- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
- opensource@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
- opensource@lemmy.ml
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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.
You would think that people would learn not to put all their eggs into one corporate basket after Facebook fucked everyone over…
At this point, charging for the service is the only thing left to do to make it more shit…
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.
Discord is only good for coordinating game events and helping to facilitate gaming community engagement. I’m so sick of everyone pushing it as the central hub of everything social and the idea of entire projects centered around Discord is absolutely ludicrous.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
It was my replacement of Skype, which was leaning hard into its enshittification around that time.
What? Skype is better than discord
Not when discord launched. Discord had far better audio quality, multiple text and voice channels, and some moderation tools. Skype was basically a group chat with a group call function
I second this!
It’s especially disappointing to see FOSS people on Fediverse promoting it.
I think you misspelled “Please use the appropriate tool for a specific job”
Forums are a better technology but come with hosting costs
The dumb part about that, though, is that it’s considerably easy to spin up a forum with a free forum host and you get significantly more control and customization than what Discord gives.
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!
I find that some Matrix clients make it easy to build and interact with a community. Even Element has a lot of Discord’s core features, it just lacks the streaming and some of the gaming-related stuff. Otherwise, Matrix rooms are sufficient for building an “easy to chat” community.
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.
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.
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.
What are you exchanging on Discord where this is an issue?
I’d hope your doctor isn’t joining your OSS project discord to conduct appointments or anything.
“If you have nothing to hide” has never been a valid excuse to compromise on privacy.
Yeah, most of the time you don’t actually need it, but if you don’t make it the norm, one day you’ll wake up and find that the entire concept of encrypted communication was made illegal.
As the UK is actively trying to do. And the first sparks of which have been seen in the EU as well.
And that’s before even bringing up that even innocent normal conversation data can be used to profile individuals and mass-influence the democratic voting process with targeted campaigning.
“Help, your library isn’t loading the Foobar files created in Bazfoo 2024” is not something that is sensitive data.
It is not my responsibility to manage random people’s baseless paranoia as a project maintainer.
What?
You need a forum, not a fucking discord server.
I’ll simplify:
How is there is a practical privacy issue here when the purpose of the chat is public support?
There should be no expectation of privacy in a public support chat/forum to begin with.
Let’s not be unreasonable with dogmatism here.
Again. What?
Discord is a DM platform first, a public space second. And it’s way better at being the first, than the second.
Providing support on discord is stupid, it’s only semi-public and hides solutions to already solved problems beyond the reach of search engines and real public platforms.
True. Sadly the article is over 2 years old and not much has changed since.
Because most opensource enthusiasts cry foul on the internet, want everything open-source, free and privacy centric but never contribute anything of value.
Did the author start a matrix instance yet? No?
Yes, not much has changed.
The author is the creator of sourcehut, literally a platform for collaborative open-source projects. I think he’s done a lot more useful than set up a new Matrix instance.
