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?
A web forum is far better in most cases. If you can't manage to run your own, there are plenty of lemmy servers that will do it for you. Even an email list (with searchable archives) would be better than Discord.
If you have collaborative documents that outgrow the forum format, use a wiki.
If real-time chat is needed, irc or matrix.
A project hosting its community on Discord is a project that won't get my contributions.
I recently went through these exact pains trying to contribute to a project that exclusively ran through Discord and eventually had to give up when it was clear they would never enable issues in their GitHub repos for "reasons."
It was impossible to discover the history behind anything. Even current information was lost within days, having to rehash aspects that were already investigated and decided upon.
would never enable issues in their Git...
That's a worrying sign for a project.
Did you clone their Git and start tracking issues there? ;-)
It's the "see no evil" approach. If you didn't report the issue while the admin was online, then they aren't compelled to do anything about it. Convenient for the project maintainer who doesn't actually like maintaining things. Awful for the rest of us.
A web forum is far better in most cases
It's sad when a web forum is better than the tool you're considering. Bumps, aggressive garbage collection, no Resurrection, it's weird.
I'm old, I guess. I miss NNTP, mainly for the archived posts I could discuss with the authors for an updated take or revised solution or some clarification. And yes, I know there's a good webUI front-end for an NNTP server as a back-end. ;-)
On the bright side:
Aggressive garbage collection and automatic thread locking are optional settings in most web forum software I've seen.
Lemmy shares some of the important parts of Usenet, and could develop into something that comes close.
The worst thing is that the mods can ban you for any or no reason, locking you completely out of the information they're providing. That is beyond an unreasonable amount of power that they can have over a user, and you just KNOW they're going to use that for political reasons.
Also the fact they can delete stuff in a way that makes them invisible to law enforcement, so a lot of illegal shit goes down there too. Combine that with the naturally hierarchal structure of discord leads to a lot of people using that power to abuse some of the more vulnerable members and of course once you call it out, poof goes the messages and poof goes your access to their server.
Perfectly summarized and the stance everyone should take for the wellbeing of any community. Look at cs.rin.ru for example.
Lemmy also doesn't get indexed by web search engines. I have yet to find a single post from lemmy on google or DDG even when specifically searching
PLEASE I BEG OF YOU, STOP USING DISCORD IN PLACE OF FORUMS AND PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE BOARDS!
While I agree, what might everyday people use to set up forums as relatively easily and cheaply as their Discord servers, and not have them riddled with ads or other clunky elements?
I'm pretty sure those that may have even been considering forums went to Discord because the only other options were more involved in terms of set up/maintenance and cost, the latter to get something without ads.
what might everyday people use to set up forums as relatively easily and cheaply as their Discord servers, and not have them riddled with ads or other clunky elements?
Discourse is a clean open source forum software that is commonly used for application support and well suited for it.
Or if your a real die hard for the fediverse, you could set up a lemmy instance for application support. There's even a phpBB frontend for an oldschool forum look and feel for it.
Usually everyday people don't setup forums, that's the responsibility of the application owner(s) or provider. In this case, the easy option is also the shitty option if measured by discoverability of the content.
Why not Lemmy?
Matrix chat works pretty well too.
It's ~ as convenient as Discord. More convenient in certain cases.
And one might be able to easily use the API to create an Archive site for all discussions in there.
In other cases, you have the ability of encrypted conversations, which of course you won't be archiving. Right?
90% of the projects that i use and other people care about are developed by people that have the technical ability to set up and host a web server. They likely have the cash. It's not exactly outrageously expensive. If it's small enough they dont have the cash for it, they don't need it.
Im guessing the discord was more of a legacy thing, someone was like "hey im having a problem, can you contact me on discord?" and then suddenly we have the rust discord server.
Discord is more analogous to IRC than web forums.
and yet people insist on using it as a forum, wiki, issue tracker, and a support channel.
That’s the problem.
honestly, i dont know why this is so downvoted, this is basically just what discord is.
But Discord is too convenient.
For a quick question yes, but if you try to search a solution for a problem it's actual hell, 1000s of BS messages and countless other problems just thrown in one timeline.
You can either search through it for hours or ask the question which was answered 10 times before.
It's as inefficient as it gets
convenient for what? forcing me to join a server, go through onboarding, and potentially even deal with not having enough spyware loaded on my information, at best waiting 10 minutes to say ANYTHING, and at worst not being able to say anything at all.
Not to mention these on boarding processes can explode and cause problems from time to time. Discord is only convenient for real time chatting, nothing else.
Do you know how crappy the discord client is? Even element with all its flaws behaves better.
it's awful and I hate it. I generally prefer not to have a shared identity across communities, and there's no way to create a usable discord identity without a phone number.
The worst part is that they act like you can set up an account without a number, but then it acts like there is 'suspicious activity' and requires you to verify with the phone immediately.
Just rant into this yesterday trying to set up a work account as my work phone is not a mobile phone with sms.
Was registering really suspicious?
Wait I thought this was dependent on the channel?
I've got a Discord account, on a lot of different channels for FLOSS and other things, and I've never set up a phone number. I have occasionally come across certain channels that I can't join without one, but the vast majority I've joined don't seem to require it
Not to defend Discord, by the way. It's fucking terrible and I despise this trend of telling people to come to your little private clubhouse to learn more about your software so I can sort through a bunch of obnoxious gif and image spam, while using an absolutely terrible search engine.
Discord separates and controls possibly useful information from the public internet. It's one of the worst platforms to use.
Are you against IRC for the same reason?
IRC isn't controlled by a single (shady) company
You never saw an IRC chatroom archive?
Fuck Discord when it's used in lieu of a forum, documentation or proper support channels.
Well...Forums need to be maintained. Discord is free and easy and fast to use.
Discord should allow the servers to be browsable. But you can only participate by logging in.
Doesnt Disqus handle it like that as well? Same account on every website utilizing disqus?
part of the problem is that discord as a platform for this, is like using NAT to make ipv4 work in the modern era. It's just annoying.
Discord even if it allowed public scraping would be a nightmare, because it's search function is practically helpless. Good luck finding a solution as well, that may or may not exist, and that question/answer has probably been brought up numerous times. There is probably specific context around it that we're missing unless we decide to role play as a historian.
Not to mention, it's a third layer of abstraction on top of something that should just be accessible.
I mean sure forums need maintenance, So do discords though, Hardware hosting is barely a problem. Basically anything and any internet connection can host a forum, cloudflare will probably sell it to you for pennies on the dollar even. (though i dont like cloudflare myself)
Discord is a fucking plague. I loathe it for communities. As soon as there are more than 10 people in a room, no one can follow what anyone is saying. Threads? No dude, this isn’t the 90s! Let’s slack it up!!! 🤮
Slack is really nice and is at least usable for large projects and teams.
Ugh. Electron which can’t keep more than 5 pages in memory before having to load backwards in the chat.
Unless they use the free version and you want to search for old questions/answers/issues.
looking at you puppet labs slack
How the heck slack better or even have any more features than discord? Discord saves all history. Discord has threads that are easier to find than slack threads. Discord voice channels let you just hop in. Discord lets you direct reply.
I use slack for work, but Discord is great for what it is. The search is amazing.
All chat tools after irc have been trash for large communities. That includes slack. Irc somehow still works with 1500 people in it. I can not explain how. With a logging bot the discussions can be archived for google searchabillity. I guess that could be true for a discord or slack also, But i never seen it implemented. In most slacks i can not search more then 60 days back.
I found IRC loses chat flow more easily, as actual chat gets lost in the stream of blabber.
I am intrigued to see how threaded conversations in slack et al work, but haven't been at a shop where slack was allowed as a tool due to data sovereignty and the CLOUD act.
But IRC was always something I approached reluctantly, and that's been 31 years now.
It also seems to attract a younger crowd - I had to state my age to join one server and the mod screenshotted my info and everyone laughed calling me "boomer". I'm only 40 (Millennial) and it wasn't a gaming or specifically teen-server. It was a silly ironic European Reddit server.
The subreddit seems to have a range of ages. The Discord server is a bunch of kids commenting capybara and cat emojis like it's funny. :/
To.be fair, there are threads though. That one is on the users.
The children do not yet know how much they yearn for the mines of listservs.
A new, novel solution to an already-solved problem that is worse in pretty much every way. But at least it is anathema to retention of institutional knowledge.
In short: just do a fucking PHPBB forum, it's better than this shit.
In short: just do a fucking PHPBB forum, it’s better than this shit.
Or a wiki or IRC or Matrix or Lemmy or Mastodon, etc. There's so many FOSS platforms for this kind of thing to choose from. How someone looks at all those options and then chooses Discord is beyond me.
Mattermost is open source and has a ton of integrations with other open source tools like Gitlab and CircleCI.
i feel everyone has just forgotten about gitter? literally its entire schtick is being the communications platform for github and gitlab, and now it's even been acquired by the matrix team!
Like surely that's the obvious place to go?
Please, not phpBB. Whatever the merits of PHP as a language are now, phpBB came from a time when it was exhibit #1 of why the language was terrible.
Adding a community on a Lemmy instance is fine. Far less admin work on your part, too. Encourage your users to donate to the people who do run the instance.
isn't discourse (important to note that's a completely different thing from discord) just a modern and much nicer version of phpbb?
It's real-time chat. That's fundamentally different, philosophically, from the way a forum/wiki works.
You can cludge forum-like features into it with stickies and bots and yada yada yada... or you could just use a platform that is designed from the ground up to be a permanent knowledge store instead of extended, glorified AOL chatrooms.
yeah I've really noticed it's hard to find info and therefore use any project that does this.
and it must suck because anyone new, instead of finding the answer to their question in a forum archive from when it was first asked, has to log in and ask it again.
whenever I have dumb noob questions on setup and I see a discord link I give up a little.
dude i give up completely, you think im joining a random discord full of a bunch of people i dont know with a culture of who knows what dialect?
Nah fuck that i'll just go use some dudes random piece of scrapped together software that's actually pretty based instead. To that guy who wrote the bash script for flashing windows ISOs under linux. Thank you.
Discord is the worst. Requires a phone number, does not allow email aliases and logs your chats.
Matrix and SimpleX is way better
Requires a phone number
It's just an email based user ID, I have multiple Discord accts and never used a phone number with it
Try DuckDuckGO aliase, it works for me
I would accept discord/irc over mailing list. But nothing beats a proper forum website.
And no, subreddit is not a proper forum.
I prefer mailing lists to forums, and forums to IRC, Slack to Discord and Discord is dead last just because it’s so fucking annoying. Forums can be annoying too but they are far more usable/searchable than the stream of consciousness, ephemeral nature of chat.
over mailing list.
LKML
For the main project I'm a maintainer on we do have forums too but they're pretty dead, we mostly just use Discord because that's what everyone else seems to be using.
Everything beats a proper forum because most proper forums are basically dead since small projects won't have many users and only a small number will sign up for a specific forum.
Forums used to be great since there was not much else, they still are good for large communities, but other than that, nope.
only a small number will sign up for a specific forum
Most people don't have to sign-up, 90% of cases should resolve on just searching the problem. Good chances it was already asked and answered.
Most of the time, forums with few users aren't dead, they're just really slow, whenever you post a question - expect at least 12-hour delay. I've never seen a message on Discord answered 12 hours later - you either get somewhat instant response or it's ghosted forever.
Also good luck asking questions if there's heated/rapid discussion in the room, or you have a little time and other responsibilities other than checking discord every couple minutes.
I get the impression that opensource communities are missing out on contributors by even including discord in the mix 🧐
I'm not sure I understand the problem. Is the problem that they're not using matrix? Or do you prefer that it was still all on IRC? I don't hate IRC but it's definitely way less user friendly.
Another commenter mentioned that they have matrix, discord, IRC, and discourse, however everything but discord is dead. So, due to the network effect of just including discord, it reduces participation on other channels.
Communities that are "discord only" however exclude people like those in this comment section.
I refuse to use discord for all the reasons people mentioned. Personally, matrix + lemmy/kbin/mbin = best. Other opensource direct communication solutions are acceptable too, like Zulip or RocketChat, but only if bridged with matrix. Then I just need one account. For async, discourse is alright, but not my favorite.
I bought a keyboard kit recently and to my horror discovered all the “documentation” to build it is on Discord. The creator’s last message was that he was working on other things after losing interest, and was not monitoring it anymore. So all the channels are full of messages asking where he is, what the status is, is he coming back, etc. I had to scroll back through dozens of pages just to find the docs.
Maybe put up a wiki on GitHub or something? Especially if you don’t want to run a forum or plan on dipping. It’s not that hard.
FCK DSCRD!
(They should use lemmy instead :-P)
Discord performance is inversely proportional to the number of servers you’re in. Until Discord addresses this, it’s a shit tool for this use case unless you participate in a tiny number of servers in one facet of your life. Unlike chat tools like Slack that allow you to focus one server or community tools like forums, Lemmy, or VCSaaS which don’t consume resources when you don’t use them, Discord just tanks everything. Since you can’t easily hop in and out (something community tools let you do because, you know, you’re not constantly polling the server), you can’t self regulate.
Every single gaming community, coding community, project, store, hobby group, friend group, and professional group (study group too) has their own Discord. It’s a goddamn nightmare because Discord does not prioritize basic community functionality. Voice and streaming kick ass, but I need some server management and resource optimization.
I'm in a ton of servers and it performs pretty okay for me. No real issues.
I feel like so many people talk about how it's not searchable or other concerns but for me I don't really care so much because there's an even bigger deal breaker which is their license agreement, where you sign away the property rights of anything you post, giving away your entire open source project.. This alone should disqualify it for any work of any creative sort. They own things you give them. I would never use it for development because of this.
Is this an actual thing or is it a misinterpretation of the standard boilerplate "you grant us a non-exclusive non-transferrable license to do the basic things that make a post visible to other people on the internet" message that every platform where you post stuff has?
I'm not personally knowledgeable on it, just going off what the investigation told why we stopped using it in our project really
I refuse to use discord.
i still use it since it's very useful to join technical communities and such
but, i use it with aliucord on mobile and vencord on my computer(which blocks all telemetry, has some useful plugins)
Since we are on the topic of disliking Discord, what Matrix clients do you humans use? I tried both Element and Nheko (the latter of which isn't electron based), and they both felt slow, clunky and unresponsive.
I gave up on matrix, was too complicated of a setup and the site was throughly unhelpful for newcomers. I eventually got it but, the permission system was somehow worse then IRC and due to the federation aspect of it you can't modify the standard at all because then the other clients/servers can't recieve you.
Are you using any other alternative now besides IRC?
On my phone I switched to Element X because Element would take up to a minute to sync messages. I'm willing to put up with the reduced feature set, as long as actual messages fucking arrive in time!
I've heard this about Element from a lot of people and I have to wonder: Is that the mobile client or on an actual PC? Because I use it on my phone and it's actually more reliable than the Discord mobile app.
Fluffychat or Gomuks
I think I will try Gomuks, since I now also tried Fluffychat, but scrolling felt weird and on a touchpad had the tendency to swipe left on messages to reply instead of scrolling down and I was unable to resize or close the channel info and channel list, or change its font size (there also appears to be no settings button). Maybe the CLI based clients will be more suited for me, since I also don't mind using irssi for IRC (but it should be noted I also have no problems with graphical IRC clients like hexchat or others, which work perfectly fine on my machine).
Matrix clients are slow and clunky because the protocol is heavy and overloaded. Upcoming sliding-sync feature will make them a bit more responsive.
Talking about specific clients, my favorite is Fractal. It's still missing some features though (like spaces). But it's getting updated fast.
Schlidichat!
I just use element right now, pretty good for phones and imo excellent for desktop (ux and usability wise)
Cinny. It uses Tauri instead of electron
I've actually had good experiences with Element except on mobile. Are you talking about mobile?
did you just license your own comment?
Nope. Desktop.
electron bloat
Using matrix would be better. Server plugins can publish channels like a public blog, viewable in a web browser.
I'm still struggling to find a decent client for matrix though
Cinny and Hydrogen are good
While I understand why FOSS community hates Discord, I don't know an alternative that is better at everything.
Discord's main problems:
However alternatives we have are not ideal either:
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
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.
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.
Mattermost
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
every time I run into an issue with Proton-GE it makes me angry again: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom?tab=readme-ov-file#2-if-you-have-an-issue-that-happens-with-my-proton-ge-build-provided-from-this-repository-that-does--not--happen-on-valves-proton-please-do-not-open-a-bug-report-on-valves-bug-tracker-instead-contact-me-on-discord-about-the-issue
Unpopular opinion:
For a open source project like the above which has so many constant moving parts, a discord is probably a good idea to ensure the author of the issue can provide more details about their problem and respond to follow up immediately.
Because I can absolutely see a breaking change involving something outside of the open-source project itself.
I say that as a person who hates discord. But I'm also part of the older generation so waiting 3-9 months for a reply is kinda normal. And the projects I support, it's pretty common to make a merge request that finally gets approved a two years later.
to ensure the author of the issue can provide more details about their problem and respond to follow up immediately.
if you actually visit that Discord (like I reluctantly do, from time to time), you'll find that all issues are being discussed in a handful of general channels with multiple people discussing multiple issues at the same time in one never-eding stream of messages. if you miraculously find a proper keyword that brings up someone else having the same issue as you do, the only way to find if someone else replied to it is by scrolling through all that noise.
Am I the odd one out for actually liking discord? Or is most of this hate specifically for using discord for FOSS projects? As a replacement for MSN Messenger/Skype/Ventrillo Discord is actually pretty great for hanging out with friends
Replacement for TS3, Skype, whatever = Good
1st party quick support channel = Good
Community maintenance = Good
Documentation = Not good
Basically Github issues replacement = Bad
Knowledgebase = Bad
It's a private silo with no public indexing by search. Makes it terrible for technical topics fine for a chat platform.
It's a bad hybrid of chat and forum. None of the advantages of rich forum posts and typically too may participants for it to be easy to follow. Noticeable if you are not in the main timezone as the others.
Discord has threads and topics, but these features are a bolted on afterthought instead of core functionality so it just doesn't work as well
I think the thread(s) aren't that hard to navigate or search in - assuming everything else has been set by admins properly (rarely the case). YMMV. Third-party ticketing/integration bots with major services are seamless, but or course depends on your use case.
Discord is an OK chat app. But it's TERRIBLE as a support forum. It's precisely the latter that everyone is complaining about.
For chatting with friends it's fine! The hate is when it's used for public documentation and communication, because it isn't public.
the hate is because discord actively makes it harder to find and get support for anything. It's adding extra steps to something that doesnt need them.
I use discord to chat with my friends and weird people online, not to complain about the nonfunctional nature of software to people i dont know.
my problem with it(apart from the fact that it's not libre) is that the chats aren't end to end encrypted
No, you're not, but the circle jerk here is definitely against discord.
Even worse if there's a github page, but they've disabled issues and discussions.
Lemmy communities with discord channels are really quite something.
Extra special.
Its awful, history isnt kept, requires account creation on a non FLOSS app. It sucks. Forums were better.
I use Discord with friends for a weekly online D&D game in what’s basically a glorified conference calls. It’s fine for that use-case, but it fucking sucks for trying to do anything organized or having on-topic conversations or looking up any sort of stored information. I kind of hate it when game companies have shit on there and you have to search/sort through hundreds of unconnected chat snippets to find answers to questions.
Basically how I use Discord as well,. My favourite feature of Discord is when I get an "@everyone" ping from big servers and I click into the notification and the message disappeared into the void without fail.
I've developed the muscle memory of immediately disabling notifications for any new server I join.
That is extremely annoying. Hate it when it happens.
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.
Exactly, it's a different paradigm and I don't want a forum.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Sorry, I'm a bit thick. What was confusing about the documentation?
Am I... A power user?
Oh I agree, doesn't prevent me from being locked into certain communities on discord.
discord is the best villain but also the worst platform ever
Is this loss?
Me when Thunders (Lemmy client I contribute to) entire dev team is on matrix: happy noises
Absolute chads those madlads
Laughs in matrix and element
So, what do we use? Matrix? Element? Idk?
Element is just a client, while Matrix is the chat protocol. But yeah, I have recently switched my discord server to a matrix instance and its been pretty great. Some pushback by users who didn't care about privacy or security, but overall the tech is solid. We didn't like that discord was moderating private chats and they don't offer any type of encryption.
Mailing list! (/s... unless?)
And Lemmy/kbin obviously
Open source communities have been around longer than the internet, so they can manage fine without discord.
Also don't you just join by submitting code or bug reports or other things?
For synchronous communication? Element, Zulip, Rocketchat (or if you really must, IRC 🤮 ), just something opensource and privacy respecting.
I think the point here is that anything that can be indexed by search engines or archival crawlers would be better, so not Matrix either. Forums, for example. Like what happens if the Discord community gets deleted due to whatever circumstances? All of that gathered knowledge will be just gone with no way to recover or search for it.
Anything else that can:
Discourse is a great choice - it meets both criteria. Even phpbb meets the requirements.
Even Zulip is objectively better than Discord. It meets point 1 very well. I don't know how well it does in point 2.
Maybe a free and open source forum software. There are a few out there, maybe you used one before.
Half this thread is mad discord saves messages and the other half is mad that discord doesn’t save messages. You can’t make this shit up lmao.
I’ll eat all the downvotes but objectively discord is the best chatting service available to the public for discussion. Blows irc out of the water easily. The only point I’ll concede on is the phone number bullshit but otherwise I’d take it over anything else.
Never had issues using their search feature for dev discords. It’s keyword based; truly stupid simple and easy to follow.
And yes I’ve used irc actively. It’s delusional to think that is somehow easier to follow.
the irony here is that discord quite literally has quantum state messages/posts, unless you NAIL the search perfectly, you're gonna get everything but the exact message you wanted. I mean sure the keywords make sense, but try searching for two or three keywords in a server with tens of thousands of message, or better yet, not knowing what specific keywords to use.
i can't tell you the amount of times i've tried searching for an embed with words only to realize that apparently, discord is completely incapable of searching through embed names.
Discord is alright as a chat platform, would actually be better if it were a universal platform base, like matrix, or get this, IRC. Not being stuck on a shitty broken electron app would nice from time to time.
Telegram would be much better if you want some chat based discusstions. Search indexable forums are the best to find help
I'm not sure you understand what "objectively" actually means... Care to provide your data in support of your objective conclusion?
Sure.
No other app has these two points along with the incredible amount of features and QoL Discord has. This is objectively true.
The search has issues but I don't fuck with irc channels because there is literally NEVER anyone there. I don't understand IRC, either. I'm young, sorry
IRC would have been the best tool if it did session logging instead of requiring the use of bouncers. IRC is text-only, nonproprietary and completely distraction-free.
But you don't have to use IRC. There are more modern federated protocols like Matrix and XMPP that do session logging. There are quite a lot of FOSS communities on them that are very active.
However, the main complaint here isn't about Discord vs other chat protocols. It's about the use of Discord as a community support forum. Unlike forums like Discourse, Discord messages aren't searchable on the web. If a person asks a question on it and gets a solution, it's then lost forever. Another person with the same question has to ask again. It completely defeats the utility of FOSS - of reusing someone else's solutions.
You brought back to me some good old memories with that Donald duck meme lol
What is a better alternative then?
I use Discord mostly for arranging matches in Wiimmfi, but yesterday I used it to get help about an issue I had running Knightcrawler (selfhosted Torrentio for Stremio) with my specific setup and some kind people helped me out real quick.
Matrix
XMPP
I don't even have discord.
It's been way too long since I last saw a Dolan meme in the wild.
Neither here nor there, but how typical is it to turn on notifications for a medium size discord server? Would you consider it?
Define medium size.
All messages notifications? Hell no never, not even on my own less than 10 persons server.
Stuff like announcement role pings? In servers I care or the roles let me filter very finely yes, irrespective of size.
@everyone pings? Only on servers I care a lot about or that use them sparely.
I refuse to use Discord for many of the reasons listed in the other comments.
Discuss are fine but they should be supplemebtary for chats and whatnot. It should not be a walled garden of knowledge
I get this post and everyone's comments here. You're not wrong. The issues is we often have to go where people already are. It's annoying, it's inefficient, but ultimately the best tool is worthless if no one comes over to it. Classic chicken-egg problem ultimately.
Discord is trash, but nobody seems to have presented anything better.
Discord is great for providing a community chatroom for both voice and text. It started, and still is, as the combination of IRC and Teamspeak/Ventrilo, now just with more bloat and memes. That people are trying to use the "IRCTeamspeak" as the entire information platform for their open source project is just mental, as it puts everything hidden behind a login requirement, unindexable and unsearchable on any search engine in an ever-changing stream of unrelated discussion.
Stick your bug reports and issues in a Github/Gitlab etc tracker, your information into a Wiki, and set up a forum. The discord can exist alongside these, but it cannot properly replace any of them.
I feel it maybe an administration issues. There are third-party bots allowing integration, channel/thread/role permissions which I find great but can be a hassle to set up.
A perfectly setup discord server with automation and webhooks, updates, permissions would be great. But setup of one is too complicated for the masses.
Segregating discord channels bases on roles, and staying on top of it with user influx - that would be perfect. Less than a percent (anectode) of channels can achieve simplicity like this.
Other then it being closed garden that isn't indexable on the web why do you think it's trash?
The stuff before it were not good.
Other than it being closed garden that isn't indexable on the web
"Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
This entire thread is just a bunch of old nerds screaming at the tide.
Hate stuff all you want. It isn't going to change anything. "People should do this or that". It must be exhausting to be so angry at something but do nothing about it.
Imagine using all this energy to really understand while people use Discord and try to make something better.
OR join these projects you apparently like and volunteer to do the extra work to publisher useful documentation. Unless of course you never intend to be useful to FLOSS and just want everyone else to do the work for you.
OR you can continue to complain and get nowhere while completely alienating an entire generation of developers. They'll eventually forget you exist while they're busy making the future happen.
I'm sure the folks that are doing the work aren't hanging out on Lemmy complaining about kids these days.
Why are you posting this on Lemmy and not Discord?
Why do you assume only "kids" use discord?
I'd understand your reaction if this were a defense of outdated bullshit that looked like it was invented in the previous century and looked the part like IRC, mailinglists, phpbb, usenet, ... But matrix is from the 2010s. It has threads, video calls, voice channels, emojis, emoji reactions, and other stuff I don't use. It's evolving. There are many clients (web, mobile, desktop, CLI) for many OSes, etc. The only thing it doesn't have is VC seed money and large amounts of marketing.
But that's not the point. The point is opensource projects using closed source products that are controlled by a single, commercial entity.
OR join these projects you apparently like and volunteer to do the extra work to publisher useful documentation. Unless of course you never intend to be useful to FLOSS and just want everyone else to do the work for you.
That's it: if they use discord these people (including me) won't. "If you don't use discord, you aren't useful to opensource and want everyone else to do the work for you" is quite the take 😂
OR you can continue to complain and get nowhere while completely alienating an entire generation of developers. They’ll eventually forget you exist while they’re busy making the future happen.
L.O.L so the "previous generation" is just sitting around complaining? No work is ever done? The linux kernel is written by teenagers and 20 year olds, rust, PHP, javascript, W3C, firefox, conferences, etc. are all done by the next generation with absolutely no input from the previous generation (whatever that means)? At 40 people either drop dead or start shouting at clouds?
My sides.
I love discord, for what it's for. Quick synchronous talks you will never refer back to again. So not software development where indexable logs of information are necessary. I know discord has indexing, and now some form of forum. But every discord I've been to for development (especially modding communities) has a large corpus of synchronous logs where people get annoyed if you ask a question that was answered one before a long time ago with extremely common language making it nearly impossible to search for because the keywords have been used out of context of your question hundreds of times since the question was asked.
If the Dev communities used the forums mode in discord more, it wouldn't always solve it, but it'd be much better. There are better places than discord for these things, but I have been trying to meet people where they're established.
Oh noes, people see something that isn't right and they're saying something about it! Let's give no real arguments and just toss some half baked insults, im sure that'll work
Wow! You are so deluded, thinking of yourself as a cool new kid with cool new tech (Discord) fighting against old people. What you don't get is that people are protesting the use of Discord for something it's not suited to. There's no generation gap in it. The best of the youngest developers I know have the same opinion. Perhaps it's time for you to reflect on your own standing.
Ummmm you know youre on lemmy right? The whole point of lemmy is that some company doesnt own everything and thats why people dont want to use discord. Its kind of ironic to use discord for a foss project when you think about it.
I'm an old nerd with 23?
They'll eventually forget you exist while they're busy making the future happen.
I highly doubt a bunch of discord kids are able to make anything happen.
I don't mind using discord, but I think it's best to consolidate all project management communications on a single platform
Why is everyone hating Discord? It's pretty neat platform when all the features used properly.
It’s the worst way to document something (doesn’t even make sense to call it documentation). It’s closed source and the content is only accessible if you register with an email address.
Maybe read a few of the responses?
Used to be fast. Isn't anymore. Need new fast thing.
IMO Discord is the best platform for this right now, which is unfortunate. The little I've tried Matrix has not been very impressive (single chatrooms, slow, bad self-hosting experience IMO), IRC is a bit better (though very dated in many regards, esp. user management) but still doesn't have the categories/channels that make discord nice. And most other chats are proprietary with discord just being the best one.
Which one would you like them to use?
I can count the number of projects where I wanted immediate feedback from random people on no hands. I do not think there are enough hands in my state to count the number of projects I’ve crawled docs and commentary from search engines. My use case for a community is an asynchronous repository of knowledge and issue tracker. Discord does none of those things.
I've been around open source for 20+ years and can tell you right now that it don't work that way. An issue tracker and a wiki is not a community.
Most older open source communities were built on irl connections and irc, with some mailing lists thrown in. Hell, we even funded conferences just around the software, not to sell a product but just because it's good for everyone to be talking to each other.
The issue tracker tracks the status of things, the wiki is generally user focused. It's not where development happens or thinks get built.
My only complaint about discord is that it requires a mobile phone number for an account, and you can't use the same number for multiple accounts.
I want separate personal (with a silly account name) and professional (with my name) accounts, but only have one phone.
Dial in BBS
Matrix is the best platform IMO, and actual dev communities agree. (See: Github, Mozilla, KDE, Nix, the list goes on)
This is in addition to forums, git, wiki, etc, which those communities also provide.