11mo ago

FLOSS communities right now

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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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:
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.

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 would rather be pen pals than use discord
- So you are suggesting forum software that supports single sign-on?
  We are talking about an open source project, not a high school reunion. I don't want to hang out with people, I want to have a discussion about a focused topic.
  I want to ask a question and get an answer. If the question is not one that anyone online can currently answer, I want to be able to tell at a glance if anyone has talked about my question. If I don't understand the answer, I want to ask a follow up question.
  In the evening, I want to be able to take a look at new posts from that day, grouped by topic, to see if there is anything I find interesting or can weight in on.
  With Discord (or any real time chat), it is hard to follow a single topic when more than one is being discussed. It is doubly hard to do so after the fact. I am aware that Discord has a forum feature. I have only seen one server ever enable it and no one posts anything to it.
  
  Can't you do everything you've listed on github though? Report bugs on issues tab, ask questions on discussions tab, following up is easy. Everything is also indexed by search engines and can be looked up later on.
  
  I know, but this thread is about projects that don't want to use GitHub as the center of discussion and use Discord instead. The Discussion tab need to be enabled.
- The most important downside for me is: I'm looking for some information about an issue I'm having or how to install or configure something and I find none. Because all the people talk behind closed doors and googling etc doesn't help any more. Only solution is to join every Discord and platform before you start using your software and scrolling trough pages of chat messages.
  I'd rather google for an error message and then be directed directly to an issue tracker where people discussed that specific problem.
  
  Yep, that's exactly why in the end of my comment I say that I currently believe a combination of Github+Discord to be best. Github for bug reporting, Discord if you want to socialize with the community, that's what it does best
  
  I'm somewhat fine with that. But you absolutely have to tell people to keep the discussions to random chatter and the absolute minimum then. (And internal talk maybe, if that's of no interest to the public. Once it gets important or someone asks for advice that could be beneficial to others, the discussion on Discord needs to be interrupted and switch platforms. Or be copied to a Wiki after the fact.
- Mattermost
- Spaces have been a thing for over 2 years now.
  
  Spaces are just group chats in a trenchcoat
  
  so are Discord's "servers".
  
  Not really. They don't show up in your dms, they don't take 1 minutes to join after clicking the "join" button, they have great permission management.
- Their licence grants intellectual rights to anything you give them. So there's that.
- I could accept discord if it has threads. But it’s all just such a jumble.
  
  Discord has threads. You just need to get people to use them
  
  Discord does have threads. I think the server admin has to enable them though. In rooms where it's enabled, you can choose to post a thread or a regular message, and people can create a thread by replying to a regular message and choosing the option to make it a thread.
  
  Ok, fair. I guess this is an issue in the discords I frequent then. I’ve never seen threads used in anger.

428 comments