you shouldn't use discord at all .... I think nowadays it's the only app that uses plain text for all messages avoid discord
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Depends what you use it for, there's some great servers for a lot of things. I don't really care about platforms and basically use them all. Certain people really hate Discord but the alternatives don't have many interesting things on them, and the people who use them aren't a very diverse group. Checking all the right FOSS and feature boxes is nice but it's not what actually makes a platform good to use.
from the article:
In short, using Discord for your free software/open source (FOSS) software project is a very bad idea. Free software matters — that’s why you’re writing it, after all. Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
Interesting to do a “s/Discord/Github/” replace on the above. Same situation yet hardly anyone gives a shit.
So yes, Drew DeVault is right. But he overestimates people’s commitment to free world digital rights principles and consistency thereof.
not at all the same situation. Git itself is not proprietary so all the projects can survive without GitHub if the need arises. Additionally, you don’t need an account to view the repository or its discussions. There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue, however it doesn’t compare to discord, which is much, much worse.
I don't care about the wall around the garden as much as I care that the wall was made by a deranged clown with no UI design experience.
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doesn’t help that modern tools like lazy.nvim, etc make alternative hosting a barrier to entry. and a GitHub mirror is a tedious half measure.
There's not really much point in using a self hosted gitea or codeberg or sourcehut if you want the barrier of entry to be as low as possible for potential contributors. Maybe if some larger projects made the move. But GitHub has more features (like discussions), provides better hosting and ease of use. The focus of any open source project should be on development of the software, not the software which supports its development.
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I miss regular old web forums, mailing lists and that sort of thing. Discord / Slack / etc have zero discoverability. The ability to google your question is gone, and knowledge is ephemeral, when a chat is the central source of community.
Thank you!!! I feel the same way and I felt like I was losing my marbles.
Discord is just way too ephemeral and the answers you get depend on who is logged on at the time. I don’t expect an immediate answer but I also don't wanna wade through 14 conversations either.
A few weeks ago the community manager of the Helldivers Discord got upset and deleted the whole thing. Years of discussions and knowledge (and memes) gone.
Naturally you can't even bring up the idea that a Discord community takes on a life past its "owner" once it reaches a certain size or level of activity. "Your container, your rules" say the defenders unironically, while not acknowledging that you neither own the "server" nor make all the rules.
I've been finding this out at work recently. Got lazy and started doing most of my conversations via teams instead of email and now having to find shit from like a year ago is practically impossible. Even some conversations I know contained what I'm looking for just have random gaps where posts have disappeared.
Teams are just shit like that. Although my company has migrated to 365 for our work apps, the team's main communication is still Slack. With Slack I'm still able to find old messages easily and be able to link it in relevant context.
yeah, discord do be like that
on hindsight they are trying to implement a "forum" like experience, where you can create a dedicated threads channel where you csn search previous threads, but it's not exactly like a real forum, pretty useful tho
The search in their new forum system is really, really, really, very, very bad. It only searches for exact matches in post titles. So not very useful. I hope we'll see more projects start to use GitHub discussions, but it depends on the commitment of the maintainers