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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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:
It’s confusing to me why people think discord is a good replacement for forums. It’s not even the same paradigm - it’s a chat program. Not being indexed by search engines is a major drawback as well.
Searching shit is pretty damn important and Discord isn't optimal, definitely. But somehow it's better at searching than Lemmy! Now how does that happen?
Lemmy is indexed so can be found on search engines while discord cant
For internal search without using a search engine discord has had way more devs, time and money thrown at it. Still would say its barely better than lemmy (just is cause of the time filters)
Because you can make a Discord server in like one click basically. That's it. Also they have forum channels now on so-called community servers.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying Discord is better. I still hate how often it is used for things it shouldn't be and I hate that it isn't indexed by search engines. I'm just explaining.
IT'S NOT A SERVER FFS
I feel you. I'm just using the terminology they do.
Exactly, it's a different paradigm and I don't want a forum.
I have no problems with discord as chat/supplement (and I remember setting up irc-discord bots in the past so you could totally have both) it's when discord is the only way to interact that it's annoying IMO. Part of the benefit of forums and git issues is searchability imo, can't really search discord externally for content and I definitely have found the search function annoying at best.
That said, video guides instead of manuals also annoys me, but that's a different issue.
We don't ask for forums because we don't want features of Discord. We ask for forums because we want features that Discord does not offer:
Note: Privacy is not what we need here. We need the solutions to open source problems to be public - especially, searchability.
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?
mumble is better for synchronous communication
Mumble needs a new client. As much as we, myself included, hate Electron apps, no normie is going to use Mumble when it looks the way that it does.
you can style it though
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.
The desired alternative is not Matrix simply because privacy-conscious, open-source ecosystem vs. proprietary solution is not the goal. Matrix would still generally be terrible for support. What people want is publicly searchable content that is ideally indexed like a wiki. Many will happily settle for issue boards or even forums though. Discord has pathetic search capabilities in comparison to any search engine and has no way to properly and publicly backup information that is posted to the platform. With a website of any kind, one could clone the site for mirroring or simply get a web archive service to crawl relevant sections.
Oh I agree, doesn't prevent me from being locked into certain communities on discord.
Just reading that is giving me a headache. I'm sure it's a good product but my god, I don't have time for that.
This user is being extremely pedantic, I recently moved my discord server to a matrix instance and I promise you, it is not that hard. Download Element, make an account in the app, log in. It takes no longer than any other service.
Wdym, that's 10 whole paragraphs with 27 whole sentences, what do I look like some kind of old person (like idk 29? Gross) who can read more than one line at a time? I, The TikTok generation, am incapable of sustaining concentration for more than 30sec at a time! It's too hard even though it explicitly lays out each step to make it easier and even includes a couple screenshots!
I know you're being sarcastic but think about it...it's not far from reality
Some real old-man-yells-at-cloud vibes coming from this comment
Matrix isn't competing with the experience of setting up another account on a different platform, with email, username, passwords, recovery key, display theme, notifications settings, content warnings, etc..
It's competing with being able to click on a link to join a subgroup of a social network that people are already a part of and already signed into.
Sorry, I'm a bit thick. What was confusing about the documentation?
Am I... A power user?