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”.
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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!
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 💀
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Sounds like a very neat feature, but IMO still not great for people outside of the discord server esp. if the threads can’t show up in a search engine
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Greatly improved usability, while still greatly hurting searchability, in that common bugs are still hidden away from indexable sight.
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That is absolutely not true unless if you have exact word matches, and anyone with half a brain knows it’s not about searching within discord, but about searching outside of it.
Discord is a black hole of information. What happens inside is unknown from the outside. This is why every single FOSS project using discord loses the right to call themselves FOSS - an issues page is equally free, has way, way better features to relate an issue to patches and releases, and is actually indexable.
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then just go inside?
Ladies and gentlemen of the Linux community: A guy telling you to step inside the walled garden. Unironically.
I rest my case.
I don’t have the time for this.
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No I will not sign up for ze discord chinese data harvesting op
If your project isn’t something I can index through a search engine - you don’t have a project. Want a forum? Make a subreddit or better yet a Lemmy community.
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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.
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.
If only there was something called an Issues page attached to every code repository. Oh well, that is an idea that is probably impossible or whatever.
You can do that.
Sorry, I forgot to add “easily”.
If you don’t understand it, that’s ok. Maybe they could work on making it easier.
Making it easier is not the problem. The problem is having the search function actually find the messages you are looking for. The biggest problem I have with it is that word order matters too much. “Keyword1 keyword2” will find different messages than “keyword2 keyword1”. Not only that, but it will also search for different variations of the word with no way of preventing it from doing it. If there is a solution for these problems, then no one is taking about it.
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.
Lemmy seems better for asking questions/problem solving, but it doesn’t seem as good for growing a community or more casual chatting about a project because discord has that social aspect and demands much less effort for each ‘post’.
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
I think in a weird way one of the problems is the feeling that you have to get it right the first time. I think we need to obviously make it wayyyy easier and less intimidating for people to find instances to sign up at that are a good fit for them, but also I think we just need to send way more of a “get it wrong, treat your first account as just a fun diversion, don’t feel like you need to find the perfect home immediately” vibe. Not every social media account needs to be a permanent investment, it can just be a momentary passing version of yourself along your way from one place to another.
I think a lot of the subconscious anxiety is about trying to nab the handle you like to use on a popular up and coming social network before everyone else jumps on and takes your precious name… but there is no rush here. Your handle will likely sit untaken on more fediverse servers than you can shake a stick at, indefinitely.
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.
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.
The problem is that people don’t care about freedom, security or privacy. If they cared, they would only choose software that gives them those things. They would use Free Software. Even when it’s not always convenient.
So the issue here is not capitalism, but non-free proprietary software, because it makes it easy to abuse users. Unfortunately most people haven’t even heard of Free Software. They don’t realise that they deserve certain rights when using computers. I think if more people were familiar with the Free Software movement, they would think differently and they would demand freedom. Not all Lemmy users have heard of Free Software, but many of us understand that freedom is important. So we use it, even though it’s not convenient and the UI sucks.
We are capable of competing with corporations and often making better software that them, but that’s not enough. If people don’t understand the issues we are trying to solve, they will just use whatever new shiny app that comes out next. That’s why some Twitter users migrated to Bluesky and Threads. They don’t understand that after a while they will be abused the same way as before.
Even if we make Matrix way better, Discord users will still use Discord, because to them everything is fine and there is no reason to switch. Learning to use something new is always inconvenient. I doubt that all Windows users are unable to switch to GNU/Linux. They just don’t think it’s worth the effort, because to them there is nothing wrong. Being spied on and restricted is ok as long as all their proprietary games work.
So the issue here is not capitalism, but non-free proprietary software, because it makes it easy to abuse users. Unfortunately most people haven’t even heard of Free Software. They don’t realise that they deserve certain rights when using computers. I think if more people were familiar with the Free Software movement, they would think differently and they would demand freedom. Not all Lemmy users have heard of Free Software, but many of us understand that freedom is important. So we use it, even though it’s not convenient and the UI sucks.
We are capable of competing with corporations and often making better software that them, but that’s not enough. If people don’t understand the issues we are trying to solve, they will just use whatever new shiny app that comes out next. That’s why some Twitter users migrated to Bluesky and Threads. They don’t understand that after a while they will be abused the same way as before.
The reason people don’t understand the issues you are trying to solve is because yall that think like this in the free software movement won’t talk about the issues in terms of a broader political context that is actually relevant to normal people, in a language they are going to understand. Too many prominent people in FOSS just want to create these weird libertarian fantasies centered on technical problems and technical solutions without stepping back and recognizing the inherently socialist thrust of free software and the power that comes from speaking directly to the broader public about software in those terms.
So long as libertarian style ideology in FOSS fumbles around with trying to reinvent the wheel from first principles while socialists, unions and leftists exasperatedly gesture at the already existing wheels all around them, FOSS will always be a marginal movement of hobbyists without real political power to enact change in the realm of software and improve the lives of everybody not just extremely technologically literate people.
If you try to sell the FOSS movement like you are, as a clever technical licensing method to give users more freedom over how they use their particular niche software, and don’t connect these struggles in software to a broader class struggle or a related critique of why capitalism is so awful at creating tools and utilities we can rely on, than FOSS will always be an obscure island the broader public could care less about.
I don’t understand what fantasies you are talking about. We just want people to have freedom when using computers. Freedom that they deserve and that nobody should be able to take away from them. As a side effect we also get privacy and security and a society that works together to achieve common goals in a way that benefits us all. Those problems affect everyone who uses a computer.
The Free Software movement is 40 years old and it has already changed the world. It benefits everyone, not just technical people. Are you gonna tell me that all users of Firefox, Libre Office, Gimp, Matrix or Signal are only technical people? You are talking to me right now using Free Software and I’m responding to you on my fully Free Software operating system.
Free Software is not a licensing method. Software has to use licenses, because that’s how copyright works. It doesn’t give users any rights by default. Software should be free (as in freedom - we are not talking about price) by default, but it isn’t, so we have to use licenses. The Free Software that we use today was created under capitalism, so I don’t see how capitalism prevents us from making useful software and working together on improving it. There are also many developers and companies that sell Free Software (they make commercial programs).
Or just create a subreddit lol, beats Discord
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)
Some speculation on my part:
- There are other higher priority items for the developers.
- It’s open to abuse, even with restrictions, and a restricted guest account may create a bad impression if the restrictions are poorly communicated (and considering some basic features of Lemmy as-is struggle with being communicated, this is a high probability).
- Larger/more active servers/communities (depending on implementation) may simply disable the feature altogether or further limit it due to 2.
Despite what @AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml says, 3 (or variations on it) has become more common across some larger/more active Discord servers simply because communities understandably don’t want to deal with drop-in trolls or raids, meaning some of them go so far as to temporarily limit or add small hurdles for people even with accounts.
You can of course still find many Discord servers that don’t, which is among the reasons it remains so popular, but it’s not as sure of a thing as it was in the past.
It’s actually a misunderstanding of what I was saying. Lemmy already has this functionality. I use my normal account to ask a question in a community I’m not normally apart of. In the forum days I’d need to make an account for e.g. a power tool forum if I had a question.
Discord is the same. I use my normal account to join a server, ask a question, then leave after getting the answer. No temporary account needed.
I must’ve been more tired than I realized and didn’t catch that properly, sorry about that! I was also more focused on the other person’s question and taking it more literally as in the pseudo-guest feature of Discord, which enables you to pop in and ask without a full account.
Nah you’re good. No worries. I actually didn’t know that pseudo guest even existed
I see. Then I guess lemmy’s current approach is reasonable. I do recall most discord servers does have e.g. some period until being able to post something.
You can, you just comment in a community you’re not subscribed to, same as Reddit.
On Reddit / Lemmy I just post to the power tools subreddit if I have a question. But in the forum days I’d need to find a power tool forum, make an account, post, remember to check for answers outside of my daily browsing, then never use the forum again.
You could start a Lemmy community, subreddit, even a mastodon or Twitter account with the same investment and effort.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone is like "discord is a bad project discussion and documentation space! "
Which could be read as “it’s very hard to cut this steak with a plunger!”
People are complaining about using a tool incorrectly.
We’re complaining about having to use it incorrectly. We can’t help if the software project (that’s part of a software project, that’s part of a software project we need) only offers support via discord.
To belabor your metaphor, you’re saying that we shouldn’t complain if we want a steak and the only place to get steak only offers plungers as utensils.
Does that really happen? I only used discord for limited socialization, discussing e.g. math in specific channels.
You don’t have to. Fork it, make it better. Crush the existing developers, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their Patreon donators.
if you don’t like this restaurant, just open your own!
It’s open source software. Forking and improving is a core feature.
If people have a decent idea but a shit implementation, supercede them.
Sure. If you need software support, build a support system and get everyone else to use it. Makes perfect sense. I hope you live exclusively by this principal.
What? This is about documentation and maintenance of an open source project, this isn’t a SaaS situation.
If your documentation sucks, you’re no better than the discord hell the original project came from.
And yes, I only work with open source projects that are run well, or I fork them and maintain them for personal use.
Crush the existing developers, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their Patreon donators.
Conan the Developer has spoken!
Well the specific context here is software projects using it as the platform for their community… So it’s kind of like going to a steakhouse and being given a fork and plunger to eat with. It makes sense to both complain about the steakhouse, and remark on the shortcomings of using a plunger for the purpose it was imposed on you for.
Now of course, it’s wrong to say that Discord or a plunger are bad tools per se-- They are both occasionally useful for when I need to deal with some problematic shit. They are unpleasant, but I just hold my nose and thoroughly wash my hands after.
Actually the plunger analogy tracks better than I expected.
To which I’m saying anyone who engages with discord in a project space that is silly. Creators and users. Software dev happens elsewhere. Fork it and make it better.
Fork… what? The software project that you’re trying to get help with? The problem isn’t that you need to change the code, the problem is that you want to be able to leverage the community.
Oh sorry are you not familiar with GitHub or other branching code managers?
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
As someone diagnosed - you couldn’t have said it better 10/10
I’m 25 and share all these woes, what is old to you?
I’m 21 and completely agree.
Old is when you don’t try to understand the interface anymore.
Discord enables so much that’s never been so convenient before. Can’t say I like the company, but it’s pretty much the best at what it does.
I joined reddit at 23 like 3 yrs ago from Tumblr/4chan(tttt)/VK/irc and already used discord before. It’s just shit and you’re coping
K? Coping with what exactly?
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.
Until discord makes their search bearable to use, I would still rather use an actual forum over discord. It’s so irritating when I have to perform multiple searches to look up conversations people had on a topic because the stupid search function takes word order into consideration for what messages to show you. And since discord servers aren’t open to search engines, those can’t be used to alleviate that issue.
There’s also no easy way to narrow searches without memorizing their syntax, which of course they do not link to or make easy to find
Also on mobile it doesn’t let you type the syntax.
Using DuckDuckGo and searching for „Discord Search“ or „Discord Search Syntax“ makes this official help website appear in the top results, even as first. Also the syntax is shown when using the search.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000468588-Using-Search
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.
The moment I see the same question popping up more than a couple of times is an indication that it should be documented by somewhere that is actually indexed by search engines, normally the website/faq/docs/wiki as it is clear there is something missing.
To me, as part of a small team/project, it feels so much better to be able to use chat for every day communication just as I would at work. It allows a lot more expression in communication than forum posting. It has really helped us have a good sense of community and teamwork we might have not otherwise had.
I hang out in the Python discord quite a lot and it seems to work well for this purpose. I will say that Python’s core library and many of the most popular packages are well documented, so it’s definitely not a case where discord is the main source of knowledge and that’s a good thing. However, a lot of people on there are new to development and don’t know where to start, so we answer their beginner questions while teaching them how to search the docs for answers.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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…
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I think the problem here really is that people are using discord to fill a niche that they wouldn’t otherwise occupy if other options were as simple “make a server” (yes they aren’t actual servers but that’s not the point).
I will concede that it’s still weird to see any FOSS communities on there.
I think discord is primarily just useful for voice chat, yes.
But:
It’s a closed ecosystem that locks what would otherwise be searchable knowledge on the web, with an unsearchable, proprietary lockdown of that information.
Yeah, no. Proprietary, sure, but you can say that about almost communication mechanism that’s not a website with an API. It’s not like people would otherwise be posting these things somewhere else if discord didn’t exist. If it wasn’t discord it’d be slack or something. Discord is an entirely different medium and complaining that it isn’t a forum is just not a legitimate argument. They’re entirely different things.
They are entirely different things, but people are using it where they should be using a forum or similar solution due to its easy of use and popularity culture wise.
That doesn’t negate the reason why it’s hated.
Why are people choosing to chat in some random meme spam for actual info instead of making a reddit/forum/something indexable post like everyone always used to is what ppl don’t get
Matrix, for example, is an open protocol for real-time messaging.
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.)
Maybe that’s one thing people like about discord: AI can’t index their chat logs… unless discord starts selling that data.
I think they already do
They’re using AI to generate summaries of chat logs.
I don’t believe they’ve had an IPO yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they start selling that data to hit profitability.
“Starts” lol. They are way ahead of you, my friend.
I recommend reading Discord’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy some time. It is… more eyebrow-raising than usual.
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.
It’s not bad to have the conversational option, but at a certain point in a project’s life cycle it probably shouldn’t be the only option.
A complex project like a government would have a hard time throwing out all their knowledge infrastructure and relying purely on Discord.
Sure, but every project doesn’t have to provide every option.
Look at Reddit’s terrible conversational “solution”.
Discord is the option.
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.
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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?
Maybe it’s your devise or I’m misunderstanding? When I click a notification it takes me to where it’s at. Gilded on the other hand sucks balls at notification.
It doesn’t really matter if I select the notification from the windows notification system, or the one on my android. At most it only takes me to the correct server and channel at most. Unless the message was one of the things said that’s still on the screen when discord opens that server and channel, then I won’t see the message.
So if I’m fast at clicking the notification as it happens, then it works fine. If there’s a delay, fuck me, I guess. Which is especially bad when it comes to busy servers with a lot of chatter.
Discord sometimes pings you for sales of their products!!
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.
Discord has done for reproducible support what panty hose has done for finger fucking.
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 awhy the lucky stiffoh, I’ve seen it being used before.
“Teams for Gamers”
I’m going to make a project and, “Join our IRC community @ Rizon”
