ditch discord! ( discuss.tchncs.de )

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

  1. person looking ahead. the text below him says, "wow a cool software. let’s check out the community"
  2. 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.

  3. hand on gear shift zoomed in, switching to reverse
  4. person looking behind with the text “nevermind”.
boredsquirrel ,

Btw they have Github Discussions now

tou ,
@tou@lemmy.world avatar

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.

obinice ,
@obinice@lemmy.world avatar

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 :-)

lud ,

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.

tron , (edited )
@tron@midwest.social avatar

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.

  1. USA government has access to unencrypted push notifications on Android and iOS. Discord does not offer any encryption. Wired Article
  2. Discord is moderating private chats PC Gamer,
  3. Discord moderating policy is becoming more ideological and political. TechCrunch
  4. Tencent Ownership
  5. 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.

LightDelaBlue ,
@LightDelaBlue@lemmy.world avatar

Oh damn that concerning .I use allucord but that don’t ditch many of those problùme .

Icaria ,

Discord is moderating private chats PC Gamer

This annoys me, not because discord is doing anything wrong, there needs to be a way to report spam and abuse, but because users can potentially abuse the feature. My hope is that reported DMs past a certain age are automatically ignored.

Discord moderating policy is becoming more ideological and political. TechCrunch

This one is just inevitable due to all the kids on it. Discord doesn’t want media and govts breathing down its neck after kids are bullied into killing themselves via the platform.

Where it gets annoying is one of the bigger public servers in Oz is straight-up a neo-nazi recruitment vector, and no amount of reporting seems to get anything done about it.

TravisKelce ,
@TravisKelce@lemmy.world avatar

Hilarious

FontMasterFlex ,

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.

femboy_bird ,
@femboy_bird@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

You ditch discord because it’s bad for organizing projects

I ditched discord because it’s proprietary

We are not the same

Dragon_Titan ,

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

abraxas ,

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.

lemmesay OP ,
@lemmesay@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

zod?

abraxas ,

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

lemmesay OP ,
@lemmesay@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

oh, I’ve seen it being used before.

Tattorack ,
@Tattorack@lemmy.world avatar

I mean, good riddance, then?

MystikIncarnate ,

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.

Faresh ,

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).

MystikIncarnate ,

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?

Riven ,
@Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

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.

MystikIncarnate ,

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.

aidan ,

Discord sometimes pings you for sales of their products!!

dangblingus ,

Another day, another 10 posts of people complaining about discord. This is getting tiring guys.

Octopus1348 ,
@Octopus1348@lemy.lol avatar

Ditchcord!

smileyhead ,

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.

dangblingus ,

My brother in Christ, this is a Linux community. High barriers to entry is literally what you signed up for.

smileyhead ,

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.

Icaria ,

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.

UnderpantsWeevil ,
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Digestive_Biscuit ,
@Digestive_Biscuit@feddit.uk avatar

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?

smileyhead ,

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.

cordlesslamp ,

Why so much hate post about discord lately? What’s happened?

calcopiritus ,
  1. This is not lately, it’s been happening for a long time.
  2. Nothing in particular happened.
  3. 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.
dangblingus ,

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.

calcopiritus ,

I’m sorry that I’m not smart enough for your discord server. But I can ask Google “how to parse html with regex” and he’ll answer me, even if the question is “stupid”, because stackoverflow is designed for that purpose and is indexed by Google.

UnderpantsWeevil ,
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world avatar

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.

calcopiritus ,

Well, if all the good answers are behind non-indexable discord servers, of course search engines will be filled with SEO crap. If I Google “how to parse HTML with regex” stack overflow comes as the first entry.

Wikis and FAQs are not at all unique to discord.

If the only benefit is that “it’s not reachable, therefore spammers won’t spam”, then it is shit. If an information source is not reachable, might as well not exist. If you don’t want spammers, you make things read-only, or whitelist/blacklist system or any other system.

UnderpantsWeevil ,
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world avatar

Wikis and FAQs are not at all unique to discord.

No. And I’ll happily concede that the above is annoying af when the Wiki/Web FAQ should be the primary source for info. But Google should be able to search/cache/serve that kind of info and clearly seems incapable of doing so anymore.

If the only benefit is that “it’s not reachable, therefore spammers won’t spam”, then it is shit.

I don’t think that’s the only benefit of Discord, by a long shot. I just consider it a fringe benefit, relative to the older “Here’s a link to a Slashdot post from 2001 that’s got 5000 comments, 90% of which are now gibberish that’s piled in thanks to the high Google index.”

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