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Can we just bring bitchx back?
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.
Or just don’t use Discord.
Can someone point to the reasons why such talented people use discord for their projects?
Convenience probably.
Email is inconvenient?
Yes.
The correct answer was forum.
I merely suggested an alternative to forums because everyone said signing up was inconvenient
You don’t need to sign up for forums for them to be searched through.
The point is that Discord is an information black hole. It’s all contained within the server, unindexed, private, hidden, and entirely gone if the server gets deleted.
You would need to sign up to be able to participate, which seems to be the pain point from the beginning. That was the reason why I suggested email threads akin to what Linus and Co use for Kernel development, since those can be searched no problem, whilst almost everyone has email IDs
I don’t think participation is the problem. If you think about it, you wouldn’t want just anyone to post something on a platform without first engaging in said platform. That can only have a neutral or negative effect. People asking stupid questions or people cursing out users. The act of signup ensures that the would-be poster has to signup first and rationalize their post during that process.
Therefor, the problem must be something else, it is the information gateoff (amongst other things) that makes Discord and similar apps unfavorable for community management and information distribution.
Or you can use Github SSO.
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 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.
There are ticketing bots, yes.
Because if I didn’t use Discord then I would be the only one in the community. Discord has a massive userbase especially with gamers. You give them a Discord link and there’s a decent chance you’ll see them join and post a message. Give them any other link and they’ll never make an account, they probably won’t even click the link to see it.
I provide links for Discord, Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, Steam group, and GitHub. I see lots of people come in on Discord, but 0 on the others except for myself lol.
Only the few actual contributors use the GitHub, don’t think I’ve ever seen a non-programmer submit a bug report on my GitHub or use the discussions or leave any comments on releases or anything.
I’m also on Moddb and NexusMods, got a few comments on Moddb, none on Nexusmods yet.
I also have Twitch and YouTube of course, I get small numbers of people commenting on those.
Nobody has even asked for any other type of community, Discord is just want they want. If I just wanted to talk to myself then I wouldn’t bother creating a community/forum at all.
Essentially, Discord is convenient for them.
TBH forums really are for the technical people, at least for the use cases I’m imagining. What incentive could we give that they join forums too?
It has pluralkit
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.
Use discourse instead? It’s really the best in my opinion.
you shouldn’t use discord at all … I think nowadays it’s the only app that uses plain text for all messages avoid discord
Discord is a disease.
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
Just do a matrix space
Does Matrix have pluralkit yet?
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
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
Meanwhile the OCaml IRC chat gets spam from Discord Crypto bots due to bridging with that proprietary platform.
Ok. And?
? What’s the difference between setting up a free forum (they’re everywhere) versus setting up Discord channels? It’s the exact same process.
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.
Running and managing a server takes a non-zero amount of work and is a commitment…if you’re actually serious about it.
That’s work wasted on sysadmining and not going into project development.
The discussion seems very muddled and opinionated ITT because I’m not even sure if you’re talking about a Discord Server or a forum/communication platform on a dedicated server. You might be able to slap together a Discord server faster, but the organizational power and not putting that extra work on users for Discord participation makes forum’s superior. Part of the project development is sysadmin. If it’s not, why take it FOSS at all? Discord is designed to take up your time, those pretty bots and “perks” keep you viewing. What could’ve been a well thought out message on a board with a reply now becomes 20+ texts which you’re stuck communicating on. Rinse and repeat every day, on a forum you simply link the previous conversation and you’re done.
I think it’s a neutral wash atm, Discord may be packaged better to be mainstream but it’s bloat all around with lots of negatives. Anyone saying Discord is better is just preference at this point, lots of counterintuitive comments like we need “real-time” communication but also anything else takes up project development, like Discord is some kind of time saver.
please list all your personal foss projects and discussion forums you’ve set up for them please. I would like to join them all.
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Libera.chat & OFTC exist for this purpose to do chat for open source without needing to set up a service.
Discord supports threaded topic based formats as well.
The reality is that for a lot of interactions, a live chat feels better than a forum post. You can very easily do both on discord, though.
It’s not perfect, but the alternatives that aren’t a whole project by themselves building a tool don’t have feature parity, or the user base.
Forums are not the same as real-time. And yes for most of the people using discord, forums wouldn’t cover the same niche.
Discourse has somewhat decent chat built in these days.
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.
My perspective is of a FOSS developer with multiple communities of thousands. If you can’t grasp it, that’s on you. It’s also why purity moralizing isn’t useful. I have only so much mental bandwidth to spend on organizing and self-hosting. If people are not stepping up to do the community management and infrastructure work, I will go with the past of least resistance.
If you can’t grasp it, that’s on you. It’s also why purity moralizing isn’t useful
oh ok, thanks for the clarification.
If people are not stepping up to do the community management and infrastructure work, I will go with the past of least resistance.
That’s basically it in a nut shell, path of least resistance. Doesn’t refute any claims made in the article or arguments presented here. Just a shame another company has a stranglehold on a whole category of services that have to be used to participate in society … while developing FOSS.
I don’t want real time. Does me no good in my time zone.
That’s what lemmy is for.
Great, use Matrix
I’ve used matrix. I am still using matrix. Just not for anything with a significant community
NixOS uses it, and it has the biggest repo out of any distro, so I’d consider it a significant community
Servers & clients use too many resources. Because of this, most have centralized around Matrix.org which kind defeats the purpose.
There’s a Mozilla home server as well, so federation is working.
Servers & clients use too many resources.
Didn’t XMPP solve that in, like, 1999?
(Really, what is with devs and nu-protocols these days? Back in my days you could run a webhost on a potato)
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.
I’d much rather have email for forums (Linux kernel style) than discord. I’ll even take IRC
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.
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…
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.
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
Took way too long to find a response from someone that actually does the work.
Most of this discussion is just the neuro spicy and olds angry that everyone doesn’t do it the “right” way.
I bet there are billions of hours wasted by people trying to make the perfect way to document and discuss stuff, while the answer is “it’s hard, tedious, and pretty manual work to create and manage good documentation”.
But nobody wants to do it because it has and always will suck.
I’m amused to know that I can look through old irc chats talking about how forums are the death of foss projects. Or mail lists complaining that everyone is using IRC wrong…
Sure, I literally do this for my work. How much are you offering me?
You’re not even worth responding seriously to.
I mean yeah I technically can’t offer the hosting without the authorization of my boss, but, ceteris paribus, how much are you offering?
I wouldn’t even take you if you paid me.
We’re on the same page then, as someone who says to go around involved in “multiple large Foss services” (no evidence to that) but that demands to be given freeloading on infrastructure by everyone else because otherwise Discord, well, is not really worth responding seriously to either.
Lol I don’t go around linking my credentials before I reply. Those who know, know. Those who don’t, check my profile, before insulting me,. And those who are useless to Foss , leave replies like yours.
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I have never used Discord and never will. No project has ever been able to change my stance on it.
Ahhh, yet another “Discord bad” post. Let’s see what alternatives they propose. After all, just telling me I made the wrong choice isn’t productive right?
There are great FOSS alternatives to Discord or Slack. SourceHut has been investing in IRC by building more accessible services like chat.sr.ht. Other great options include Matrix and Zulip. Please consider these services before you reach for their proprietary competitors.
Hahaha hahaha. Good fucking joke.
There’s a reason Discord is a million times more usable than all of those, and it’s not just network effect.
…
I’m well aware discord is going to enshittify itself eventually. It’s inevitable. However quite frankly as long as that hasn’t happened yet, it will remain by far the best option. I am not going to knee-cap my project by using a Discord “alternative” that barely works.
The day Discord dies will be a massive loss for the internet. That hasn’t happened yet. But it will. And it’s not going to be a loss just because of all the communities locked in on it. It’s going to be a loss because it’s the best damn community chat software and there’s no replacement.
I’ve used Zulip a couple times and thought it had some neat features and worked well enough. What’s so bad about it that justifies a reaction like that?
When the OP article was posted in 2021, Zulip didn’t even have public access as an option. This basically would make it a non-starter for what the article author suggests it for, as that’s worse (having to make an account everywhere) than Discord, Matrix or IRC.
To be honest I don’t have too much experience with Zulip or Rocket or all of these other new platforms, but my current default assumption is that they will always be designed foremost for organizations rather than the “I am in 20 communities I am somewhat active in[1]” like Discord. Matrix always seems like the better choice here… but it’s got its own issues.
I also don’t put much regard into the author’s word here because unironically suggesting IRC in 2021 means they’re off their rocker.
[1] I know you can only join like 100 servers without nitro ok.
There are a lot of people out there who uphold privacy and security as their own personal tenets. Many ToS or privacy policies do not meet their standard and thus, many tech workers or tech savvy hate things like discord. To each their own. Try to understand why and look beyond the “discord bad” to learn more.
I am fully aware why people go “Discord bad”. But weak arguments like “you miss out on all the contributors that have too bad of a PC to run Discord” do not outweigh the fact that Discord is a million times better for building a community. You’re suggesting to make the experience worse for 90% of people interested in a project to appease the <1%.
I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but it is.
I see what you’re saying. A similar comparison might be that that they don’t use discord just like how we are here on lemmy instead of reddit. I’m guessing reddit has the 90% of people still.
as long as that hasn’t happened yet
Hasn’t happened yet? Have you seen the new mobile app? What usability?
Hey, you’re not gonna get me to disagree the new app is terrible. Ain’t some sort of wild gotcha here.
The fact of the matter is that even with the frog partially boiled it’s still better than the alternative.
I’ve used Element and I actually prefer it over Discord. But I use Vim mode in Obsidian so I clearly don’t know squat about usability.
i agree with you that irc is not a good alternative, but [Matrix] is
I think you meant XMPP?
XMPP is dead and buried lets be honest
I mean, it hopefully wasn’t, it’s a much lighter, simpler and more efficient protocol and seems to stand as a perfect middle ground between IRC and nu-protocols.
in my opinion matrix is the protocol with the best change right now
I’ve evaluated Matrix multiple times, even tried to set up a homeserver once, and I can confidently say it’s an unusable mess compared to Discord.
If I wanted to set up a community like on Discord the experience would be worse than Discord 8-7 years ago. Is there a nice, GUI based system for managing permissions, administration and members in a group across 50 channels yet? No? Alright.
Also every time I try to set up Element on another device it takes like 5 attempts to get it to stop spouting errors about E2E stuff, and then still fails to decrypt messages.
it is a bit of a mess admittedly, but it is getting better, and irc is way worse in the user-friendlyness regard
The day Discord dies will be a massive loss for the internet.
What loss will that be? Discord’s value is the same as MSN Messenger - the history on Discord is already unusable for resolving issues, so when it’s gone people will just move to the next real-time communication platform that fills the same gap. It’s not a forum that people can search and find answers on years after discussions have happened and solutions have been posted.
See my other comments. There is still no suitable alternative to Discord that is as good at it for making communities people can easily access. The loss is not solely in the messages that get locked away (sure that sucks too). It’s the loss of the communities that can’t exist on platforms like Matrix or IRC.
Another community will take its place one day, so no real value will be lost.
Depends what you use it for, there’s some great servers for a lot of things. I don’t really care about platforms and basically use them all. Certain people really hate Discord but the alternatives don’t have many interesting things on them, and the people who use them aren’t a very diverse group. Checking all the right FOSS and feature boxes is nice but it’s not what actually makes a platform good to use.
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.
from the article:
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.
USE REVOLT INSTEAD
Fmhy used revolt as primary and even they had to fall back to discord
