FLOSS communities right now

• Terrible format for archiving knowledge
• Terrible tool for retrieving knowledge
• Locks community access behind a corporate license agreement
• Hands control of community-created content to a corporation
• Prevents indexing by web search engines
• Antithetical to interoperability
• Privacy-hostile

A web forum is far better in most cases. If you can't manage to run your own, there are plenty of lemmy servers that will do it for you. Even an email list (with searchable archives) would be better than Discord.

If you have collaborative documents that outgrow the forum format, use a wiki.

If real-time chat is needed, irc or matrix.

A project hosting its community on Discord is a project that won't get my contributions.

PLEASE I BEG OF YOU, STOP USING DISCORD IN PLACE OF FORUMS AND PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE BOARDS!

it's awful and I hate it. I generally prefer not to have a shared identity across communities, and there's no way to create a usable discord identity without a phone number.

Discord separates and controls possibly useful information from the public internet. It's one of the worst platforms to use.

Fuck Discord when it's used in lieu of a forum, documentation or proper support channels.

Discord is a fucking plague. I loathe it for communities. As soon as there are more than 10 people in a room, no one can follow what anyone is saying. Threads? No dude, this isn’t the 90s! Let’s slack it up!!! 🤮

The children do not yet know how much they yearn for the mines of listservs.

A new, novel solution to an already-solved problem that is worse in pretty much every way. But at least it is anathema to retention of institutional knowledge.

In short: just do a fucking PHPBB forum, it's better than this shit.

Seriously why did the cancer growth called Discoord suddenly dominate everything.

yeah I've really noticed it's hard to find info and therefore use any project that does this.

and it must suck because anyone new, instead of finding the answer to their question in a forum archive from when it was first asked, has to log in and ask it again.

whenever I have dumb noob questions on setup and I see a discord link I give up a little.

Discord is the worst. Requires a phone number, does not allow email aliases and logs your chats.

Matrix and SimpleX is way better

I would accept discord/irc over mailing list. But nothing beats a proper forum website.
And no, subreddit is not a proper forum.

I get the impression that opensource communities are missing out on contributors by even including discord in the mix 🧐

I bought a keyboard kit recently and to my horror discovered all the “documentation” to build it is on Discord. The creator’s last message was that he was working on other things after losing interest, and was not monitoring it anymore. So all the channels are full of messages asking where he is, what the status is, is he coming back, etc. I had to scroll back through dozens of pages just to find the docs.

Maybe put up a wiki on GitHub or something? Especially if you don’t want to run a forum or plan on dipping. It’s not that hard.

The people in this thread are open source power users who don't get and don't want the features that discord offers. It's no surprise you'd rather have your forum back. I don't think that's how it's going to work.

Privacy is good and what discord does is bad. But don't lecture me on how convient and nice it is to use or run something like matrix, if this is your idea of a user onboarding experience:

https://matrix.org/docs/chat_basics/matrix-for-im/

FCK DSCRD!

(They should use lemmy instead :-P)

While I understand why FOSS community hates Discord, I don't know an alternative that is better at everything.

Discord's main problems:

• Not FOSS / Privacy respectful
• Hard/Impossible to index/search for data and organize tech support

However alternatives we have are not ideal either:

1. Old-school web forums
   • Great for info archival / organized tech support
   • Separate accounts for every one of them, different sets of newsletters / email notifications. Basically, to efficiently be active on several forums you have to manually log in to each on regular basis and check what's new
   • Due to slower pace of communication, it's harder to just log in and "hang out" with community, everybody is more of a pen pal.

2. FOSS messaging applications (e.g. Matrix since that's what most use)
   • Info archival is even worse then on Discord. Every time I tried to search for anything useful on Matrix I would give up due to poor results and HUGE delays for every search
   • Because most communities use a single Matrix chat, it's a huge disorganized mess for any communication and tech support. There's often 2-3 concurrent conversations in a single room and some just stop abruptly due to it getting confusing to keep up
   • it's FOSS and Private, though

Feel free to downvote me for this, but I think that Github for support & issue tracking and Discord for community hang out spot is currently the lesser evil approach until better Foss tools arrive

I feel like so many people talk about how it's not searchable or other concerns but for me I don't really care so much because there's an even bigger deal breaker which is their license agreement, where you sign away the property rights of anything you post, giving away your entire open source project.. This alone should disqualify it for any work of any creative sort. They own things you give them. I would never use it for development because of this.

Discord performance is inversely proportional to the number of servers you’re in. Until Discord addresses this, it’s a shit tool for this use case unless you participate in a tiny number of servers in one facet of your life. Unlike chat tools like Slack that allow you to focus one server or community tools like forums, Lemmy, or VCSaaS which don’t consume resources when you don’t use them, Discord just tanks everything. Since you can’t easily hop in and out (something community tools let you do because, you know, you’re not constantly polling the server), you can’t self regulate.

Every single gaming community, coding community, project, store, hobby group, friend group, and professional group (study group too) has their own Discord. It’s a goddamn nightmare because Discord does not prioritize basic community functionality. Voice and streaming kick ass, but I need some server management and resource optimization.

I refuse to use discord.

Since we are on the topic of disliking Discord, what Matrix clients do you humans use? I tried both Element and Nheko (the latter of which isn't electron based), and they both felt slow, clunky and unresponsive.

Half this thread is mad discord saves messages and the other half is mad that discord doesn’t save messages. You can’t make this shit up lmao.

I’ll eat all the downvotes but objectively discord is the best chatting service available to the public for discussion. Blows irc out of the water easily. The only point I’ll concede on is the phone number bullshit but otherwise I’d take it over anything else.

Never had issues using their search feature for dev discords. It’s keyword based; truly stupid simple and easy to follow.

And yes I’ve used irc actively. It’s delusional to think that is somehow easier to follow.

Using matrix would be better. Server plugins can publish channels like a public blog, viewable in a web browser.

every time I run into an issue with Proton-GE it makes me angry again: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom?tab=readme-ov-file#2-if-you-have-an-issue-that-happens-with-my-proton-ge-build-provided-from-this-repository-that-does--not--happen-on-valves-proton-please-do-not-open-a-bug-report-on-valves-bug-tracker-instead-contact-me-on-discord-about-the-issue

Oh my fuck I'm so glad these characters died out. Dolan memes were the bane of my existence while they were a thing.

Am I the odd one out for actually liking discord? Or is most of this hate specifically for using discord for FOSS projects? As a replacement for MSN Messenger/Skype/Ventrillo Discord is actually pretty great for hanging out with friends

Discord is trash, but nobody seems to have presented anything better.

Is this loss?

Lemmy communities with discord channels are really quite something.

Even worse if there's a github page, but they've disabled issues and discussions.

Its awful, history isnt kept, requires account creation on a non FLOSS app. It sucks. Forums were better.

discord is the best villain but also the worst platform ever

Laughs in matrix and element

Me when Thunders (Lemmy client I contribute to) entire dev team is on matrix: happy noises

So, what do we use? Matrix? Element? Idk?

This entire thread is just a bunch of old nerds screaming at the tide.

Hate stuff all you want. It isn't going to change anything. "People should do this or that". It must be exhausting to be so angry at something but do nothing about it.

Imagine using all this energy to really understand while people use Discord and try to make something better.

OR join these projects you apparently like and volunteer to do the extra work to publisher useful documentation. Unless of course you never intend to be useful to FLOSS and just want everyone else to do the work for you.

OR you can continue to complain and get nowhere while completely alienating an entire generation of developers. They'll eventually forget you exist while they're busy making the future happen.

I'm sure the folks that are doing the work aren't hanging out on Lemmy complaining about kids these days.

Why is everyone hating Discord? It's pretty neat platform when all the features used properly.

What is a better alternative then?

I use Discord mostly for arranging matches in Wiimmfi, but yesterday I used it to get help about an issue I had running Knightcrawler (selfhosted Torrentio for Stremio) with my specific setup and some kind people helped me out real quick.

IMO Discord is the best platform for this right now, which is unfortunate. The little I've tried Matrix has not been very impressive (single chatrooms, slow, bad self-hosting experience IMO), IRC is a bit better (though very dated in many regards, esp. user management) but still doesn't have the categories/channels that make discord nice. And most other chats are proprietary with discord just being the best one.

Which one would you like them to use?

You brought back to me some good old memories with that Donald duck meme lol

All you idiots telling FOSS maintainers to do something else, know that we don't want to maintain yet another server. Aside from Discord, Zulip is the next best thing.

Discuss are fine but they should be supplemebtary for chats and whatnot. It should not be a walled garden of knowledge

I don't even have discord.

I get this post and everyone's comments here. You're not wrong. The issues is we often have to go where people already are. It's annoying, it's inefficient, but ultimately the best tool is worthless if no one comes over to it. Classic chicken-egg problem ultimately.

Neither here nor there, but how typical is it to turn on notifications for a medium size discord server? Would you consider it?