11个月前

ditch discord!

person backing up his car exploitable with the following four panels:

person looking ahead. the text below him says, "wow a cool software. let's check out the community"
screenshot with the text
Community
The main place where the community gathers is our Discord server. Feel free to join there to ask questions, help out others, share cool things you created with Typst, or just to chat.
hand on gear shift zoomed in, switching to reverse
person looking behind with the text "nevermind".

339 留言

Discord makes for a bad forum because it's not a forum! Stop using it as one! It's good for small groups that need realtime communication-- friend groups, project groups, even classes of students. If you're using it as a public forum you're using the wrong tool!
- This, exactly.
  Discord sucks at what it wasn't designed to do... Shocker. That doesn't make it bad.
  
  It sucks at what it was designed to do also. One of the trashiest UIs I've seen, and buggy af. It's barely gotten any better too.
  
  Why do people do this when there are already Github discussions and issues?
- I brought this up in a project Discord once and they told me "this is just the way projects do it now, get used to it".
  I left that server right away.
  
  See I always wondered what the rationale was, hiding from indexers to not get canceled or smth? Bruh 💀
- Discord is great for friends, bad for projects. I'll never have a discord for a project because I don't want to answer the same questions over and over.
  
  You just gave me a fear I didn't know I had.
- That’s the problem. I know of a couple video games where the publisher closed their forums and opened a discord channel. I have no idea why people view them as equivalent things.
- Users don’t move everything from an already existing forum to Discord. It’s not like people are going there because they want to use it as a forum, lots of forums have been replaced by discord (like in the screenshot of this post). To reiterate the metaphor someone used already, it’s like wanting to eat a steak but the only steakhouse gives you a plunger instead of a knife.
- Same as Matrix tbh.
  Awesome in FOSS matrix rooms: there are threads, but people never use them. Its horrible, they dont even jump on the boat. You could literally have one message = one topic and everything in a separate thread...
- It makes for a bad forum sure, but why should it have to be a forum?
  
  To be able to search through and find information in previous discussions.
  
  Time zones.
- Who is saying this is using it as a forum?
- I mean, I get it, but when the wrong tool is used so ubiquitously, you have to start asking questions about why people aren’t using the “right” tool. Forums seem to end up being hostile to newcomers, with all this “did you search the forum first you fucking noob?” mentality. Having a living place for real-time questions and discussion just feels better, same way email exchanges feel terrible after using Slack for so long. You can still have incredibly toxic people in real-time chat servers, obviously, but there just seems to be less overall stress to keep the posts in the forum “pristine” or… whatever that was.
  Not being able to search for old content is a huge con to real-time chat. Even if the history is retained forever (in self-hosted instances), real-time messages just aren’t the best bits of data to recall later like forum posts. Clear drawback.
  Still, people are using discord, not to spite forums, but because it works, is free, and is easy.
  
  Forums seem to end up being hostile to newcomers, with all this “did you search the forum first you fucking noob?” mentality. Having a living place for real-time questions and discussion just feels better, same way email exchanges feel terrible after using Slack for so long. You can still have incredibly toxic people in real-time chat servers, obviously, but there just seems to be less overall stress to keep the posts in the forum “pristine” or… whatever that was.
  Tbh you can find similar hostility to newcomers in Discord servers, simply swap some words about for a, "Did you read the pins you fucking noob?" mentality. It's very much the old forum kneejerk response of, "Did you read the rules/stickied posts?" simply in a different context. As you note though, you'll find assholes in any communication medium.
  Also, to your point about a place for real-time questions & discussion, that's also to its detriment for anyone out of sync with a server's more active hours, which I think is kind of an understated argument against it among the usual criticism found in these threads. Sure search is one thing, but the asynchronous nature of a forum is imo one of its greatest strengths, especially considering how flaky and/or inundated Discord's inbox/mentions can be.
  
  Most of discord is toxic AF and is so prone to astroturfing it's unreal. Literally just use reddit at that point I beg you.
  Real time conversation is only useful for children with too much free time on their hands and that's why WhatsApp group chats exist.

Everyone in this comment section is yelling about how bad discord is, telling people to use forums or matrix instead. No one is asking "why?". Why aren't people using forums or matrix? Because the path to user growth isn't guilting people into the 'morally correct' choice, it's making a product they want to use.
Why are small communities using discord over forums? Well, we're talking about small projects, hobbies, and volunteer work. Hosting a forum costs both time and money - renting server space and configuring/managing both the forum and the server. Making a discord channel is instant and free. You want your favorite project to have a forum? Then take up the mantle of hosting and maintaining it yourself. You want all projects to use a forum? Develop a forum system that you absorb the hosting costs for. Neither of these exist, so communities use discord.
Why are small communities using discord over matrix? I'm in my 30s, I spend all day on my PC, I've taken a couple years of college courses in programming. Figuring out matrix was annoying for me. I had to figure out which client program to use, I had to navigate the less-than-ideal way of joining servers, and there was a difficulty curve for understanding the program's features and how to use it. It wasn't impossible, but it took effort. Discord doesn't. For every step of friction, a product will bleed users. Matrix is cumbersome to set up and use, and it's copying something that already exists and does it better for the end-user experience. It shouldn't be surprising that people prefer discord. Want that to change? Start contributing code to matrix and refine the user on-boarding process.
Instead of stating opinions, ask questions. That's how things get changed. No amount of moral grandstanding will change end-users, no matter how correct you might be.
- Honestly a lemmy community wouldn't be a bad format. It's basically a forum
  
  Normally I'd say that reddit/lemmy are poor choices for a community - but if the competitor is a live-chat like discord? Yeah. Lemmy is better.
  Project leads would just need to make sure to direct users straight to a specific instance that allows instant/unmoderated sign-ups, or else that element of friction will occur -- and certainly not start the whole "there's many instances, pick the one that's right for you!" spiel, or users will give up immediately. I thought similarly about matrix - on-boarding users to a matrix community would be helped by explicitly writing a guide for them to do so, but then we're back to step 1, where making a discord channel is quicker than writing instructions.
  
  There have been projects that skin Lemmy to be like a forum, based on phpBB code if I recall. Don't think the projects are active though.
  
  Technically it is ActivityPub actor
- Matrix was confusing. Lemmy wasn't. That should say something because Lemmy is already considered confusing by a lot of people.
  
  Honestly the only confusing part for me now is choosing the right instance. This one thing is quite difficult
- A Lemmy community would be 1000x better than a discord community and there’s literally thousands of servers where you can create one of those.
- I think another hinderance is that the people asking questions get ignored, dismissed or shouted at, even if they tried whatever it was they tried. The Linux community doesn't do this as much when someone who tried Linux runs back to Windows, thankfully, but if you're a Chromium user who tried Firefox, or a Bluesky user who tried fedi, and found that the former of those was better for your needs, prepare to have angry nerds flaming you for your blasphemous act.
- Also people don't want to make a new account to ask one question. Discord let's you pop into a server, ask a question, and leave with ease.
  Until this is enabled in some other platform, people won't switch away from Reddit/Lemmy and discord. People don't want to make accounts and that's why these services took over.
  
  Hmm, now I wonder why lemmy does not have this "temporary user" kind of thing, where you can join with simpler form only to participate once (with restrictions, ofc)
- But we need to convince people to care about freedom too. There will always be some excuse to not use the freedom respecting alternative. Look at Reddit users. They could all join us here and change something, but they don't care. Same with Twitter, Windows, etc. It's always difficult, it's always annoying. But if we spread the message and help people with their issues, we can convince at least some of them.
  Software takes time to improve. Matrix is a complicated project and unlike Discord it's also federated. It's possible that some things will always be harder with Matrix. But even if it improves a lot (which will probably take years), people might find other excuses to not use it. For example Discord might still be more popular.
  I know Matrix takes effort to use. You have to understand what a homeserver is, how fediverse works, etc. I had to go through even more effort to set up my own server. It was difficult and took a lot of time of reading the documentation and tutorials. Some of the problems I had were ridiculous. Then to get people to use my server, I had to guide them step by step on how to create an account, because you can't just send them an invite link.
  But we can't just give up on our freedom and privacy. We are aware of Matrix's issues and they won't be fixed in a month or even a year. In the future Discord will have even more users and it will be even harder to escape it. So there is no reason to wait, we have to fight this battle now. This is the right thing to do.
  
  But we need to convince people to care about freedom too. There will always be some excuse to not use the freedom respecting alternative. Look at Reddit users. They could all join us here and change something, but they don’t care. Same with Twitter, Windows, etc. It’s always difficult, it’s always annoying. But if we spread the message and help people with their issues, we can convince at least some of them…
  ….But we can’t just give up on our freedom and privacy. We are aware of Matrix’s issues and they won’t be fixed in a month or even a year. In the future Discord will have even more users and it will be even harder to escape it. So there is no reason to wait, we have to fight this battle now. This is the right thing to do.
  I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and Ian starting to feel like the situation we are in feels impossible partially because of the way we have let capitalism define what we call “friction” in apps.
  Friction as a concept can do a lot of good in getting developers to be laser focused on how it actually feels to use a software as a human, but also… does Lemmy cause “friction” for new users because they simply cannot physically imagine a social network outside the context of a massive corporation?
  Discord is undoubtedly very slick to use but no one can convince me that Discord, Bluesky, Threads etc… don’t have a huge advantage in being low “friction” from being imaginable by the average person.
  We need to start differentiating between the shitty kind of friction that needlessly pushes away users and frustrates them and generative friction where the difficulty of getting someone to use something is an expression of traction where a broader invitation to think more radically about what is possible in community organization can happen. Seen from this light onboarding someone onto Lemmy is a million times harder than onboarding someone onto Discord, but that is because onboarding someone onto Lemmy is actually doing something far more difficult and meaningful.
  Getting someone to try Lemmy who before wouldn’t have tried it (or hadn’t even heard of it) expands the realm of what is possible in that person’s mind. It isn’t fair to expect that to magically happen with less friction than shuffling people onto yet another corporate social media service in the honeymoon phase where there aren’t many ads and things are artificially cheap…. If the situation is the same, and your onboarding has done no work on the system, it damn well better be easy.
  I mean, not all books should be difficult or challenging works of literature, but if your objective is to be genuinely changed by a book than you can’t really expect to get there without friction between you and the book. A frictionless book that just glides through you has no purchase to enact a genuine change in the fabric of your mind.
  Should we not think of social media community building in a similar light? Yes there are annoying works of literature that seem purposefully obtuse (bad friction) but by the same token it is the challenging books that actually transform our minds.
  Even if that one person you get to try Lemmy only tries it briefly and then just drifts off, you have fundamentally changed what that person thinks can be possible in the realm of online communities and that is no small victory even if it is harder to quantify.
- Or just create a subreddit lol, beats Discord
- You could start a Lemmy community, subreddit, even a mastodon or Twitter account with the same investment and effort.
- i feel like discord is much better at fostering a community and less good at being a resource or repository of information. like in a discord you talk directly to individuals so you get to know them and become friends. if you are new you can just pop in and say hi and start making friends, it's very organic. other platforms are much worse at this. I feel this is a big reason people use it.
  
  To add, I have seen informative discords before, but it requires a dedicated mod team to organize the channels into read only, informative posts.
  Definitely works 1000x better as a community chat though.
- Figuring out matrix was annoying for me. I had to figure out which client program to use, I had to navigate the less-than-ideal way of joining servers, and there was a difficulty curve for understanding the program's features and how to use it. It wasn't impossible, but it took effort
  I went through the same effort and all I got for my troubles was a few dead chatrooms where what little discussion exists is purely about distros.
  The barrier to entry filtered out everyone else.
- Making a discord channel is instant and free
  This is because discord is close to the top of the enshittification funnel.
  
  It's like you didn't even read his comment fully and only made it halfway through the first paragraph.

I don't get discord at all. It seems like the worst parts or IRC and the worst parts of webforums mashed together with no redeeming values added. I can't find anything, I can't tell what conversations are over, I can't figure out any of the in-jokes. If the place is too dead it's completely devoid of anything of value, if it's too big everything of value gets buried.
I've tried to take part in a couple of servers, those attempts have never last more than a couple hours.
- That's was my exact experience on a pokemon go server. So many channels and conversations that notifications are useless and searching for the information I needed was difficult. Just one giant group chat which is awful for storing needed, retrievable, information imo.
  Made me never want to step into discord again.
  
  Same thing with EVERY SINGLE GORILLA TAG SERVER. Way too many mentions. Not straight forward enough. I can not express this enough. It’s insane!
- It's great for smallish groups of friends bs-ing or collaborating, but bigger than that I've always found it painful
  But, some people can apparently keep up with the firehouse of comments on Twitch streams while they make me not want to bother with it at all, so...
  
  Yeah. My D&D group uses it for audio and video feeds and a little bit of between session chat. I appreciate how good the audio settings are.
- It has probably the worst UI of any site or app. I can never find the settings I need to modify or what the heck I’m looking at. It tells me that there’s a new reply specifically to me but I can never find it because it has long scrolled up in the history.
  I tried posting an image using the app on my phone but it kept ignoring it. Somehow I magically hit the right button and it included it in my reply. I had no idea.
  The content is hidden from the world unless you sign up and join, so the knowledge captured on a discord server is essentially useless.
  It’s definitely a mashup on irc and web forums, but infinitely worse.
  
  I think it is only used more than IRC because you can post images.
- I've always found that Discord's search works pretty well!
  
  Yeah that's what I use most to see if people have asked the same question I have then I jump to the discussion they had and that leads me where I want to go, but I do get it would be really annoying for someone who isn't logged into discord or uses it to chat with friends
- What do you mean find anything?
  Discord is used like this:
  Text message: you wanna play today? Yeah.
  Discord: here's the server address. Thanks
  Discord voice chat: I made us a bunch of supplies. Cool I dug up a diamond.
  
  And if we were talking about hooking up with our friends to play Minecraft, that'd be a great point.
- The barrier to entry for IRC is very high for non technical users. It's also archaic, has little to no customisation and can be difficult to moderate at high volumes.
  I'm not defending discord here, but the IRC comparisons are silly.
- I am guessing they advertised the right time in the right place. I agree, it's absolute trash
- Are you old?
  
  28yo here - Discord feels as if ADHD was a piece of software
  
  I’m 25 and share all these woes, what is old to you?

I don't care if people use Discord to talk, it's only when that's where the documentation, faq, etc. is.
- I do care about people using discord to talk when it’s the only place to talk and there’s 300 conversations on top of each other and 15000 messages/day. Also, Discord sucks for finding out who’s responding to you and its window seems to grab a random point in the chat and say “new messages”. I mean, I might have been 2000 messages behind but now I gotta scan them all to see if anybody actually responded.
  I would take a busy forum any day.
  
  Discord has threads and forums now. Most servers aren't going to that many messages. I don't think it is a real problem in the context of floss projects.
- Yeah, even less nerdy people hate that. I've had friends who aren't well-versed in fediverse/Linux culture complain about ROM hacks in particular doing this.

I think I might make this my fucking profile picture, I am so sick and tired of this.
The other day I finally got myself to join the discord of a small early access game to give some feedback/ideas I thought would fit the game really well.
I posted in the right ideas subchannel but then I also made the mistake of saying in the general “hey what do y’all think about this idea!”. I didn’t spam it, I spent awhile writing my idea out in a clear and concise fashion to post in the idea channel, tried to make it lighthearted and even made a bad photoshopped image to go along with it, and then I mentioned it ONCE in the general chat.
The only two people who responded either in the idea channel or in general were two people in general that immediately jumped down my throat, saying I was begging or advertising (by saying I wanted a feature in the wrong place once?)… and everybody else was just silent like that is a sane way to great people at the door to a community.
I hate discord so much, what an awful place to try to organize anything. Either there are only a couple of firehose channels where interesting conversations are diluted into inscrutability by low effort jokes and meme posts or someone taking up half the chat window to say something only to one person… or there develops an ever increasing suffocation of hyper over-organized channels where the only conversations allowed proceed along strict boundaries for what is considered “on topic” for that channel (and thus the possibility space of conversations becomes a series of tiny islands, unconnected from anywhere else conceptually).
This last point might seem like an oddly specific pet peeve, but I have noticed over and over again that the kinds of people who enjoy setting up discord communities and creating an extremely organized system of subchannels just don't understand how the way that feels good for them to structure the world actually critically fails to capture the organic, living aspects of it. In my opinion one of the major reasons people enjoy microblogging services like twitter so much is a structural resistance to "discord channel organizer brain" kinds of people taking hold of communities and making them into their personal pet organization project that makes them feel good at the end of the day when "everything" can now have a perfect spot. Human conversations and interactions derive their genius from being messy and stepping over boundaries, if you make it so every type of conversation has one precise corresponding spot in some mess of subchannels it is very difficult for it not to mortally wound the living fiber of conversation. The problem with Discord, is again, you HAVE to do this when you get any more than 15 people in a Discord channel or the whole thing becomes unmanageable.
It just doesn’t work for a software project ANYWHERE along the continuum of a handful of firehose channels to a confusing web of subchannels and I hate it. Either way, the search is utterly useless in terms of helping curate a body of expert conversations (like say a Reddit-like or forum) but that won’t stop people hanging out in discord all day yelling at you for asking a question that has already been asked before…. in a chat room…. where the whole point is conversations repeat as different social groups join and leave…?
Did I mention I hate discord?
- I think discord works for up to perhaps a dozen people. Big servers are pointless to engage with, they flow too quickly to be useful.
  
  I would rephrase this to: the people who designed discord and the stupendous amounts of investor money facilitating such a huge rise in discord adoption (keeping subscription prices relatively low, not going aggressively for monetization out the bat) don't really give a shit if discord doesn't really work for groups of more than a dozen people, nor how healthy for users it is (especially minorities of them). They care about how many people are using discord, that is all.
  It isn't a great place for ughh ...somedays what seems like 95% of the hobbies I love centralizing there communities on.
  Obviously discord type communities have their place (I don't like discord, but fine, I am a grumpy piece of shit) but what concerns me is how much energy is being put into this powerslide of community after community moving over to discord (or more usually, new communities just forming on discord and never going anywhere else). It feels like a distortion, like the hype is a misconception about discord being the best future for every facet of digital community structures (owned by one company, based in the US...) rather than an awesome new spin on IRC, voicechat and lite community organization all rolled up in a package that made it a fresh alternative to all those federated lemmy and kbin instances (that all had years and years of open threads you could search through and read like a normal ass website)....
  
  In the general chat sure. Most large discord servers have dozens of channels with more focused discussions.
- I don't think much in this is specific to Discord so much as it is to chat/IM in general. Honestly we use both chat (yes via Discord although I'd love to move to Matrix) and forums. They just serve completely different roles. Traditional style forums (whatever it is, Discourse, Flarum, Github Discussions) work really well for "long form" topics and asynchronous conversations. i.e. if there is something to discuss that is complex and can attract valid conversation over the course of days/weeks/months then it is ideal.
  Chat on the other hand is great for co-ordinating and asking quick one-off questions that will get you an answer really quickly. We use it all the time to just discuss general plans, ideas etc. and answer simple questions like "how do I do x?".
  I think most of the (justified) hatred is to those projects that only have a community via chat which is valid - on big projects it can be somewhat difficult to get a word in and get noticed if you have a "simple" question which wouldn't be a problem on a forum.
  
  The problem with the concept of "Quick one off questions go to discord" concept is when the second through infinite people have the same question or issue. Discord isn't crawled by search engines, and it ties up support staff/developers with answering repeat questions. Nevermind the time zone issue.
  Like, I get that conversation isn't as dynamic, but you can always schedule a time to chat dynamically.
  
  I think most of the (justified) hatred is to those projects that only have a community via chat which is valid - on big projects it can be somewhat difficult to get a word in and get noticed if you have a “simple” question which wouldn’t be a problem on a forum.
  Right, there is nothing wrong with discord type services other then the fact that I hate them and find them annoying and impossible to engage with, but that is a personal opinion I can just sit there and deal with if communities also have other places I can interact with them online but again for the overwhelming majority of them…. they don’t.
  My whole life I have been very much a “social butterfly” engaging in lots of different hobby communities and enjoying learning and reading expert conversations on niche things I never knew about. In the last 6 years or so, more than anything else Discord has been destroying my capacity to do enjoy doing that. I join a Discord server about something I am passionate about and I just can’t find the interesting conversations anywhere (even though the topics are extremely interesting to me) and I end up zoning out and disengaging with the community. I also need an account to search old conversations which feels VERY VERY wrong to me.
  My point isn’t “woe is me” but to stand up and sound the alarm that we are rapidly losing agency, searchability and general knowledge curation capacity systematically across digital communities as the Discord tidal wave envelopes all. It has and will do massive longterm damage to the health of internet communities.
  I mean, for goodness sake my damn workplace was trying to unionize (hell yeah) and we had a great signal chat that was very focused going on (not perfect by any means) and then a couple of people who like Discord got EVERYTHING to move to Discord and….. guess how effective we were at organizing our ≈110 person company?
  Spoilers, we weren’t, at all.
  It just crushed me to see people trying to agitate and encourage people to think outside the narrative of what the boss says is possible or how people’s relationship to work has to look like according to the boss, but there was zero creative or imaginative power to conceive of the politics and consequences of the tools we were using to organize or thought into how a communication tool fundamentally impacts the kind of conversations that happen in favor of others. I get that it wasn’t the primary question, but it seems to me like a far more relevant question than people gave it credit for, especially since our solution was “use the popular social media service being massively subsidized by investors in an attempt to develop an unassailable monopoly on the industry” which seems like not a great place to build the future of worker power, especially since Discord is a U.S. based company.
- Some of these issues would probably be avoided if the server enforced using the threads feature for topics and conversations, but at that point you might as well just use reddit (or lemmy).
- Check out revolt, its (Libre)FOSS discord. https://revolt.chat/
  
  Definitely glad this exists, has anyone tried it here who can speak to how nice of an experience it is? Does it have voice channels?
  
  Sucks ass until it gets proper push to talk and voice activation
- I worked before in a startup with 30~40 members.
  Discord was awesome for communication an administrative bulletins, you could check at a glance everyone who was online and join calls in a single click.
  Also we had text channels for specific projects, and for a in-depth discussion of a specific thing we created threads in the same channel, anything of importance could also be pinned down.
  With that out of the way, I think if done correctly, It works just fine, It's a different medium than a forum, since the last is used for future reference, and the former is for on-demand discussions.
  Also any platform can be shitty If the wrong person is holding the reins (i.e. Github issues boards)

Discord seems okay for chat, but not good for information that is going to be retained and indexed. Isn't this already known? Why is this news?
- I guess because people still use it. It might be obvious, but it isn't common knowledge. All people are ignorant about most things. There's just too much to know and not enough time to learn it unless you're forced.
- And making a wiki is super easy.
  
  picks fandom.com*
  BILLY NO!

You ditch discord because it's bad for organizing projects
I ditched discord because it's proprietary
We are not the same
- I ditch it because it doesn't have End to end encryption in chats.
  source: their T&C, and from the horses mouth the CEO

Discord is only convenient for those already using it everyday. For everyone else this is a high barrier to entry, especially when you actually care what software you use.
- My brother in Christ, this is a Linux community. High barriers to entry is literally what you signed up for.
  
  Won't consider all those people inviting to join and wanting to give help, with community written wikis that only this OS has actually useful a high barrier.
  
  If an OSS project is designed to connect people with each other, and it doesn't do that well, it's kind of a failure.
  Looking at you, Matrix.
- You could say this about virtually any modern social media platform. Hell, half the reason I'm on Lemmy is because Reddit hates me if I try to look at something without signing in first and then hates me even more for signing in and participating in a community.
  Discord isn't any more difficult to enter than Reddit (or Lemmy, for that matter). At the worst, I'd consider it a modernization on IRC with Microsoft Characteristics. I wouldn't call that high at all. At its best, its a great live chat space for niche interest groups to organize.
- I used it for a short time when it first came out. I went back for another look recently. I haven't a clue what is what. So much going on. I thought I don't wish to spend the time learning something I probably will use a couple of times a week.
  Is this what getting old feels like?
  
  I can name myself a technical person, using stuff like these everyday and always trying new software. And I too have problems doing something above basic on Discord sometimes, especially on mobile.

I can’t ditch discord. They won’t even let me in via browser because I “failed the captcha”.
(Not that they’d tell me this somewhere in their UI, this is the server response.)
- my failed attempts at registering on discord:
  use temporary email: locked out
  use real email with VPN: locked out
  use real email without VPN and Firefox: locked out
  use real email, no VPN, le lion(brave): registered. join a community. community requires phone verification. deny it. locked out.
  every damn time they require a phone number.
  
  I'm not doubting that some servers do, but I've yet to run into one myself
  
  Phone verification is the worst!
  
  Only the big ones
- Same. This happened to me so many times, I just can't suffer it any more.

The transition to Discord for communities really sucks. It's impossible to find information now that everything is gated to unsearchable servers.

I am OOL, why so much discord hate lately? I have never used it…
- Discord is a real-time communication system that also has a built-in history feature. This type of communication promotes conversational interactions, which are really hard to search for complete ideas about problems and their solutions, and those solutions are not indexed by internet search engines, which makes it extremely difficult for people to discover useful information on the platform even with the available history.
  The asynchronous nature of web based forums promotes communication in more complete ideas (though this is clearly not always how communication happens) and they are indexable by search engines.
  Just look at how people discover solutions in Reddit posts so frequently when searching Google, but nobody finds solutions in chat logs, even IRC which has been around for decades and is often archived in a search indexable site where chat logs are posted.
  Edit: I swear that wasn't written even a bit by AI.
  
  Edit: I swear that wasn't written even a bit by AI.
  That's the beauty of it. Tomorrow, it will be.
  (When an AI copy/pastes your answer to someone asking about choosing the correct iphone power brick, or something.)
  
  No one wants their private/semi-private chats to be indexable or searchable. The whole POINT is to not have what you say broadcast to all and sundry.
  
  You don’t really address why having a “conversational” option is bad. I understand the advantages of searchable history but that’s not necessarily the right option for every community. Diversity is good.
  
  This whole comment/complaint is just the pros and cons of different types of communication. None of this is discord specific, it's just complaints that real time chat isn't indexed by search engines and isn't organized into clear topics.
  Sure, some IRC chats were logged/posted, but that still has all the same searchability problems, and that process can still be used within discord search. It's just not useful because real time chat doesn't have any sort of topic organization.
  This whole thing is like complaining that signal is worse than email because it's not as organized. It's not worse, it's just a different medium with different goals and purpose. And you're not giving any specifics as to why signal/discord is bad, just that you don't like direct messaging/chat rooms.
- I don’t think people hate discord as a host for some communities, but there definitely is a growing rejection of it among FOSS contributors.
  It sucks as a place to store knowledge. The search sucks, it’s not indexable by search engines, and requires an account to use. As another commenter on this post said, it combines the worst parts of IRC and webforums.
  There are better ways to organise a FOSS project, and people are unhappy that some projects still choose discord.
- its not open source, meaning its spyware
  now seriously, i think its only issue is that it doesnt run well, and its even worse on phones. it works very well as a tool to create communities and talk to people.

Worst example I've ever seen is 3dVista - a fucking facebook group. Discord would have been amazing in comparison.
- Had to see it to believe it. On their website, under Support > Forum, you're redirected to their Facebook group. This is criminal.

My biggest issue with discord is that I'll get pinged, and have no fucking clue what pinged me.
Even if I get to the notification, often I don't get it right away, and often I don't open it right away either. So when I click on it, which, in most chat like apps will take you to that post/mention/whatever, it just takes me to the channel where I was mentioned. I'm left with no earthly idea why I'm in this chat or what was said that prompted the notification.
When I'm actively in discord, this works okay, since the mention which prompted the notification is likely the most recent thing said, or at least, close to it. The problem is, I'm almost never actively in discord.
I find that if I use discord all the time, which is rare, but happens.... Then I don't mind it so much. However, if I don't use discord all the time, then it's less than useless. I get notifications all the time and I just end up dismissing them because by the time I get to it, there's no chance I'll be able to figure out why I got the notification in the first place.
DMs and very very small communities are an exception, since the volume of messages is so low that generally, even if I get to the notification hours later, the message that prompted the notification is still one of the most recent handful of messages.
To this end, my list of pros and cons for discord are: Pros:
convenient (when in active use)
good voice chat
a lot of people use it Cons:
slow notifications
bad notification handling
I feel like the people who run any given community, who are centered around discord, don't have problems with it, since they're pretty much always on it. For someone who isn't always plugged into discord, it's a horrendous nightmare of missed messages and notifications that take you somewhere unexpected. Any complaints about this generally falls on deaf ears because the people in charge, who picked that the community should be in discord, use it so much that they don't really have any issues with it.
Compare and contrast with a competing text-chat service like slack. In general slack doesn't do voice, so there's some differences there, but talking strictly about notifications and such: the notifications frequently arrive within seconds or minutes at most, when you select them, it takes you to the channel where the alert came from, scrolled to the post where the mention that prompted the notification is located, with the specific mention highlighted for clarity. From here, you can scroll back to get context, and scroll forward to see other replies. Contrasted with my experience in discord, you select the notification, you're taken to the channel where the notification originated, and scrolled to a random point in the recent history of the channel. Does this section contain the mention? Maybe, but probably not. Nothing is highlighted. Good luck.
- Not defending it, but discord has an inbox menu, where you can see a list of messages that pinged you and jump to any of those messages. It is a button on the top right corner to the left of the question mark and to the right of the search field (desktop).
  
  I've been using that, and bluntly, that's great, but why, when I click on a notification, does it not do the same thing?
- Discord sometimes pings you for sales of their products!!

It would be nice if more people used Matrix. From my experience though it seems like not a lot of people check in on it regularly because the niche communities they follow are on Discord and even though bridges between Matrix and Discord do exist they are often neglected and fall of out sync.
- It would be better if they used a web forum. It's so easy to search in threads.
  
  Like an independent forum or something like XDA Developers?
  I feel like it really depends on the topic and level of engagement. I find traditional forums a bit hard to follow at times because of people branching off and bouncing around discussions. I might run into the same issue I do with Matrix channels where I'm not regularly checking in. Logging in is also another thing.

I get frustrated with these platforms trying to turn into these 'do it all' applications. discord was fine before they started adding all the bullshit in everywhere. it was a great chat place with 'rooms' for different groups of people or friends. kinda like how spotify seems to be trying to morph into some social music sharing crap. i don't use spotify to be social, i use it to listen to fucking music.

There's a growingly popular javascript schema validation library I avoid like the plague because its author was a whiny child on reddit who would get into flamewars with a bunch of people and then suddenly delete all his comments.
There's a lot of reasons not to trust a library with an unstable Code Owner.
- zod?
  
  No. Zod's fine, if slow as molassas.
  The library I was referring to is typebox (I wasn't going to name&shame, but I guess it doesn't hurt). By some metrics, it's the second-most-popular validation library, despite the fact most devs have never heard of it. And according to a lot of benchmarks, it's incredibly fast. But that sinclairzx81 guy was really immature on reddit, starting a bunch of arguments and then up and ragequitting the threads. And as far as I can tell, he's the only owner/merger. It sorta scares me about using it until at least enough other active users embrace it that it would be reasonably forked if he pulls a why the lucky stiff

Discord has done for reproducible support what panty hose has done for finger fucking.

Ditchcord!

I recently soured on Discord myself and here is my story. I have been part of the same private chatroom since 1999. We started on IRC as a Pokemon community and some of us just never left. We moved the chat off IRC to Discord in 2015? At first it was great, discord is miles ahead of IRC in terms of accessibility, now we were sharing photos and videos in chat and now we had it on our phones. We had seen myspace, facebook and countless other social networks go from good to terrible in our lifetimes and I guess we've always known the writing was on the wall for Discord. The end of last year we saw a few different things happen that really creeped me the fuck out.
USA government has access to unencrypted push notifications on Android and iOS. Discord does not offer any encryption. Wired Article
Discord is moderating private chats PC Gamer,
Discord moderating policy is becoming more ideological and political. TechCrunch
Tencent Ownership
General fear that our 25 year long running chat will be sold as AI training data or other BS against our will.
So we moved to a Matrix instance. It was a struggle, some people just flat out refused and to this day (months later) will probably never come. The tech is I'd say, 90% on par with discord. Element (the main Matrix client) sucks at voice chat. It is embarrassingly bad, WHY ISNT THERE PUSH TO TALK? HELLO? Youtube videos won't play in chat, which sucks too. Otherwise we gained encryption and a sense of independence I feel. Looking forward it is possible we will buy rack space for our own instance to further get off the grid. Definitely pros and cons overall but thats my experience. Anybody looking to try out Matrix hit me up you're welcome on my server.
Edit: I completely forgot about the mobile app redesign what a shit show that was! The devs attitude during that is what lead me find Matrix in the first place.
- Oh damn that concerning .I use allucord but that don't ditch many of those problème .

"Teams for Gamers"

Why so much hate post about discord lately? What's happened?
- This is not lately, it's been happening for a long time.
  Nothing in particular happened.
  I'm gonna explain the meme: Discord started as a gaming communication software, after some time they expanded and discord servers are not used just for gaming. This leads to some software projects being coordinated in discord servers. However, discord is not a tool designed for this purpose, and because of that, OP had the reaction of this meme.
  The disadvantages of discord when used as a community for software projects (as opposed to traditional forums, for example) are as follows (not an exhaustive list):
  Most importantly, discord doesn't get indexed by search engines. So you can't just Google a problem and a link to a discord message with the answer will appear. Some say that if something is said in a discord server, it hasn't been said, because it's not findable. You have to know in which server to look for, and then use Discord's own searcher (which in my opinion is bad).
  Conversations are just a flow of messages. Recently they introduced threads, which acts more like traditional forums, with an OP, title and answers. However, most people still just use the chat.
  If you ask a question in a chat and nobody answers, people will just keep chatting and your question will be faded away, hidden by more recent messages.
  
  Most importantly, discord doesn’t get indexed by search engines. So you can’t just Google a problem and a link to a discord message with the answer will appear.
  That's true. But also Google's algorithm has been circling the toilet for years now. So even if you were expecting a Stack Exchange esque reference to a problem in a Discord server, there's a much better chance that you'd get a bunch of SEO garbage inside the first couple of pages purely thanks to degradation in Google's internal optimization.
  If anything, I'd consider Discord's opaqueness a benefit, as it keeps a lot of the spamming and automated manipulations out of these spaces. A good channel will have a Git space associated with it pinned to the main feed. And an active community will often have its own Wiki or equivalent to help organize FAQs for new users.
  Its annoying in so far as its more transient than the older school repositories. But that's the direction the entire internet has been moving for the better part of a decade. Not really the fault of Discord.
  
  No, the memes literally started like less than 2 weeks ago. If you ask a question and no one replies, it' s generally because you asked a stupid question and no one wants to be the guy to tell you your question doesn't make sense.

I understand the mentality but depending on the project it can be a struggle. If I was going to set up a brand new software project then sure, I'd be going all in on Fediverse and open source platforms. Forge? Codeberg. Chat? Matrix. Forum? Discourse/Flarum or maybe just Lemmy. Microblog? Mastodon.
However it isn't easy to be that idealistic all the time and sometimes there is a degree of needing to do stuff against your ideals. I'm part of the Pulsar editor team which is a fork of the Atom text editor that got discontinued and we had to get things moving as quickly as possible in the time period that GitHub set until they pulled their services completely (along with their package backend). We needed the least friction possible to get things in motion and get as many people from the community involved as possible.
We needed GitHub - unsurprisingly Atom had close ties with GitHub anyway so moving away wasn't ever going to be quite that simple and we would have needed to migrate an awful lot of repos within the org. The entire Atom package system relies on GitHub - people published their packages to atom.io but the actual code was on GitHub - something not fixable in the short period we had. We also needed it because this is where the Atom community was gathered around - at a period where we needed things to be as simple as possible for people to find out about and get involved with the project, moving to another forge may have just been the end of it.
We also use GitHub Discussions for our forum - as we are already tied to GitHub for the time being we might as well use that platform as well - it is a lot easier than trying to maintain our own forums which wouldn't be seeing that much activity. The team behind Zed found this out; they set up a Discourse forum and barely anyone used it so they just went back to GitHub Discussions.
We needed Discord because it was simply the most commonly used platform. Pulsar split off from Atom-community which was already on Discord so it was a natural move that meant little disruption or friction to anyone wanting to get involved with the new project. We have been looking to make a Matrix bridge but honestly there doesn't seem to be all that much desire for it - we had some initial enthusiasm to create a Lemmy community but when we did it barely sees any activity (other than me posting updates there).
Would I love to move off of these platforms? Absolutely. However we simply have bigger fish to fry at this point in time for the project itself so it is going to be slow.
So whilst I love to be idealistic about what platforms we should be using I also heavily sympathise with those who use those "less than ideal" ones - there could well be some very good reasons behind it that might not be obvious to you.

Discord my have issues in terms of not being foss, data collection etc etc but other than that I think it's a chat app that has no viable contender. Nothing comes close to the same out of the box functionality.
- I think it's a chat app that has no viable contender.
  Telegram and even fucking VK.
  Nothing comes close to the same out of the box functionality.
  Matrix except most client's UI.
  
  I have both of those apps and they have a fraction of the functionality Discord has.
  
  Telegram is so much better it's mind boggling discord is a thing

What is an acceptable community?
- Discourse or some other threaded forum software that is visible to search indexers, and an actual issue tracker.

What are the preferred alternatives?
Mine is probably matrix, mostly because I can use the same account everywhere, but it also feels like there's a lot of gotchas and all the phone apps are kinda meh each in their own unique way.
- Personally, I'd prefer that projects use forums for community discussions rather than realtime chat platforms like Discord or Matrix. I think the bigger problem of projects using Discord is not that it's closed source, but rather that it makes it difficult to search (since no indexing by search engines) and the format deprioritizes having discussion on a topic over a long period of time. Since Matrix is also intended for chat, it has these same issues (though at least you can preview a room without making an account).
  
  I agree with you, but I also think people find Discord convenient because it's just 1 account and free to use.
  I wonder if Lemmy and the rest of the fediverse can work here, or just anything where smaller free projects don't necessarily have to pay for and maintain their own community infrastructure, and still allow users to jump around without getting too locked in.
- matrix is adding sliding-sync functionality which is supposed to dramatically reduce startup times. you can try element x and see the difference.
  
  I'm a bit annoyed with element X tbh, my home server only has sso logins, but they don't support that and the error message doesn't explain this at all, which means it's up to me to figure out if I'm doing it wrong, my home server is doing something wrong, or the app is just bad at communicating errors.
- Revolt looks promising: https://revolt.chat/

You can join the matrix room https://matrix.to/#/#typst:matrix.org
- Or keep all communities public and stop using walled garden communities full stop. Along with keeping forum threads alive for easier documentation and searchability.
  
  Wrong comment level?
  Matrix is open, not closed. Also, chat is no forum and shouldn't be used as such.

I'm going to make a project and, "Join our IRC community @ Rizon"

Let's pretend "a software" doesn't sound as stupid as "a traffic".

we have a discord and a matrix server bridged to it

I hate discord as much as anyone else but it's where most people are already going to have an account. People don't want to create brand new accounts to ask a single question. That question will just not get asked, The question could be asked on Reddit which may or may not end in a good result. It could take hours, weeks or even days. Discord is already there, and if a discord community is large enough you may get a fast and knowledgeable response. I can see why people like discord, I just don't see any better alternatives or something that is as convenient.
- If you ask me (you don't, but anyway) I'd prefer creating a new account. Discord is a bit weird in a way it provides transparent account and I am annoyed by the fact that I have no control over it. Now that I think about it, I could just create several discord accounts and join servers with the appropriate one, i.e. work, gaming, personal, etc. But I would much rather prefer to have more flexibility with settings

Know any good Autistic communities in Matrix? I'm in the market, I love mine but it's in Discord and they ain't moving.
- There's this stickied post in an autism community: https://lemmy.world/post/11077933
  Hope that helps.
  
  Thank you!

I personally don't mind Discord. I do in fact like it. (If you want to convince me otherwise, please don't)
But I really hate that OSS uses discord for their lack of documentation. I understand that documentation is hard and boring to create, but I don't want to go on some discord to ask a bunch of questions that thousands of others have before. Instead I will try and find something using search engines and I will read the open and closed issues. If I don't find anything, I give up on the software.

Discord is a good service to engage with communities but what I hate most is when services, platforms and whatnot use Discord as their primary means of official communication like for announcements.
Having to be in a lot of servers purely to get announcements results in an already limited total sever count that one can join to be even more limited.

instead of discord, people should use revolt which is a foss clone https://app.revolt.chat
- Stay away from it as it is centralized and the moderation practices are questionable at best.
  
  You can self host your own instance, no? https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
- No, just a webforum.

I think most of the problematic toxic mods from Reddit have started infecting Discord too. It's been getting worse lately.
- Don't worry, most Discord servers are already infected with problematic toxic mods from Twitter.
- Seems like a recipe for "drama"

Where Linux?
- At least it's not some anime / trans issues "meme". I'll call it a step in the right direction.

Is there a good federated "one click" insta community replacement for discord yet? Or rather, what is the most likely to evolve into something like that? I looked into matrix chat and elements.
- Matrix is very much in development but its getting there. Especially enthusiast servers work great imo. Mine is bridged with discord, whatsapp and signal for example.

Ok Discord bad. What's good?
- A wiki, documentation on their website(if they have one), a web forum that can be searched/indexed cached for later(instead of troubleshooting via discord. To me are the ideal solutions.
- Any of the issue tracking software (GitHub. JIRA, GitLab etc.)
  Any of the documentation software (readthedocs, GitHub wiki, Antora etc.)
  Any of the forum style software. Even a Lemmy community would be a million times better for this purpose than Discord.
  Discord is probably the best app to chat/call with your gaming buddies but it's a shit application for issue tracking and documentation.
- Revolt looks pretty promising. https://revolt.chat/
  Just wish they would do something like federate logins. I know with chat it doesn't make sense to federate everything, but logins would be a really huge selling factor.
  
  We don't need another chatroom. Discord works fine as a chatroom. It sucks as a forum. An altertative will not fix that at all.
  
  The fmhy community had to move away from revolt back to discord due to bugs I've heard

Me after looking at silver bullet today lol

I mean, good riddance, then?

Hilarious

ditch discord!
make me

but why?
- Amongst many other reasons, my biggest is it's not searchable by search engines.
  If someone else is having the same problem as me with some software, and someone else has figured it out, it should show up on the first page of a Google search regarding it.
  If it doesn't, the tool the community is using is entirely unfit for purpose.
  Open source communities should be all about tearing down walled gardens, not living in them.
  
  Amongst many other reasons, my biggest is it's not searchable by search engines.
  That's why we made forum.2009scape.org for our project. Yet the SEO is so bad that nobody finds anything we put there anyways.
  
  I don’t think you understand how terrible search engines are for niche communities. I’d bet most lemmy posts don’t show up. You’re far better off just joining the community and doing a search within discord than wasting your time scraping through bad search results.
  
  that makes sense, thank you for explaining
  You are right, when I was trying to get acquainted with Gentoo for instance, I found most of my problems solved in a forum or wiki, if they had discord I wouldn’t have gotten nowhere probably and would’ve just ditched it
  
  Amongst many other reasons, my biggest is it's not searchable by search engines.
  Well gee, I hope you don't use texting, phone calls, emails, private forums, social media DMs, or talk to anyone IRL, because those aren't searchable either!
  This argument seems like reaching for something to complain about rather than having a legitimate problem with discord. If anything, you don't like the "large group chat" paradigm, but that's like hating a screwdriver because it's not a hammer.
- cant speak for everyone but there are the ever present provacy concerns of all your messages being scraped to feed LLMs and other data structures, and any monopoly for communications that develops is bad in principle. Also running a chrome app is a no for some people.
  
  Your comment intrigued me as there is one that is just about the opposite of yours with a slightly different take.
  You are concerned with your data being used to feed a private LLM. the other comment was concerned with three conversations being hidden from the public, more specifically not searchable from the outside and therefore hiding a knowledge repository.
  I get both takes but they seem to be in conflict with each other. LLMs are important for accurate and useful AI, but there should also be a way for an open community to block them from consuming their data. It seems we missed a step somewhere. Providing data to an LLM should be opt-in.

Discord isn't a forum and shouldn't be used as one, but it's a fantastic community chat room/hangout space. It's my main hangout these days :-)

How about Slack?
- Slack is great and free. Plus they actually care about your privacy and data. They just have a work vibe to them, which I don't mind. Plus the tool integration is amazing.
  
  One downside that slack shares with discord is it's not searchable/visible to the greater web
- Mattermost is a FOSS alternative that works well
  
  Or revolt, its more like discord and all the features are free:
  https://revolt.chat/

Typst is very good software, though. Never will ever use latex again in my life.

I’m pretty sure the hype towards discord for programming is the convenience. A combination of gaming communities, content creators and I’ve actually seen it be used in professional environments.
- I've even seen schools conducting classes on discord during pandemic.
  
  I haven't seen that yet but I'm not surprised by it. Some people have (or had) discords for cryptocurrencies. The guy I knew involved with it wasn't a tech savvy person though.

There is an unofficial matrix room for typst. Join it and use it, and it will replace discord.
Typsts documentation is the documentation for their IDE. I have no idea why anyone would mix that.
Ever made a table in typst? It sucks. Latex tables are easier. As always, markdown is king.

Btw they have Github Discussions now

Wow another discord bad thread. Daring today aren’t we?
- because it is?! if your goal is to have a non-indeaxable support forum, at least use matrix which is far far better than the horse manure that discord is.
  
  I’m at a point where I wish our support forum was at least on Discord, the majority of my community is pretty old but it spans down into a handful of Gen Z with more Millennials and Z coming in as the Boomers get out. Even so the main forum is a Facebook page. Splinter groups using WhatsApp, Signal and iMessage. It’s not like the older gen is technically inept, for the most part, it’s just they’re entrenched and moving them would take a massive, easy to use software that is far superior to FB’s viability. Personally using Discord and it’s seamless jump from PC-Laptop-Phone is nice, admittedly I’m in the same mindset of those in my groups on FB as I haven’t tried anything else.
  
  Ah yes let me switch to a chatting app that is missing half the features from discord with a worse UI. Epic!
- It rwally does suck though
- It's become the new "DAE Win 11 bad?"

Every time this kind of post comes up, I always ask what software is only supporting discord. The response has consistently been some niche software where it's only a handful of users. The other kind is devs trying to evade Nintendo lawyers because apparently that's a thing.
So...if you're going to post this meme, name and shame. Discord only support is bad. But I have never run into this in the wild.
- I've run into it multiple times. It doesn't matter if it's niche or not.
  
  Names?
- The name is in the meme, Typst. Which appears to be a niche open source text editor, so your point stands.
  
  Typst says discord is for chatting with the community. But the project has issues and discussions enabled.
  I'm okay with "hey hang out with us on discord".
  I'm not okay with "Need support? Only discord."

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