person backing up his car exploitable with the following four panels:
- person looking ahead. the text below him says, “wow a cool software. let’s check out the community”
- screenshot with the text
Community
The main place where the community gathers is our Discord server. Feel free to join there to ask questions, help out others, share cool things you created with Typst, or just to chat. - hand on gear shift zoomed in, switching to reverse
- person looking behind with the text “nevermind”.
Discord isn’t a forum and shouldn’t be used as one, but it’s a fantastic community chat room/hangout space. It’s my main hangout these days :-)
I understand the mentality but depending on the project it can be a struggle. If I was going to set up a brand new software project then sure, I’d be going all in on Fediverse and open source platforms. Forge? Codeberg. Chat? Matrix. Forum? Discourse/Flarum or maybe just Lemmy. Microblog? Mastodon.
However it isn’t easy to be that idealistic all the time and sometimes there is a degree of needing to do stuff against your ideals. I’m part of the Pulsar editor team which is a fork of the Atom text editor that got discontinued and we had to get things moving as quickly as possible in the time period that GitHub set until they pulled their services completely (along with their package backend). We needed the least friction possible to get things in motion and get as many people from the community involved as possible.
We needed GitHub - unsurprisingly Atom had close ties with GitHub anyway so moving away wasn’t ever going to be quite that simple and we would have needed to migrate an awful lot of repos within the org. The entire Atom package system relies on GitHub - people published their packages to
atom.iobut the actual code was on GitHub - something not fixable in the short period we had. We also needed it because this is where the Atom community was gathered around - at a period where we needed things to be as simple as possible for people to find out about and get involved with the project, moving to another forge may have just been the end of it.We also use GitHub Discussions for our forum - as we are already tied to GitHub for the time being we might as well use that platform as well - it is a lot easier than trying to maintain our own forums which wouldn’t be seeing that much activity. The team behind Zed found this out; they set up a Discourse forum and barely anyone used it so they just went back to GitHub Discussions.
We needed Discord because it was simply the most commonly used platform. Pulsar split off from Atom-community which was already on Discord so it was a natural move that meant little disruption or friction to anyone wanting to get involved with the new project. We have been looking to make a Matrix bridge but honestly there doesn’t seem to be all that much desire for it - we had some initial enthusiasm to create a Lemmy community but when we did it barely sees any activity (other than me posting updates there).
Would I love to move off of these platforms? Absolutely. However we simply have bigger fish to fry at this point in time for the project itself so it is going to be slow.
So whilst I love to be idealistic about what platforms we should be using I also heavily sympathise with those who use those “less than ideal” ones - there could well be some very good reasons behind it that might not be obvious to you.
I recently soured on Discord myself and here is my story. I have been part of the same private chatroom since 1999. We started on IRC as a Pokemon community and some of us just never left. We moved the chat off IRC to Discord in 2015? At first it was great, discord is miles ahead of IRC in terms of accessibility, now we were sharing photos and videos in chat and now we had it on our phones. We had seen myspace, facebook and countless other social networks go from good to terrible in our lifetimes and I guess we’ve always known the writing was on the wall for Discord. The end of last year we saw a few different things happen that really creeped me the fuck out.
- USA government has access to unencrypted push notifications on Android and iOS. Discord does not offer any encryption. Wired Article
- Discord is moderating private chats PC Gamer,
- Discord moderating policy is becoming more ideological and political. TechCrunch
- Tencent Ownership
- General fear that our 25 year long running chat will be sold as AI training data or other BS against our will.
So we moved to a Matrix instance. It was a struggle, some people just flat out refused and to this day (months later) will probably never come. The tech is I’d say, 90% on par with discord. Element (the main Matrix client) sucks at voice chat. It is embarrassingly bad, WHY ISNT THERE PUSH TO TALK? HELLO? Youtube videos won’t play in chat, which sucks too. Otherwise we gained encryption and a sense of independence I feel. Looking forward it is possible we will buy rack space for our own instance to further get off the grid. Definitely pros and cons overall but thats my experience. Anybody looking to try out Matrix hit me up you’re welcome on my server.
Edit: I completely forgot about the mobile app redesign what a shit show that was! The devs attitude during that is what lead me find Matrix in the first place.
I hate discord as much as anyone else but it’s where most people are already going to have an account. People don’t want to create brand new accounts to ask a single question. That question will just not get asked, The question could be asked on Reddit which may or may not end in a good result. It could take hours, weeks or even days. Discord is already there, and if a discord community is large enough you may get a fast and knowledgeable response. I can see why people like discord, I just don’t see any better alternatives or something that is as convenient.
If you ask me (you don’t, but anyway) I’d prefer creating a new account. Discord is a bit weird in a way it provides transparent account and I am annoyed by the fact that I have no control over it. Now that I think about it, I could just create several discord accounts and join servers with the appropriate one, i.e. work, gaming, personal, etc. But I would much rather prefer to have more flexibility with settings
Discord is a good service to engage with communities but what I hate most is when services, platforms and whatnot use Discord as their primary means of official communication like for announcements.
Having to be in a lot of servers purely to get announcements results in an already limited total sever count that one can join to be even more limited.
Everyone in this comment section is yelling about how bad discord is, telling people to use forums or matrix instead. No one is asking “why?”. Why aren’t people using forums or matrix? Because the path to user growth isn’t guilting people into the ‘morally correct’ choice, it’s making a product they want to use.
Why are small communities using discord over forums? Well, we’re talking about small projects, hobbies, and volunteer work. Hosting a forum costs both time and money - renting server space and configuring/managing both the forum and the server. Making a discord channel is instant and free. You want your favorite project to have a forum? Then take up the mantle of hosting and maintaining it yourself. You want all projects to use a forum? Develop a forum system that you absorb the hosting costs for. Neither of these exist, so communities use discord.
Why are small communities using discord over matrix? I’m in my 30s, I spend all day on my PC, I’ve taken a couple years of college courses in programming. Figuring out matrix was annoying for me. I had to figure out which client program to use, I had to navigate the less-than-ideal way of joining servers, and there was a difficulty curve for understanding the program’s features and how to use it. It wasn’t impossible, but it took effort. Discord doesn’t. For every step of friction, a product will bleed users. Matrix is cumbersome to set up and use, and it’s copying something that already exists and does it better for the end-user experience. It shouldn’t be surprising that people prefer discord. Want that to change? Start contributing code to matrix and refine the user on-boarding process.
Instead of stating opinions, ask questions. That’s how things get changed. No amount of moral grandstanding will change end-users, no matter how correct you might be.
Matrix was confusing. Lemmy wasn’t. That should say something because Lemmy is already considered confusing by a lot of people.
Honestly the only confusing part for me now is choosing the right instance. This one thing is quite difficult
I think in a weird way one of the problems is the feeling that you have to get it right the first time. I think we need to obviously make it wayyyy easier and less intimidating for people to find instances to sign up at that are a good fit for them, but also I think we just need to send way more of a “get it wrong, treat your first account as just a fun diversion, don’t feel like you need to find the perfect home immediately” vibe. Not every social media account needs to be a permanent investment, it can just be a momentary passing version of yourself along your way from one place to another.
I think a lot of the subconscious anxiety is about trying to nab the handle you like to use on a popular up and coming social network before everyone else jumps on and takes your precious name… but there is no rush here. Your handle will likely sit untaken on more fediverse servers than you can shake a stick at, indefinitely.
But we need to convince people to care about freedom too. There will always be some excuse to not use the freedom respecting alternative. Look at Reddit users. They could all join us here and change something, but they don’t care. Same with Twitter, Windows, etc. It’s always difficult, it’s always annoying. But if we spread the message and help people with their issues, we can convince at least some of them.
Software takes time to improve. Matrix is a complicated project and unlike Discord it’s also federated. It’s possible that some things will always be harder with Matrix. But even if it improves a lot (which will probably take years), people might find other excuses to not use it. For example Discord might still be more popular.
I know Matrix takes effort to use. You have to understand what a homeserver is, how fediverse works, etc. I had to go through even more effort to set up my own server. It was difficult and took a lot of time of reading the documentation and tutorials. Some of the problems I had were ridiculous. Then to get people to use my server, I had to guide them step by step on how to create an account, because you can’t just send them an invite link.
But we can’t just give up on our freedom and privacy. We are aware of Matrix’s issues and they won’t be fixed in a month or even a year. In the future Discord will have even more users and it will be even harder to escape it. So there is no reason to wait, we have to fight this battle now. This is the right thing to do.
But we need to convince people to care about freedom too. There will always be some excuse to not use the freedom respecting alternative. Look at Reddit users. They could all join us here and change something, but they don’t care. Same with Twitter, Windows, etc. It’s always difficult, it’s always annoying. But if we spread the message and help people with their issues, we can convince at least some of them…
….But we can’t just give up on our freedom and privacy. We are aware of Matrix’s issues and they won’t be fixed in a month or even a year. In the future Discord will have even more users and it will be even harder to escape it. So there is no reason to wait, we have to fight this battle now. This is the right thing to do.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and Ian starting to feel like the situation we are in feels impossible partially because of the way we have let capitalism define what we call “friction” in apps.
Friction as a concept can do a lot of good in getting developers to be laser focused on how it actually feels to use a software as a human, but also… does Lemmy cause “friction” for new users because they simply cannot physically imagine a social network outside the context of a massive corporation?
Discord is undoubtedly very slick to use but no one can convince me that Discord, Bluesky, Threads etc… don’t have a huge advantage in being low “friction” from being imaginable by the average person.
We need to start differentiating between the shitty kind of friction that needlessly pushes away users and frustrates them and generative friction where the difficulty of getting someone to use something is an expression of traction where a broader invitation to think more radically about what is possible in community organization can happen. Seen from this light onboarding someone onto Lemmy is a million times harder than onboarding someone onto Discord, but that is because onboarding someone onto Lemmy is actually doing something far more difficult and meaningful.
Getting someone to try Lemmy who before wouldn’t have tried it (or hadn’t even heard of it) expands the realm of what is possible in that person’s mind. It isn’t fair to expect that to magically happen with less friction than shuffling people onto yet another corporate social media service in the honeymoon phase where there aren’t many ads and things are artificially cheap…. If the situation is the same, and your onboarding has done no work on the system, it damn well better be easy.
I mean, not all books should be difficult or challenging works of literature, but if your objective is to be genuinely changed by a book than you can’t really expect to get there without friction between you and the book. A frictionless book that just glides through you has no purchase to enact a genuine change in the fabric of your mind.
Should we not think of social media community building in a similar light? Yes there are annoying works of literature that seem purposefully obtuse (bad friction) but by the same token it is the challenging books that actually transform our minds.
Even if that one person you get to try Lemmy only tries it briefly and then just drifts off, you have fundamentally changed what that person thinks can be possible in the realm of online communities and that is no small victory even if it is harder to quantify.
The problem is that people don’t care about freedom, security or privacy. If they cared, they would only choose software that gives them those things. They would use Free Software. Even when it’s not always convenient.
So the issue here is not capitalism, but non-free proprietary software, because it makes it easy to abuse users. Unfortunately most people haven’t even heard of Free Software. They don’t realise that they deserve certain rights when using computers. I think if more people were familiar with the Free Software movement, they would think differently and they would demand freedom. Not all Lemmy users have heard of Free Software, but many of us understand that freedom is important. So we use it, even though it’s not convenient and the UI sucks.
We are capable of competing with corporations and often making better software that them, but that’s not enough. If people don’t understand the issues we are trying to solve, they will just use whatever new shiny app that comes out next. That’s why some Twitter users migrated to Bluesky and Threads. They don’t understand that after a while they will be abused the same way as before.
Even if we make Matrix way better, Discord users will still use Discord, because to them everything is fine and there is no reason to switch. Learning to use something new is always inconvenient. I doubt that all Windows users are unable to switch to GNU/Linux. They just don’t think it’s worth the effort, because to them there is nothing wrong. Being spied on and restricted is ok as long as all their proprietary games work.
So the issue here is not capitalism, but non-free proprietary software, because it makes it easy to abuse users. Unfortunately most people haven’t even heard of Free Software. They don’t realise that they deserve certain rights when using computers. I think if more people were familiar with the Free Software movement, they would think differently and they would demand freedom. Not all Lemmy users have heard of Free Software, but many of us understand that freedom is important. So we use it, even though it’s not convenient and the UI sucks.
We are capable of competing with corporations and often making better software that them, but that’s not enough. If people don’t understand the issues we are trying to solve, they will just use whatever new shiny app that comes out next. That’s why some Twitter users migrated to Bluesky and Threads. They don’t understand that after a while they will be abused the same way as before.
The reason people don’t understand the issues you are trying to solve is because yall that think like this in the free software movement won’t talk about the issues in terms of a broader political context that is actually relevant to normal people, in a language they are going to understand. Too many prominent people in FOSS just want to create these weird libertarian fantasies centered on technical problems and technical solutions without stepping back and recognizing the inherently socialist thrust of free software and the power that comes from speaking directly to the broader public about software in those terms.
So long as libertarian style ideology in FOSS fumbles around with trying to reinvent the wheel from first principles while socialists, unions and leftists exasperatedly gesture at the already existing wheels all around them, FOSS will always be a marginal movement of hobbyists without real political power to enact change in the realm of software and improve the lives of everybody not just extremely technologically literate people.
If you try to sell the FOSS movement like you are, as a clever technical licensing method to give users more freedom over how they use their particular niche software, and don’t connect these struggles in software to a broader class struggle or a related critique of why capitalism is so awful at creating tools and utilities we can rely on, than FOSS will always be an obscure island the broader public could care less about.
I don’t understand what fantasies you are talking about. We just want people to have freedom when using computers. Freedom that they deserve and that nobody should be able to take away from them. As a side effect we also get privacy and security and a society that works together to achieve common goals in a way that benefits us all. Those problems affect everyone who uses a computer.
The Free Software movement is 40 years old and it has already changed the world. It benefits everyone, not just technical people. Are you gonna tell me that all users of Firefox, Libre Office, Gimp, Matrix or Signal are only technical people? You are talking to me right now using Free Software and I’m responding to you on my fully Free Software operating system.
Free Software is not a licensing method. Software has to use licenses, because that’s how copyright works. It doesn’t give users any rights by default. Software should be free (as in freedom - we are not talking about price) by default, but it isn’t, so we have to use licenses. The Free Software that we use today was created under capitalism, so I don’t see how capitalism prevents us from making useful software and working together on improving it. There are also many developers and companies that sell Free Software (they make commercial programs).
Making a discord channel is instant and free
This is because discord is close to the top of the enshittification funnel.
It’s like you didn’t even read his comment fully and only made it halfway through the first paragraph.
Honestly a lemmy community wouldn’t be a bad format. It’s basically a forum
There have been projects that skin Lemmy to be like a forum, based on phpBB code if I recall. Don’t think the projects are active though.
Normally I’d say that reddit/lemmy are poor choices for a community - but if the competitor is a live-chat like discord? Yeah. Lemmy is better.
Project leads would just need to make sure to direct users straight to a specific instance that allows instant/unmoderated sign-ups, or else that element of friction will occur – and certainly not start the whole “there’s many instances, pick the one that’s right for you!” spiel, or users will give up immediately. I thought similarly about matrix - on-boarding users to a matrix community would be helped by explicitly writing a guide for them to do so, but then we’re back to step 1, where making a discord channel is quicker than writing instructions.
Lemmy seems better for asking questions/problem solving, but it doesn’t seem as good for growing a community or more casual chatting about a project because discord has that social aspect and demands much less effort for each ‘post’.
Technically it is ActivityPub actor
A Lemmy community would be 1000x better than a discord community and there’s literally thousands of servers where you can create one of those.
i feel like discord is much better at fostering a community and less good at being a resource or repository of information. like in a discord you talk directly to individuals so you get to know them and become friends. if you are new you can just pop in and say hi and start making friends, it’s very organic. other platforms are much worse at this. I feel this is a big reason people use it.
To add, I have seen informative discords before, but it requires a dedicated mod team to organize the channels into read only, informative posts.
Definitely works 1000x better as a community chat though.
You could start a Lemmy community, subreddit, even a mastodon or Twitter account with the same investment and effort.
Also people don’t want to make a new account to ask one question. Discord let’s you pop into a server, ask a question, and leave with ease.
Until this is enabled in some other platform, people won’t switch away from Reddit/Lemmy and discord. People don’t want to make accounts and that’s why these services took over.
Hmm, now I wonder why lemmy does not have this “temporary user” kind of thing, where you can join with simpler form only to participate once (with restrictions, ofc)
Some speculation on my part:
- There are other higher priority items for the developers.
- It’s open to abuse, even with restrictions, and a restricted guest account may create a bad impression if the restrictions are poorly communicated (and considering some basic features of Lemmy as-is struggle with being communicated, this is a high probability).
- Larger/more active servers/communities (depending on implementation) may simply disable the feature altogether or further limit it due to 2.
Despite what @[email protected] says, 3 (or variations on it) has become more common across some larger/more active Discord servers simply because communities understandably don’t want to deal with drop-in trolls or raids, meaning some of them go so far as to temporarily limit or add small hurdles for people even with accounts.
You can of course still find many Discord servers that don’t, which is among the reasons it remains so popular, but it’s not as sure of a thing as it was in the past.
I see. Then I guess lemmy’s current approach is reasonable. I do recall most discord servers does have e.g. some period until being able to post something.
It’s actually a misunderstanding of what I was saying. Lemmy already has this functionality. I use my normal account to ask a question in a community I’m not normally apart of. In the forum days I’d need to make an account for e.g. a power tool forum if I had a question.
Discord is the same. I use my normal account to join a server, ask a question, then leave after getting the answer. No temporary account needed.
I must’ve been more tired than I realized and didn’t catch that properly, sorry about that! I was also more focused on the other person’s question and taking it more literally as in the pseudo-guest feature of Discord, which enables you to pop in and ask without a full account.
Nah you’re good. No worries. I actually didn’t know that pseudo guest even existed
You can, you just comment in a community you’re not subscribed to, same as Reddit.
On Reddit / Lemmy I just post to the power tools subreddit if I have a question. But in the forum days I’d need to find a power tool forum, make an account, post, remember to check for answers outside of my daily browsing, then never use the forum again.
I think another hinderance is that the people asking questions get ignored, dismissed or shouted at, even if they tried whatever it was they tried. The Linux community doesn’t do this as much when someone who tried Linux runs back to Windows, thankfully, but if you’re a Chromium user who tried Firefox, or a Bluesky user who tried fedi, and found that the former of those was better for your needs, prepare to have angry nerds flaming you for your blasphemous act.
Or just create a subreddit lol, beats Discord
Figuring out matrix was annoying for me. I had to figure out which client program to use, I had to navigate the less-than-ideal way of joining servers, and there was a difficulty curve for understanding the program’s features and how to use it. It wasn’t impossible, but it took effort
I went through the same effort and all I got for my troubles was a few dead chatrooms where what little discussion exists is purely about distros.
The barrier to entry filtered out everyone else.
I personally don’t mind Discord. I do in fact like it. (If you want to convince me otherwise, please don’t)
But I really hate that OSS uses discord for their lack of documentation. I understand that documentation is hard and boring to create, but I don’t want to go on some discord to ask a bunch of questions that thousands of others have before. Instead I will try and find something using search engines and I will read the open and closed issues. If I don’t find anything, I give up on the software.
You ditch discord because it’s bad for organizing projects
I ditched discord because it’s proprietary
We are not the same
Let’s pretend “a software” doesn’t sound as stupid as “a traffic”.
Worst example I’ve ever seen is 3dVista - a fucking facebook group. Discord would have been amazing in comparison.
Had to see it to believe it. On their website, under Support > Forum, you’re redirected to their Facebook group. This is criminal.
Ditchcord!
What are the preferred alternatives?
Mine is probably matrix, mostly because I can use the same account everywhere, but it also feels like there’s a lot of gotchas and all the phone apps are kinda meh each in their own unique way.
matrix is adding sliding-sync functionality which is supposed to dramatically reduce startup times. you can try element x and see the difference.
I’m a bit annoyed with element X tbh, my home server only has sso logins, but they don’t support that and the error message doesn’t explain this at all, which means it’s up to me to figure out if I’m doing it wrong, my home server is doing something wrong, or the app is just bad at communicating errors.
Personally, I’d prefer that projects use forums for community discussions rather than realtime chat platforms like Discord or Matrix. I think the bigger problem of projects using Discord is not that it’s closed source, but rather that it makes it difficult to search (since no indexing by search engines) and the format deprioritizes having discussion on a topic over a long period of time. Since Matrix is also intended for chat, it has these same issues (though at least you can preview a room without making an account).
I agree with you, but I also think people find Discord convenient because it’s just 1 account and free to use.
I wonder if Lemmy and the rest of the fediverse can work here, or just anything where smaller free projects don’t necessarily have to pay for and maintain their own community infrastructure, and still allow users to jump around without getting too locked in.
Yeah I think Lemmy would actually work pretty reasonably. It reminds me of how lots of software and projects have Reddit communities. I agree that being able to share 1 account over many services, and especially not having to pay for infrastructure is something that drives discord use over forum-based platforms.
Revolt looks promising: https://revolt.chat/
Wow another discord bad thread. Daring today aren’t we?
It rwally does suck though
because it is?! if your goal is to have a non-indeaxable support forum, at least use matrix which is far far better than the horse manure that discord is.
Ah yes let me switch to a chatting app that is missing half the features from discord with a worse UI. Epic!
Features such as being locked in to a bloated proprietary client that doesn’t even respect your date format settings? Or having to give your phone number to a shady company?
Meanwhile Discord misses half the features Matrix has. It’s almost as if they’re different projects with similar, but different goals.
One tries to be a flexible, interoperable, and secure protocol for communication, that’s free for anyone to implement and use…
The other is a for-profit company that cherishes its centralized nature and far reaching control, allowing them to sell you random bells and whistles, collect your data unobstructed, and lure in investors and advertisers.
One tries to be a flexible, interoperable, and secure protocol for communication, that’s free for anyone to implement and use…
The other is a for-profit company that cherishes its centralized nature and far reaching control, allowing them to sell you random bells and whistles, collect your data unobstructed, and lure in investors and advertisers.
Barely anyone cares about any of this. This stuff will never outweigh the features and QoL Discord has over everything else.
I’m at a point where I wish our support forum was at least on Discord, the majority of my community is pretty old but it spans down into a handful of Gen Z with more Millennials and Z coming in as the Boomers get out. Even so the main forum is a Facebook page. Splinter groups using WhatsApp, Signal and iMessage. It’s not like the older gen is technically inept, for the most part, it’s just they’re entrenched and moving them would take a massive, easy to use software that is far superior to FB’s viability. Personally using Discord and it’s seamless jump from PC-Laptop-Phone is nice, admittedly I’m in the same mindset of those in my groups on FB as I haven’t tried anything else.
I finally got our drone community on discord but now they are all gamers and don’t want to talk about drones anymore
It’s become the new “DAE Win 11 bad?”
Know any good Autistic communities in Matrix? I’m in the market, I love mine but it’s in Discord and they ain’t moving.
There’s this stickied post in an autism community: https://lemmy.world/post/11077933
Hope that helps.Thank you!
I think most of the problematic toxic mods from Reddit have started infecting Discord too. It’s been getting worse lately.
Don’t worry, most Discord servers are already infected with problematic toxic mods from Twitter.
Seems like a recipe for “drama”
