4 pane comic of dolan on the left and spooderman on the right
pane 1 (dolan): cum join opensurce cummunity!
pane 2 (spooderman): shure! how joyn?
pane 3 (dolan): Here discord! (with discord logo)
pane 4 (spooderman with tears in eyes): y u do dis?
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- 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.
I recently went through these exact pains trying to contribute to a project that exclusively ran through Discord and eventually had to give up when it was clear they would never enable issues in their GitHub repos for “reasons.”
It was impossible to discover the history behind anything. Even current information was lost within days, having to rehash aspects that were already investigated and decided upon.
It’s the “see no evil” approach. If you didn’t report the issue while the admin was online, then they aren’t compelled to do anything about it. Convenient for the project maintainer who doesn’t actually like maintaining things. Awful for the rest of us.
would never enable issues in their Git…
That’s a worrying sign for a project.
Did you clone their Git and start tracking issues there? ;-)
So, what do we use? Matrix? Element? Idk?
For synchronous communication? Element, Zulip, Rocketchat (or if you really must, IRC 🤮 ), just something opensource and privacy respecting.
I get the impression that opensource communities are missing out on contributors by even including discord in the mix 🧐
I’m not sure I understand the problem. Is the problem that they’re not using matrix? Or do you prefer that it was still all on IRC? I don’t hate IRC but it’s definitely way less user friendly.
Another commenter mentioned that they have matrix, discord, IRC, and discourse, however everything but discord is dead. So, due to the network effect of just including discord, it reduces participation on other channels.
Communities that are “discord only” however exclude people like those in this comment section.I refuse to use discord for all the reasons people mentioned. Personally, matrix + lemmy/kbin/mbin = best. Other opensource direct communication solutions are acceptable too, like Zulip or RocketChat, but only if bridged with matrix. Then I just need one account. For async, discourse is alright, but not my favorite.
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:
Matrix is the protocol. Element is one of the (many) clients. Setting up an account on a server is as easy or easier than discord. Try it https://app.element.io
Matrix has video and voice rooms, screen-sharing, direct calls, threads, and very little fluff. An entire conference (FOSDEM) was hosted on a matrix server and people from any homeserver could connect. Admittedly, I don’t use other features, but those are all that I need. What other features are essential for an opensource community that only discord provides?
As for forums, they are for async. Are you going to seriously tell me discord is a good forum replacement?
To me it looks like the features are about 80% there, can’t find the screen sharing, login with QR doesn’t exist. Not really sure how to even search for some features because the naming is so extremely bad. “matrix automation” “element bot”. E.g. this is a very poor collection: https://element.io/integrations Looks like custom emotes are still missing.
But let’s say all of that exists and works.
What other features are essential for an opensource community that only discord provides?
I think we’re talking about different things then. I don’t need something for an opensource community. I need something for ALL communities I’m a part of. Because I’m already in 40 of them and 5 of them are FOSS projects. So switching those over increases friction, if it’s not a total replacement.
As for forums, they are for async. Are you going to seriously tell me discord is a good forum replacement?
This is inverted. I don’t need to defend why the platform I’m on is good, (it’s not), you need to explain why forums are supposed to be better (they are significantly worse).
Documentation belongs on a dedicated website, Issues belong on some gitlab or something instance. If I have a question, I want the answer reasonably quickly or I’m just not going to use the software you’re providing. If I’m nice, I’ll leave a post on the bug tracker that the install/getting started documentation didn’t work.
Forums serve no purpose anymore.
Right now, I’m going to stop using element/matrix again for the forseeable future because there are no communities with public rooms I’m interested in.
I think we’re talking about different things then
You are in a comment thread with the title “FLOSS communities right now”. I don’t know what you were expecting…
Forums serve no purpose anymore.
So programming.dev is useless and serves no purpose? A budding community must be online 24/7 to provide support because “I want the answer reasonably quickly”? Not even a budding community, imagine a community with many people and the chat moving forward quickly enough for your question to be out of scrolling view within minutes due to other discussions going on. Even in that scenario there is “no purpose” for a forum?
We’re talking about discord and why people use that and not other technology. 99% of the people on discord are not involved with FOSS, but they are what make the platform attractive.
programming.dev is useless and serves no purpose?
No, this instance is federated and not a traditional forum.
A budding community must be online 24/7 to provide support
No, it’s fine if that support is given via the git platform, and it’s also fine if it takes a while. And it’s also fine if the question goes unanswered.
imagine a community with many people and the chat moving forward quickly enough for your question to be out of scrolling view within minutes due to other discussions going on. Even in that scenario there is “no purpose” for a forum?
Yes. Because it is functionally no different than a forum main page where so many new topics get created that questions people don’t get to get buried. And also, I’ve never seen that happen with chats. What I have seen is that people didn’t have time or interest to answer my question. Which is fine because they owe me nothing. But a forum would not have “solved” that.
We’re talking about discord and why people use that and not other technology. 99% of the people on discord are not involved with FOSS, but they are what make the platform attractive.
Dunno what to tell you, but I made meme about FLOSS communities using discord and you’re talking to me about the other “99%”. Not my problem if you go off-topic.
Neither here nor there, but how typical is it to turn on notifications for a medium size discord server? Would you consider it?
I refuse to use Discord for many of the reasons listed in the other comments.
Lemmy communities with discord channels are really quite something.
Extra special.
Since we are on the topic of disliking Discord, what Matrix clients do you humans use? I tried both Element and Nheko (the latter of which isn’t electron based), and they both felt slow, clunky and unresponsive.
I’ve actually had good experiences with Element except on mobile. Are you talking about mobile?
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 do you assume only “kids” use discord?
I’d understand your reaction if this were a defense of outdated bullshit that looked like it was invented in the previous century and looked the part like IRC, mailinglists, phpbb, usenet, … But matrix is from the 2010s. It has threads, video calls, voice channels, emojis, emoji reactions, and other stuff I don’t use. It’s evolving. There are many clients (web, mobile, desktop, CLI) for many OSes, etc. The only thing it doesn’t have is VC seed money and large amounts of marketing.
But that’s not the point. The point is opensource projects using closed source products that are controlled by a single, commercial entity.
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.
That’s it: if they use discord these people (including me) won’t. “If you don’t use discord, you aren’t useful to opensource and want everyone else to do the work for you” is quite the take 😂
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.
L.O.L so the “previous generation” is just sitting around complaining? No work is ever done? The linux kernel is written by teenagers and 20 year olds, rust, PHP, javascript, W3C, firefox, conferences, etc. are all done by the next generation with absolutely no input from the previous generation (whatever that means)? At 40 people either drop dead or start shouting at clouds?
My sides.
Why is everyone hating Discord? It’s pretty neat platform when all the features used properly.
Maybe read a few of the responses?