11mo ago

Never again

linuxmemes @lemmy.world

Never again

2014 214

51 comments

Imagine being in a corporate environment trying to implement an OSS into your platform and having to tell your 50 yo teammate: "Oh yeah, just pop in this Discord server real quick to see any relevant info". Instant credibility loss
- The loss of credibility is not because it's discord,. specifically.
  It's because the project thinks a chat platform is an appropriate way to document a project. I would feel the same way if someone told me to get on IRC for docs, or Slack.
  
  Matrix for example would be better.

D🤮scord

I've literally never seen a project remotely interesting that has their documentation on discord
- Revanced was one. Good thing they wisen up and have documentations now, though it's just a set of .md files in their git repo.
  
  Markdown in the repository is a pretty good way to keep documentation in sync with the source.
  
  what is it
- To be fair, I could say the same, but is probably a biased sample.
  I have other red flags, like only distributing on docker, that I've tried, and tried again, and found that it's a sign of a badly run project. But I can't state any confidence on the discord based rule, because I've never tried to make any run.
  
  The docker thing really grinds my gears. I see it as the ultimate "works on my machine" mentality. Basically they can't be arsed to write software that is robust to changes in hosting platform.
- The Gagguino project is a counterpoint to this. They have some extremely limited documentation, but to really build one you probably are going to need to dig into Discord. I hate it. The project is really cool, though, and I'm building one right now.

My biggest nightmare is one day you will go on to a random website and when you press "contact us" it opens an invite to a discord server.
- or better yet a QR code to scan in the Discord App. Great way to get your account credentials stolen

Stay the fuck away from anything that's organized over discord. Mod abuse and Nazis are a guarantee.
- What? I agree that discord is a bad platform but those aren't a guarantee
  
  Just when I finally think I've found one which is safe, I am painfully reminded of my place.
- People organizing on Discord when Matrix exists 🙄
  
  Its the same as the GitHub problem though, if you want to get community involvement then the necessary evil is to go where the people are. We use GitHub and Discord as that is where the vast majority of our users are, our Lemmy community sees barely any activity over our subreddit, we have barely anyone clamouring for Matrix or IRC. Our Mastodon is probably our only large 'fedi or fedi—adjacent' platform and thats because we drew the line at twitter. Would I love to get away from Discord? Absolutely, but that limits our ability to have an active community whilst we are still growing the project.
- I'm involved in a few projects that are organized over private Discord servers. No mod abuse or Nazis involved.

I am already happy if there is any documentation at all. And I am euphoric if it doesn't suck, i.e. sufficiently detailed and up to date.
So I guess Discord is better than nothing. But sure it's a turn off.
- Log into discord, copy the documentation and create a PR with it. (Or make a wiki?)

You old farts should keep up with times. /s

Preach!

This is often done by people while the project is unstable. No need to write documentation that gets outdated every few weeks, when you can help people live in discord.
- thats understandable but at least use something searchable that has tagging capabilities and is archivable so that you can come back to it years later
  
  Dscord is technically searchable and fairly archiveable (messages never get deleted due to old age (in my experience at least) or if the original poster deletes their account). And some dscord servers even have a Q&A mode similar to stck verflow. But yeah, not the right tool for the job, not to mention ＡＢＳＯＬＵＴＥＬＹ　ＰＲＯＰＲＩＥＴＡＲＹ
  
  Zulip is a little better in this regard. I'm involved in Lean, which uses Zulip as the primary mode of support and documentation. While it's usable, I still think that a Discourse style forum is the way to go.
- when you can help people live in discord.
  That live support is super handy when you're 8 timezones apart from the maintainers.
  Hey there, how do I get this thing to compile?
  11 hours later
  Ok just need to make sure you have this list of prerequisites installed and then we can walk you through the compilation process.
  6 hours later
  Nevermind, I built and installed another project.
  
  Or if you find the project a while later, and the link/server is dead, either because the maintainer forgot to update the link, or the server shut down/removed invites for some reason, like spam prevention.
- There needs to be some plan to migrate to stable documentation at some point though.
  Hell, even a small traditional forum is better searchable.
  What I see happen is that the people with the knowledge get so busy answering questions in discord that it impacts the efforts on documentation and on the software itself.

51 comments