1y ago

Why projects start with a Discord and not an alternative - Comment found on Mastodon

Original comment, copy-pasted for convenience:

why do so many projects start with a discord and not with a wiki, or github, or web presence?

simply, discord is the fastest, most frictionless way to do the following:

garner a community of support ensuring that there is an audience for the project
provide access to idea validation for the creators of that project. rapid feedback for their project = rapid progress
provide the easy creation of (not necessarily accessible nor good, but) quick resources for the project

forums, websites, hell even github can only hope to match the value proposition of discord, and it's something people fail to take into account when they criticise the move to discord as a file host/forum/wiki/project website

if you want people to make a file host/forum/wiki/project website, they're directly competing with the frictionless, fast, yet unsustainable and frankly web-shit discord. the fast, frictionless nature is enough for people to use and accept, hell, even to make infrastructural to their project

a platform that could create a non-webshit, easy way to provide the value that discord provides, all while being just as fast and frictionless if not faster/more lubricated, would absolutely blow discord out the water

I am a sysadmin and my level of tech friction tolerance is different from the people referenced here leading projects, but I'd like to gather opinions on this, the fact that this regularly happens as described suggests there's a whole lot of truth to it, but i feel like it's overstating the friction, am i wrong here?

71 comments

If people need to make an account, I'd bet your engagement drops at least 90%. That's the friction they mean.
- That was my thinking when reading the above - Discord's big advantage is numbers, a lot of people will be on Discord already so getting them to sign up is a really low bar. Sign-up is also simple (compared to federated options).
  We're moving instance and I set up a Matrix space as a fallback in case the current one goes down and as a way to have secure private messaging. We did discuss setting up a Discord channel and a Matrix bridge (as lemmy.world have done) but it may not currently be worth it as public discussion can shift to the new instance. However, if that wasn't the case then it's something we'd definitely do.
  As Lemmy integrates nicely with Matrix, I'd like to think that future solutions would involve a Lemmy instance as as public web-friendly forum (especially if we can get wikis built in) with Matrix for secure and private discussion and possibly a bridge to Discord (and other messaging platforms) to make it easy for people to join in there.
  
  How do you see Matrix integrating with Lemmy? They don't seem compatible in any way.
- I mean with IRC you can just click a link and automatically connect to a server and start talking to people. You just have to pick a nickname.
  Somehow people still don't use it so there's clearly more to that.
  
  The "somehow" is because IRC is extremely bare bones. It doesn't stand up to modern expectations of what chat software does. Plus accounts aren't all a bad thing. Anti-spam is vital for the internet today, as is rigid ways of preventing impersonation. IRC is a relic of a simpler era.
- @conciselyverbose You could still have content available publicly, but only interaction to be doable by using an account. You could still search for your problem this way for example
  @jherazob

I sure Discord is handy and reduces friction, for development, but when it's used as a substitute for a support forum for paid products, it's atrocious. (not a knock on Discord, but certainly a knock on companies that choose the wrong tool for support).

The main reason projects use it is because a plurality of people already have a discord account, and you don’t need to keep making a new account for every new forum or wiki you want to comment on, read, or post to. I don’t think this is just an issue of “critical mass” ether. Lot of people don’t really want to be handing information to every project they interact with, nor do people want to learn 30 different UIs and quirks.
It’s nature as a chat/call system first has it’s benefits in the form of printed community discussion. People feel like they’re part of a community more easily than on traditional forums and wikis, it’s just more conversational.
It’s far from a good wiki or forum, in fact it is basically non-functional as a wiki, but, as a forum and tech support line, it does work, largely buoyed by the good search function.
It’s open ended enough in it’s functionality, and enough people already know how to use plugins and bots for it, that a lot of it’s short comings can be paved over or overlooked.
It’s bloated and messy and the back end is… yah, and it’s UI and formatting are not well suited for certain tasks. But the average person is far more likely to actually use it. With a single link anyone who already has a discord account can get access to a community, post, comment, and search previous comments and questions. Not to mention that it’s easier to keep track of projects you’re interested in if they’re all centralized on a single platform.
- largely buoyed by the good search function
  ???
  Good search function? On Discord? Since when?
  I have never encountered a Discord server that is useful for anything except live chat and automated notifications. Which is not an indictment of Discord; I mean, that's what it's for, and it's pretty good at it at small-medium scales.
  I use Discord on a daily basis, but when I encounter a project that uses Discord, I just do not engage with it at this point. It's always a mess. Every server has its own arcane rules and mechanisms to access channels, usually with some bot commands that I need to dig through docs to learn. I don't consider it "low friction" at all, even as someone who's been using Discord for many years and always has it open.
  
  I've seen discord communities that work like this:
  Person posts a question in the main chat, people discuss it and reach a resolution, a mod, bot or sometimes the op copies the question, helpful troubleshooting and the eventual answer into a separate channel (usually one of many sorted by topic) which only sees those sorts of posts and acts as a fairly searchable faq.
  That format, while labour's intensive, seems pretty effective and low friction (for a user) to me. I'm not saying it's the best tool for job, but it works and is popular which is what really matters.
  
  I've had an impressively easy time finding particular messages as long as I had a decent idea of what servers it might have been in and at least one of the following:
  Who said it
  To whom it was said
  At least a word that was likely said
  Which has been way better than most other things I've bothered to search through like Reddit, Beehaw, or Mastodon (especially when it was limited entirely to hashtags). Lord help me if I want to find a particular post or comment on TikTok or Youtube.
  
  Admittedly the only projects I’ve ever used it with were games or mods for games, but I’ve never had issue finding what I need using the search function, it’s got an ok set of search boolean, and with that I can pretty easily skim all the channels or with in a specific channel for certain things or discussions.
  
  I like being able to filter for messages associated with particular users, messages with particular attachments or embeds, and messages before/after specific dates. I like that and you can't get that as easily anywhere else that I can think of off the top of my head (not Google, anyway).
- This is what I hate about Discord. It's another account. If you don't have Discord (or do, but would rather not tie all your identities together), you need to register. What I like about Matrix is any Matrix home server can join, and it can then be used to access bridged Discord rooms, the problem of course being that many projects don't bridge to Matrix.
  
  I know before you didn't need an account but maybe you do now?

For me personally the shitty UI of discord causes so much friction that I'll never interact with discord ever again, unless I can reach it via some gateway from some of the messaging systems I use - which so far doesn't happen as I'd need to log in to discord to configure the gateway. I tried that once, never again.
- what don't you like about the Discord UI?
  
  It is a web designers masturbation phantasy - fancy looking, but convoluted and impractical.

Wait, starting up projects on Discord is a thing?
Edit: Ahem... who on the hell expects wiki / github to gather audience!? Did I trip into a different universe?
- For some folks, audience is everything.
- I’ve been fulltime I n the crypto industry for a couple years now. Discord and Telegram groups are project homes. Twitter, or “CT” for “Crypto Twitter” is the public square.
  It’s a really weird and insanely fast paced industry full of some fun characters and clowns.

Personally, if I see a software project on Discord, I nope out. I have made very few exceptions and every time I have come to the conclusion that it is not worth it. Discord isn't really good for anything other than what it was designed for: Persistent IRC - plus a voice chat option. It's perfectly fine to chat with a bunch of friends and play some games together. But that is about it.
It is terrible for tracking subjects, for finding information, for storing information, and for engaging in chats across more than one instance. It is unintuitive to navigate, and while they have made improvements, it is up to the user to make a server bearable to navigate by hiding the flood of channels that the average instance contains. Even so, Discord will still try to show you things you have explicitly disabled as a "suggestion". Discord is bloody intolerable.
So yes, you may grow a community quickly because the people who already use Discord can jump on there. You will, however, lose a bunch of users wiling and able to use a better option who are, most likely, more experienced web users - and sick of the Discord bullshit. While this certainly includes me, I have seen the same sentiment again and again in my feeds. Power users tend to loathe Discord.

One big plus for Discord is that you can essentially lock it down to people who are interested in your project, instead of the entire public to browse. This hurts searching for answers, but helps immensely for projects that can be taken down like romhacks and speed running tools for example
- Advantage over what alternatives that can't be locked down?
  
  Forums, websites, and Github as mentioned in the OP. All those are publicly searchable and prime targets for takedown requests once they get big enough

Most of the sysadmins I know have incredibly high tolerances for friction, but ridiculously low tolerances for repetitive tasks. Which I think is a bit ironic.
I’m not sure this crowd will be representative in terms of which tools and services they use (or prefer to use).

I've been working on a Conan exiles rp server for the past 9 months that automates a lot of the bookkeeping and game logic that's usually relegated to humans and rule sets. In my experience with other servers, an excessive use of staff discretion leads to nepotism and bias or at the very least ample opportunity for its appearance.
A big part of automating some of these tasks is enabled by the use of webhooks. Rather than track every player character's information in a ticket that the user needs to submit, a bunch of scripts strapped to NPCs post the information via webhooks to a discord channel that's only viewable to those with the appropriate rank.
Without easy webhook integration, this wouldn't be possible. Never mind that all those tickets i was just talking about are made, organized, and recorded via discord bot.
A well set up discord server can be a huge boon to a project, especially if it's public-facing in any way. For game servers or mods it's especially useful, because the chance of your target users having it is very high.
Discord has experienced a little enshittification, but it's largely been inconsequential so far. Meanwhile, Matrix is cool but nobody has it and it doesn't have the same tools. Even with the cross-posting there's a need to risk your discord account or server and it isn't fully integrated.
But like, discord has aaaalll this community management and automation stuff built around it, most of which is pretty intuitive and well supported. That's hard to compete with.

It absolutely is a thing. Network effect matters. Usability matters. Open source/community solutions usually lack that (and the lack of familiarity makes it worse).
- Discord's usability is terrible for Open source communities. It never gave me the impression that it was designed for anything more than game chat rooms. The topic separation and discoverability is poor. Even Zulip does a much better job at it.
  Open source maintainers always ask you to search the bug tracker/forums before asking a question. The same maintainers make their own life hard when they choose Discord, because the history is simply a black hole as far as search engines are concerned. Just use a discourse forum or something similar.

garner a community of support ensuring that there is an audience for the project
I'm sure this is true for certain kinds of communities. Personally I've never been tempted to try using Discord, because any project that uses it is obviously built by and for people with (imo) very poor taste in technology.

The genie is out of the bottle and discord is unfortunately here to stay for the foreseeable future. What we need are good reliable tools to export all this data to an external service / knowledge base. At least that way they could be picked up by web search and be accessible without a discord account one day down the line when discord goes to shit.
- i'm surprised discord has managed to last this long without turning to shit.
  seriously, it's 2023 and the service is still free without ads. their entire revenue stream is built on people subscribing to nitro.
  i hope it stays like this but enshittification feels inevitable these days.
  
  without ads.
  only if you have a very strict definition of Ad
  
  I became a Nitro subscriber pretty early specifically because I hope it helps them not enshittify their product… :(

When someone posts on Discord, they will often get an answer within seconds. I don't recommend or use Discord, however I absolutely do recommend every project use a realtime chat service of some kind.
With GitHub or a forum it's likely to be overnight if you get a response at all. That fundamentally changes the type of content people are willing to post.
Projects should eventually have a website and an issue tracker and a chat service and an email address and a mastodon account. But you don't need to create all of them at once...
And a chat is always where I start. In fact I usually start discussing my idea in a chat room of some kind before I've even decided to start work on the project at all. 99% of the time the discussion ends with me deciding it's not a good idea.
- Discord, they will often get an answer within seconds.
  That's what IRC used to be for. I was gonna say it was annoying to get something like mIRC installed and set up, but that's not even true since there are plenty of one click web clients. My subreddit used to have a channel on a reddit-affiliated IRC server and we provided a link to our IRC channel. Don't even have to register a username on most servers to join a channel and idle.
  Being text only, however, means no reactions emojis and preview of images and videos and all that. Which I can understand be kinda annoying these days. Plus servers didn't necessarily talk to each other. There wasn't/isn't federation, or if there is, most servers are not federated. But if you're just dropping in for a one-off question, that shouldnt' matter.
  
  No reactions, emojis, previews of images and videos? Sounds like heaven.

Network effects have always been strong with online services.
- It’s also a matter of retention rate. I might make a new account on a forum and make one post or comment, but what are the chances I come back to the forum or build community there after I close out the page?
  With discord, previous communities you’ve interacted with are stickied to the side and thus get totally forgotten about less easily.
  
  I feel its the reverse, most people I know on discord mute most of the discord servers they are in. I put most of the discord servers I'm in into folders so that its easier to find the people I actually talk to and ignore all of the ones I joined for asking questions or downloading files.
  
  Good point. The single account for multiple "servers" contributes to that as well.

@jherazob I don't get the comment about Discord being frictionless, at least for anyone who values their privacy and/or doesn't want to be tracked. I have tried several times to sign up for Discord using a desktop computer (I am old; I don't use a mobile phone for interacting with social media because it is too difficult to type a message on those things) and every single time it has demanded a phone number, which is a big NO for me. I've never had a working Discord account because of that damn phone number thing; perhaps it does not require that from everyone but it always has for me even when I've had an invite code for some community.
But also, I just have to say that I am really turned off by the weird cartoony artwork on that site. I think whoever did that art must have either been higher than a kite, or trying to appeal to 3-year-olds. It's like something Dr. Seuss might have drawn if he'd been taking psychedelic drugs. So, to me Discord never really came off as a site for serious discussion.

If discord supported activitypub protocol it'd be great to use open source chat platforms like matrix or Lemmy with however I wouldn't hold my breath. :/

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