that the wall was made by a deranged clown with no UI design experience.
And if you insist on using Microsoft GitHub, this contribution concern can be mitigated by offering an alternative mirror or a mailing list/email address to send patches. One way to help prevent lock-in would be to use MS GitHub’s repository settings & straight-up disable non-portable features like “Discussions”, “Sponsors” & maybe even the “Issues” tracker favoring a third-party option or the issue tracker of the mirror along with disabling “Actions” choosing a third-party CI option or the CI that comes with the mirror (or require checks ran locally before pushing).
like I said I agree, Discord is simply more terrible.
Having a bug tracker in that walled garden is the biggest problem. It demonstrates what I’m talking about: digital rights being disregarded.
You’re neglecting the exclusion that’s inherent in Github when the need to bounce does NOT arise.
Also worth adding that during the war in Gaza some of us boycott Israel. Which implies boycotting Microsoft.
Advocating read-only access is comparable to endorsing only freedom 1 and 2, not freedom 0 or 4. Which is precisely what I’m talking about: FOSS projects that discard digital rights and partake in digital exclusion for some convenience frills.
Bug trackers have more of a monopoly on bug reports than discord has on discussions. There are countless decentralized discussions about free software all over the place -- threadiverse, probably facebook, ad hoc phpbb forums, IRC, usenet, mastodon, mailing lists, conferences like FOSDEM … and rightfully so. Discussions don’t need the centralization that bug trackers do. General discussions also do not have the degree of importance to QA that bug tracking does.
Case in point, when bugs are reported outside of Github, they don’t get noticed by developers and triaged.
I give a shit. Open source contributions shouldn’t require proprietary services if open alternatives (even if it requires more than a single service) suffice. In the case of Git forges, the alternatives are great--& the more you buy into the Microsoft GitHub-specific features the harder it will be to migrate which will lead to lock-in.
There are not enough of you. Evidenced by ~95%+ of noteworthy FOSS projects being jailed in Github’s walled garden.
And certain projects I don’t deem it worth my time to contribute due to this fact. The unfortunate issue with that is usually there isn’t a good way to communicate that to the maintainers when they lock all coms to Microsoft GitHub & Slack/Discord. There are certain projects I have skipped on trying based on this too as to me it becomes an indicator of poor decision-making trying to capture hype/marketing rather than fostering goodwill of the free/ethical software movements. At least on Lemmy you get an upvote instead of harassed by asking for an open communication and/or contribution option 😅
There's not really much point in using a self hosted gitea or codeberg or sourcehut if you want the barrier of entry to be as low as possible for potential contributors. Maybe if some larger projects made the move. But GitHub has more features (like discussions), provides better hosting and ease of use. The focus of any open source project should be on development of the software, not the software which supports its development.
Of course there is.
Bingo. Prioritizing convenience features above digital rights principles is exactly why Github’s walled garden dominates over forges that have a lower barrier of entry.
Again, people to setting aside their principles is exactly what I’m talking about.
doesn’t help that modern tools like lazy.nvim, etc make alternative hosting a barrier to entry. and a GitHub mirror is a tedious half measure.
If you're desperate for a discord-like experience (because lets face it, irc and mailing lists arent very flashy anymore!) you can try:
Yes you wont have voice/vodeo chat for these but IMO that's rarely useful anyway. And if you DO need it then you can use stuff like teamspeak or zoom******yes i know the issues with these options but for devs you dont really ever need to use meetings for very long and sometimes using a shitty free service with all you need is better than self hosting your own. Maybe Nextcloud talk can work?Some good arguments made for FOSS voice/meeting apps, and why VC and meetings are more important to the FOSS workflow than I thought :)
Jitsi Meet for zoom replacement
Jitsi is amazing. Even during 2020 it always has worked way better than Zoom for me, and I haven't even tried hosting it myself.
How about Revolt? It's open source and it's pretty much a Discord clone.
Forums are a better technology but come with hosting costs
Discourse is a forum platform and now has a similar layout like Discord.
I think you misspelled "Please use the appropriate tool for a specific job"
Which certainly isn't Discord
Depends what job, keeping a community ? Why not. Gaming with friends ? Yeah. Keeping track of a project ? There sure are many - even - free tools to manage that
I have never used Discord and never will. No project has ever been able to change my stance on it.
On the other end I have a lot of first-hand experience of Discord's abuses and that's precisely why I have my stance on it.
This article has a few primary arguments for not using Discord—
I know this opinion is going to be unpopular but here I go anyway.
Other than the accessibility argument, I find these arguments quite weak. Yes, Discord is proprietary software, but the reason it's used is because a lot of people are familiar with it and many people already have Discord accounts.
Although I'm a firm supporter of free software, I also believe that it's more important to use the right software for the job than to idealistically use inferior software just because it happens to be open-source. And yes, I regard most of the alternatives to Discord listed in the article to be inferior solely because they are unfamiliar to users. Sometimes, the superior choice happens to be proprietary and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. That's the way it is sometimes; you can't win every fight, as much as you'd like to.
If your goal is to foster a community of regular users and make it easy for normal users to interact with contributors, there is no choice that will hamper that goal more than using an obscure alternative software that nobody's heard of.
With respect to chat logs and administration tools... for the most part, nobody cares. Discord's tools are sufficient for most groups and few people consider the drawbacks to outweigh the other benefits.
The strongest argument for me is that discord is commercial, borne of venture capital spent on operating at a loss for years to gain users. It is therefore bound for a turn towards profit and enshittification, sooner, rather than later.
The flip-side of that argument is that "librefosschat" alternative might also be dead next year when it runs out of money :/
At least commercial vc enshitiffied stuff tends to get ridden into the ground, so there is a long offramp.
Not really. Something you can self-host, like irc, xmpp or matrix, has an infinite offramp.
Very true, but self-hosting isn't free either, so there are maintenance/moderation/etc costs that take away time from the project. Small projects often just cant justify selfhosting.
But if your service is hosted by a third party, you really do want to be sure they will be around in the near future. And its not just chat that this applies to, git hosting, web hosting, ci/cd etc.
You don't need to selfhost most of those. There's IRC and webpage providers everywhere (you can literally walk into a cpanel hosting and click the button that says "make me a Wordpress", for example). After all, I'm sure your product has an email account, yet you are not selfhosting your e-mail, do you? And you release your software via what, Github? Flatpak? Lemme see, are you selfhosting those too?
Idk about infinite, if they stop getting updates they will eventually get phased out and if you can't download the application it's also dead. All that aside the sun is going to go super nova eventually.
Also a lot of people don't want to self host. I doubt you self host your own Lemmy instance for instance.
IRC works since decades, same for XMPP. I think that is a pretty strong indication that it will continue to work just fine.
And not everyone needs to self host, like one in a thousand is more than sufficient for a community to have their own self-hosted chat system.
Decades is far from infinite
You are not infinite either 😅
I host my own matrix instance.
I wouldn't mind hosting my own lemmy instance either, but as it's a public platform anyway I don't have the same qualms about using an instance hosted by someone else. So I opted not to take on any more work on that.
Not everyone needs to self host, you might get away with knowing someone who does. And no, I wouldn't accept a nextcloud account hosted by just anyone, but my siblings and parents happily utilize ones provided by me.
And back when teamspeak, mumble, ventrilo, minecraft servers, cs servers, etc. all had to be "self-hosted" there were plenty of service providers who would do all the technical work for the layman, in exchange for direct payment. Making all those services quite accessible to anyone.
That was so much better than how today we "pay" by getting datamined.
Unless I'm misreading this, your argument seems to be that software freedom is irrelevant in the face of technical superiority or popularity. That's exactly the opposite of "firm support" in my view.
I'll offer a counterpoint to the "best tool for the job" thing: before git existed, Linux development relied on a proprietary VCS called Bitkeeper. Licenses for Bitkeeper were "graciously" donated for gratis by the Bitkeeper developer. Andrew Tridgell, who was not party to the Bitkeeper EULA, telneted to a Bitkeeper server and typed "help". The Bitkeeper developer, in retaliation, revoked the Linux developers' gratis license to use the proprietary "best tool for the job." This was what forced Linus to develop git, which became the most widely used VCS in the free software world. (read: Thank You, Larry McVoy by Richard Stallman)
Proprietary tools can seem to be useful in the moment but developing a dependency on them, and encouraging their use, is dangerous. Discord might seem like "the best tool for the job" until it enshittifies, just like its predecessors did, and just like its successors inevitably will. We've seen it happen often enough.
True, but managing expectations is needed tho, mainly about exit strategy:
If a community needs to leave, the content on Discord must be considered "not important", "not transferable" and "not archive worthy".
If Discord changes freemium, limits users or otherwise applies enshittification just leave your stuff and start over.
It would be easier to leave if you started by using a platform that made that seamless. Freenode gets bought & communities say to point your bouncers/clients to Libera.chat or OFTC. If you were on XMPP on a decentralized account, your account stays, but now there’s a new MUC to join. With Discord, if Discord goes down, so does the client & the whole server… folks need to relearn a bunch of stuff & it’s not a clean break.
This is also inevitable as we are talking about a US-based, VC-funded service & we have the entire track record of these types of services declining. Why not start with something that’s more likely to not suck in 5 or 10 years even if it doesn’t have all the same features so long as you can still chat in realtime.
Agree, wholeheartedly and reasons I want to avoid Discord et al. I do communicate my expectations rather cynically in case a community is starting and does have a choice in the beginning.
Gonna add that while Discord is inaccessible if your hardware is crap, it's the ONLY platform accessible to plural people
If your logic is that a piece of software is inferior to another because it is less popular and familiar than go back to reddit
It's getting a bit annoying honestly how people are telling other developers how to run their projects. And often these people don't even contribute anything
I personally hate discord, but I do use slack. Using discord or slack however doesn't make your code any less open source
If people want this, they can set up something for my projects, and convince users to go. If it's successful I'd join too. Otherwise, it's really just focusing on things that dont actually matter much. I've personally been part of a project which died because we focused too much on infrastructure
We shouldn't be mixing FOSS projects with proprietary communication platforms. There are a lot of FOSS enthusiasts who want their setup to be entirely free and open, including Discord into the mix basically goes against the whole philosophy.
Great, well those FOSS enthusiasts can contribute something to the project if they want to dictate how it is run, or/and they can set it up and moderate it.
Again, projects need to be super careful not to get caught up in overheads than actually producing results. One of my projects we spent so much time jerking around with choosing source code systems and such, that we didn't really produce anything. You start nitpicking features, servers, long term reliability, etc, instead of just picking what you're familiar with which might be closed source but super popular.
I we go extreme, a hardcore FOSS user could even argue developers shouldn't use VS Code and argue they should use another tool. Well, if you're more productive with VS Code and produce more/better code though, use that, because its the results that matter.
The fact is, most projects get 0 donations and people do them as a hobby. If people seriously want this, they can contribute donations to projects to get them to switch
Also, this link is basically a Sourcehut advert..
Because you are not giving a portion of your audience an open, privacy-respecting way to contribute.
Go ahead and deploy and maintain "an open, privacy-respecting way to contribute" and I'm sure plenty of FOSS devs will be happy to migrate
Exactly. You should consider it too… at a bare minimum have a bridge. If you are a small project that doesn’t have the funds Libera.chat & OFTC exist to be used for this exact purpose.
I don't use Discord actually..
In fact, my most popular project made Slashdot front page 20 years ago, and I was actually using IRC. No help.. Just submitted issues or suggestions. The only donations I got were from people I knew. And donations aren't common for most projects honestly until they get much bigger, or they are operating an online service
There is nothing stopping people setting up communication channels and such on IRC and such though if they don't want to use the others
what was your popular project then?
THIS.
omg If I have to configure another Matrix mirror bot for something I wanna self host, I swear...
you shouldn't use discord at all .... I think nowadays it's the only app that uses plain text for all messages avoid discord
I use discord when playing video games with my daughter. It's improved our experience immensely.
Audio chat, webcam and screen sharing are a great combination.
Can you recommend an alternative?
But I also don't want to make zillions accounts, one for each project, just for a quick question.
You mean pretty much a single GitHub account?
Also your quick question may have already been asked and answered but difficult to find on Discord. Or if it hasn't been asked yet, now a future person can't discover the same question easily. So either way you're just wasting other people's time.
That "Discord" can be replaced with any IM platforms. Slack, Martix, Gitter, you name it. They are still hard to search. By no means I like the idea of using IM platforms as a support portal/community. I still think forums-like platforms are the best, yet I don't want to create another account to engage with a project that I use.
Github, Lemmy and Stack Exchange enables one account for multiple projects/topics, which I quite like. Or mailing lists. That can do as well.
Thanks for the clarification and I believe I misunderstood your original comment.
To add to your list there is an often underutilized feature of GitHub for discussions too.
Openstreetmap 👀 👀 👀 👀
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Matrix ?
Yes I know of and use the bridged Matrix Room. But bridges can't mimic or replicate every function which has effect on dialogue between users on both sides.
This is why the ‘primary’ or ‘base’ server needs to be non-proprietary & open, not the other way around.
This article is two years old, and perhaps discord have improved their accessibility, since this user find it more accessible then matrix. Yes, it's a single usercase, but worth mentioning nonetheless.
I think there are other arguments against Discord that haven't been mentioned: data privacy. I know there was an instance where Discord collected user without their consent, and that is enough for me to avoid the platform.
I much rather use matrix or the horridly old IRC protocol than Discord. Or forums. Or just plain old issues!
Discord collects every message you ever send in cleartext.
So does lemmy, so does matrix if that's what the admin wants to do.
Lemmy is public and my matrix server doesn't.
Yeah, e2ee on activitypub platforms isn't widely implemented yet, but it's likely it will be.
I don't see discord making that jump.
You can even request your entire metadata blob to see for yourself.
That's how joining a server and being able to see history works
IRC has the same problem as discord when it comes to using it for support. It can't be searched. The same questions will get asked over and over again.
With forums and issue trackers, users can find a solution to previously solved issues with a simple web search.
Besides the privacy, Discord is also complicit in spam attacks against the Fediverse.
Don't talk to discord users, they have cooties.
I have an existing community of thousands of users on discord, attempts to migrate to other platforms have failed. What would you suggest?
The community was inherited and existed when I became maintainer.
Set up a Matrix bridge and promote it too. You can't force a community but you can inform and give choice.
We tried that. Did nothing but divide the community, cause increased cost, increased administrative burden, increased spammers and detracted efforts from actually working on the project. Ultimately, about five legitimate community members continued to used it over three to six months.
Matrix is IMHO a bad choice as it attracts the same demographic as Discord (glossy webclient) but is much more janky. Realistically speaking it is a poor Slack clone once you look beyond the technical aspect of federation which few people care deeply enough about to endure the buggy and half-broken user experience of Element.
I have had great success bridging to IRC (and XMPP). Yes, it will not fully replace Discord, but it allows a very dedicated group of people to participate in a community on their own terms and with great lightweight clients.
I agree though that any kind of bridge increases the risk of spam. But you should really try to get community members on board to deal with this kind of thing. Developing a software and running a community alone is not a good idea.
For you, I suggest sticking to Discord. I am of the mind that your effort should be focused on your community instead of enforcing a FOSS philosophy upon a group that may not have any interest in doing so.
If you are creating a new community, this is a different conversation, of course.
To me, I
Matrix for synchronous chat Threadiverse/Fediverse community for announcements and discussion Discourse for forums (smaller possible channels) OpenSource based Software forges like Forgejo (codeberg.org) or gitlab (gitlab.com) for issue tracking, code repo, Dev artfacts, and CI/CD.
The exciting things for these lay in the future though: ForgeFed to federate between forges like codeberg, gitlab, and independent instances of those software, plus federate to whole fediveriverse!
With the fediverse plugin for discourse
the commune app's to take matrix chats and growing them into full posts on fediverse is super exciting to me too
All of these helping to meet people where they are at in Free internet instead of the techno feudal states. There should be work to bridge to those people too, but I hope we can the Free internet better more.
I created a discord server for an open source project of mine, but grew to dislike it. It got spammed multiple times, people are off topic and talking about their lives in channels that aren't for that, and so I started pushing the community toward GitHub discussions.
Discord isn't searchable, nor archivable, nor public, but GitHub is (I'm aware of another conflict with Microsoft for some people, but to me this is the easiest solution to get contributors and have an easy CI setup).
I haven't had much success yet, but I'm slowly shutting down all links to the discord and will let it die (for outside contributors at least). I might keep it to stay in touch with a few developers, to refine issues and prepare migrations that aren't ready to be turned into public discussions/ issues / pull requests.
It's pretty strange to see an accessibility argument against Discord when Discord is the only platform that's accessible to plural people. Like, the arguments against Discord are good, but it's ignoring the tradeoff that other platforms lack the crucial accessibility feature that only discord has.
Discord is a disease.
Matrix is free and works much better and you can run your own server
Still has a lot of the same underlying issues discord has. It's not indexable being the biggest. The reality is that services like stack overflow or an issue tracker like bugzilla, or your local git services issues section or discussion section, hell even something like discourse or even mailing lists, just work better. If someone made an im service that could be indexed by search engines and the like, now we'd be talking. Opensorce design and discussion doesn't really benefit that much from closed ecosystems and end to end encryption in most cases.
I guess though at least with matrix someone could make a service that acts as a client and indexes content from a list of channels or something...
Discord, matrix, slack and telegram are where documentation goes to die in the current state of things though.
Why does nobody ever recommend GitLab
The same applies to Android OS development. All of it. Android requires a very powerful 1000 USD desktop or laptop computer with 20 gigs of ram and 200 gigs of SSD hard drive space just to compile. This is unacceptable.
Meanwhile, mainline phone linux, like dreemurrs archlinux or postmarketos, can be developed using the same phone it runs on!!!!!!!! All you need is a 20 USD bluetooth keyboard. It is fully awesome. Imagine a world where anybody with just a smartphone and a bluetooth keyboard could be an OS developer!
Android dev here. It does not require 20 gigs of RAM.
Yeah I don’t understand this comment lol
Or just don't use Discord.
Use discourse instead? It's really the best in my opinion.
Can we just bring bitchx back?
Look at what just happened to Yuzu - Years of community just deleted because of a few lawyers.
I haven't read the legal outcome, but wouldn't this have happened anyways if the forums were in other places? The github got removed as well
basic news is: Yuzu and citra agreed to shut down with immediate effect incl. discords.
At least with an open platform youd have a chance to backup discussions or rehost. You'd probably still be dead in the water but it would beat the info being wiped.