Gullible ,

Neither here nor there, but how typical is it to turn on notifications for a medium size discord server? Would you consider it?

onlinepersona OP ,

I refuse to use Discord for many of the reasons listed in the other comments.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Kiloee ,

Define medium size.

All messages notifications? Hell no never, not even on my own less than 10 persons server.

Stuff like announcement role pings? In servers I care or the roles let me filter very finely yes, irrespective of size.

@everyone pings? Only on servers I care a lot about or that use them sparely.

grubders ,

discord is the best villain but also the worst platform ever

KeenFlame ,

I feel like so many people talk about how itā€™s not searchable or other concerns but for me I donā€™t really care so much because thereā€™s an even bigger deal breaker which is their license agreement, where you sign away the property rights of anything you post, giving away your entire open source projectā€¦ This alone should disqualify it for any work of any creative sort. They own things you give them. I would never use it for development because of this.

Ultraviolet ,

Is this an actual thing or is it a misinterpretation of the standard boilerplate ā€œyou grant us a non-exclusive non-transferrable license to do the basic things that make a post visible to other people on the internetā€ message that every platform where you post stuff has?

KeenFlame ,

Iā€™m not personally knowledgeable on it, just going off what the investigation told why we stopped using it in our project really

sleepmode ,

I bought a keyboard kit recently and to my horror discovered all the ā€œdocumentationā€ to build it is on Discord. The creatorā€™s last message was that he was working on other things after losing interest, and was not monitoring it anymore. So all the channels are full of messages asking where he is, what the status is, is he coming back, etc. I had to scroll back through dozens of pages just to find the docs.

Maybe put up a wiki on GitHub or something? Especially if you donā€™t want to run a forum or plan on dipping. Itā€™s not that hard.

WindowsEnjoyer ,

Why is everyone hating Discord? Itā€™s pretty neat platform when all the features used properly.

mint_tamas ,

Itā€™s the worst way to document something (doesnā€™t even make sense to call it documentation). Itā€™s closed source and the content is only accessible if you register with an email address.

onlinepersona OP ,

Maybe read a few of the responses?

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

AMDIsOurLord ,

If youā€™re putting that creative Commons thing in your comment to prevent AI training, itā€™s as useful as those ā€œsovereign citizenā€ dorks against paying taxes

AI companies really donā€™t give much of a flying fuck

onlinepersona OP ,

Thanks. I donā€™t care.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Chadus_Maximus ,

Used to be fast. Isnā€™t anymore. Need new fast thing.

Faresh ,

Since we are on the topic of disliking Discord, what Matrix clients do you humans use? I tried both Element and Nheko (the latter of which isnā€™t electron based), and they both felt slow, clunky and unresponsive.

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

Iā€™ve heard this about Element from a lot of people and I have to wonder: Is that the mobile client or on an actual PC? Because I use it on my phone and itā€™s actually more reliable than the Discord mobile app.

Pika ,
@Pika@sh.itjust.works avatar

I gave up on matrix, was too complicated of a setup and the site was throughly unhelpful for newcomers. I eventually got it but, the permission system was somehow worse then IRC and due to the federation aspect of it you canā€™t modify the standard at all because then the other clients/servers canā€™t recieve you.

Faresh , (edited )

Are you using any other alternative now besides IRC?

Rootiest ,
@Rootiest@lemmy.world avatar

Element, Beeper, FluffyChat, NeoChat, Cinny, Thunderbird

Crazazy ,

Thunderbird has matrix support now? šŸ¤Æ

Rootiest ,
@Rootiest@lemmy.world avatar

Yup it does!

onlinepersona OP ,

Iā€™ve actually had good experiences with Element except on mobile. Are you talking about mobile?

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Faresh ,

Nope. Desktop.

pkill ,

electron bloat

tengkuizdihar ,
@tengkuizdihar@programming.dev avatar

did you just license your own comment?

pkill ,

Fluffychat or Gomuks

Faresh ,

I think I will try Gomuks, since I now also tried Fluffychat, but scrolling felt weird and on a touchpad had the tendency to swipe left on messages to reply instead of scrolling down and I was unable to resize or close the channel info and channel list, or its font size (there also appears to be no settings button). Maybe the CLI based clients will be more suited for me, since I also donā€™t mind using irssi for IRC (but it should be noted I also have no problems with graphical IRC clients like hexchat or others, which work perfectly fine on my machine).

pkill ,

it had some stability issues, alternatively, also weechatā€™s quite decent since it has quite long history of development

morrowind ,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

Cinny. It uses Tauri instead of electron

tengkuizdihar ,
@tengkuizdihar@programming.dev avatar

I just use element right now, pretty good for phones and imo excellent for desktop (ux and usability wise)

sysadmin420 ,

Schlidichat!

Afiefh ,

On my phone I switched to Element X because Element would take up to a minute to sync messages. Iā€™m willing to put up with the reduced feature set, as long as actual messages fucking arrive in time!

technom ,

Matrix clients are slow and clunky because the protocol is heavy and overloaded. Upcoming sliding-sync feature will make them a bit more responsive.

Talking about specific clients, my favorite is Fractal. Itā€™s still missing some features though (like spaces). But itā€™s getting updated fast.

noodlejetski , (edited )

every time I run into an issue with Proton-GE it makes me angry again: github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom?tab=rā€¦

Potatos_are_not_friends ,

Unpopular opinion:

For a open source project like the above which has so many constant moving parts, a discord is probably a good idea to ensure the author of the issue can provide more details about their problem and respond to follow up immediately.

Because I can absolutely see a breaking change involving something outside of the open-source project itself.

I say that as a person who hates discord. But Iā€™m also part of the older generation so waiting 3-9 months for a reply is kinda normal. And the projects I support, itā€™s pretty common to make a merge request that finally gets approved a two years later.

noodlejetski ,

to ensure the author of the issue can provide more details about their problem and respond to follow up immediately.

if you actually visit that Discord (like I reluctantly do, from time to time), youā€™ll find that all issues are being discussed in a handful of general channels with multiple people discussing multiple issues at the same time in one never-eding stream of messages. if you miraculously find a proper keyword that brings up someone else having the same issue as you do, the only way to find if someone else replied to it is by scrolling through all that noise.

kurwa ,

Discord has like a Q/A section now doesnā€™t it? That should definitely be utilized more than the chat portion for projects like this.

tonkatwuck ,

You mentioned ā€œkeywordā€, are you aware of the search feature in discord?

noodlejetski , (edited )

yes, Iā€™m aware of how absolutely useless it is.

xenoclast ,

This entire thread is just a bunch of old nerds screaming at the tide.

Hate stuff all you want. It isnā€™t going to change anything. ā€œPeople should do this or thatā€. It must be exhausting to be so angry at something but do nothing about it.

Imagine using all this energy to really understand while people use Discord and try to make something better.

OR join these projects you apparently like and volunteer to do the extra work to publisher useful documentation. Unless of course you never intend to be useful to FLOSS and just want everyone else to do the work for you.

OR you can continue to complain and get nowhere while completely alienating an entire generation of developers. Theyā€™ll eventually forget you exist while theyā€™re busy making the future happen.

Iā€™m sure the folks that are doing the work arenā€™t hanging out on Lemmy complaining about kids these days.

phoenixz ,

Oh noes, people see something that isnā€™t right and theyā€™re saying something about it! Letā€™s give no real arguments and just toss some half baked insults, im sure thatā€™ll work

sanguine_artichoke ,
@sanguine_artichoke@midwest.social avatar

Why are you posting this on Lemmy and not Discord?

ComradeKhoumrag ,
@ComradeKhoumrag@infosec.pub avatar

I donā€™t mind using discord, but I think itā€™s best to consolidate all project management communications on a single platform

onlinepersona OP ,

Why do you assume only ā€œkidsā€ use discord?

Iā€™d understand your reaction if this were a defense of outdated bullshit that looked like it was invented in the previous century and looked the part like IRC, mailinglists, phpbb, usenet, ā€¦ But matrix is from the 2010s. It has threads, video calls, voice channels, emojis, emoji reactions, and other stuff I donā€™t use. Itā€™s evolving. There are many clients (web, mobile, desktop, CLI) for many OSes, etc. The only thing it doesnā€™t have is VC seed money and large amounts of marketing.

But thatā€™s not the point. The point is opensource projects using closed source products that are controlled by a single, commercial entity.

OR join these projects you apparently like and volunteer to do the extra work to publisher useful documentation. Unless of course you never intend to be useful to FLOSS and just want everyone else to do the work for you.

Thatā€™s it: if they use discord these people (including me) wonā€™t. ā€œIf you donā€™t use discord, you arenā€™t useful to opensource and want everyone else to do the work for youā€ is quite the take šŸ˜‚

OR you can continue to complain and get nowhere while completely alienating an entire generation of developers. Theyā€™ll eventually forget you exist while theyā€™re busy making the future happen.

L.O.L so the ā€œprevious generationā€ is just sitting around complaining? No work is ever done? The linux kernel is written by teenagers and 20 year olds, rust, PHP, javascript, W3C, firefox, conferences, etc. are all done by the next generation with absolutely no input from the previous generation (whatever that means)? At 40 people either drop dead or start shouting at clouds?

My sides.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Poik ,
@Poik@pawb.social avatar

I love discord, for what itā€™s for. Quick synchronous talks you will never refer back to again. So not software development where indexable logs of information are necessary. I know discord has indexing, and now some form of forum. But every discord Iā€™ve been to for development (especially modding communities) has a large corpus of synchronous logs where people get annoyed if you ask a question that was answered one before a long time ago with extremely common language making it nearly impossible to search for because the keywords have been used out of context of your question hundreds of times since the question was asked.

If the Dev communities used the forums mode in discord more, it wouldnā€™t always solve it, but itā€™d be much better. There are better places than discord for these things, but I have been trying to meet people where theyā€™re established.

rimjob_rainer ,

Iā€™m an old nerd with 23?

Theyā€™ll eventually forget you exist while theyā€™re busy making the future happen.

I highly doubt a bunch of discord kids are able to make anything happen.

AI_toothbrush ,

Ummmm you know youre on lemmy right? The whole point of lemmy is that some company doesnt own everything and thats why people dont want to use discord. Its kind of ironic to use discord for a foss project when you think about it.

technom ,

Wow! You are so deluded, thinking of yourself as a cool new kid with cool new tech (Discord) fighting against old people. What you donā€™t get is that people are protesting the use of Discord for something itā€™s not suited to. Thereā€™s no generation gap in it. The best of the youngest developers I know have the same opinion. Perhaps itā€™s time for you to reflect on your own standing.

Gallardo994 ,

So, what do we use? Matrix? Element? Idk?

tron ,
@tron@midwest.social avatar

Element is just a client, while Matrix is the chat protocol. But yeah, I have recently switched my discord server to a matrix instance and its been pretty great. Some pushback by users who didnā€™t care about privacy or security, but overall the tech is solid. We didnā€™t like that discord was moderating private chats and they donā€™t offer any type of encryption.

ytg , (edited )

Mailing list! (/sā€¦ unless?)
And Lemmy/kbin obviously

trbleclef ,

IRC has been working for me for at least 25 years

electric_nan ,

IRC is the vim of chat.

Potatos_are_not_friends ,

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6d86f824-5fe4-41c5-acd9-2be4da16fe35.png

camelbeard , (edited )

Open source communities have been around longer than the internet, so they can manage fine without discord.

Also donā€™t you just join by submitting code or bug reports or other things?

sanguine_artichoke ,
@sanguine_artichoke@midwest.social avatar

Maybe a free and open source forum software. There are a few out there, maybe you used one before.

onlinepersona OP ,

For synchronous communication? Element, Zulip, Rocketchat (or if you really must, IRC šŸ¤® ), just something opensource and privacy respecting.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

veloxization ,
@veloxization@yiffit.net avatar

I think the point here is that anything that can be indexed by search engines or archival crawlers would be better, so not Matrix either. Forums, for example. Like what happens if the Discord community gets deleted due to whatever circumstances? All of that gathered knowledge will be just gone with no way to recover or search for it.

technom ,

Anything else that can:

  1. Segregate topics clearly, without stuffing all of it into a single stream
  2. Can be queried from a web search engine.

Discourse is a great choice - it meets both criteria. Even phpbb meets the requirements.

Even Zulip is objectively better than Discord. It meets point 1 very well. I donā€™t know how well it does in point 2.

peak_dunning_krueger ,

The people in this thread are open source power users who donā€™t get and donā€™t want the features that discord offers. Itā€™s no surprise youā€™d rather have your forum back. I donā€™t think thatā€™s how itā€™s going to work.

Privacy is good and what discord does is bad. But donā€™t lecture me on how convient and nice it is to use or run something like matrix, if this is your idea of a user onboarding experience:

matrix.org/docs/chat_basics/matrix-for-im/

TheFonz ,

Just reading that is giving me a headache. Iā€™m sure itā€™s a good product but my god, I donā€™t have time for that.

tron ,
@tron@midwest.social avatar

This user is being extremely pedantic, I recently moved my discord server to a matrix instance and I promise you, it is not that hard. Download Element, make an account in the app, log in. It takes no longer than any other service.

ArcaneSlime ,

Wdym, thatā€™s 10 whole paragraphs with 27 whole sentences, what do I look like some kind of old person (like idk 29? Gross) who can read more than one line at a time? I, The TikTok generation, am incapable of sustaining concentration for more than 30sec at a time! Itā€™s too hard even though it explicitly lays out each step to make it easier and even includes a couple screenshots!

TheFonz ,

I know youā€™re being sarcastic but think about itā€¦itā€™s not far from reality

Ledivin ,

Some real old-man-yells-at-cloud vibes coming from this comment

peak_dunning_krueger ,

Matrix isnā€™t competing with the experience of setting up another account on a different platform, with email, username, passwords, recovery key, display theme, notifications settings, content warnings, etcā€¦

Itā€™s competing with being able to click on a link to join a subgroup of a social network that people are already a part of and already signed into.

Potatos_are_not_friends ,

Sorry, Iā€™m a bit thick. What was confusing about the documentation?

Am Iā€¦ A power user?

morbidcactus ,

I have no problems with discord as chat/supplement (and I remember setting up irc-discord bots in the past so you could totally have both) itā€™s when discord is the only way to interact that itā€™s annoying IMO. Part of the benefit of forums and git issues is searchability imo, canā€™t really search discord externally for content and I definitely have found the search function annoying at best.

That said, video guides instead of manuals also annoys me, but thatā€™s a different issue.

sanguine_artichoke ,
@sanguine_artichoke@midwest.social avatar

Itā€™s confusing to me why people think discord is a good replacement for forums. Itā€™s not even the same paradigm - itā€™s a chat program. Not being indexed by search engines is a major drawback as well.

peak_dunning_krueger ,

Exactly, itā€™s a different paradigm and I donā€™t want a forum.

fibojoly ,

Searching shit is pretty damn important and Discord isnā€™t optimal, definitely. But somehow itā€™s better at searching than Lemmy! Now how does that happen?

mac ,
@mac@programming.dev avatar

Lemmy is indexed so can be found on search engines while discord cant

For internal search without using a search engine discord has had way more devs, time and money thrown at it. Still would say its barely better than lemmy (just is cause of the time filters)

JackbyDev ,

Because you can make a Discord server in like one click basically. Thatā€™s it. Also they have forum channels now on so-called community servers.

Donā€™t misunderstand me, Iā€™m not saying Discord is better. I still hate how often it is used for things it shouldnā€™t be and I hate that it isnā€™t indexed by search engines. Iā€™m just explaining.

pkill ,

ITā€™S NOT A SERVER FFS

JackbyDev ,

I feel you. Iā€™m just using the terminology they do.

onlinepersona OP ,

Matrix is the protocol. Element is one of the (many) clients. Setting up an account on a server is as easy or easier than discord. Try it app.element.io

Matrix has video and voice rooms, screen-sharing, direct calls, threads, and very little fluff. An entire conference (FOSDEM) was hosted on a matrix server and people from any homeserver could connect. Admittedly, I donā€™t use other features, but those are all that I need. What other features are essential for an opensource community that only discord provides?

As for forums, they are for async. Are you going to seriously tell me discord is a good forum replacement?

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

peak_dunning_krueger ,

To me it looks like the features are about 80% there, canā€™t find the screen sharing, login with QR doesnā€™t exist. Not really sure how to even search for some features because the naming is so extremely bad. ā€œmatrix automationā€ ā€œelement botā€. E.g. this is a very poor collection: element.io/integrations Looks like custom emotes are still missing.

But letā€™s say all of that exists and works.

What other features are essential for an opensource community that only discord provides?

I think weā€™re talking about different things then. I donā€™t need something for an opensource community. I need something for ALL communities Iā€™m a part of. Because Iā€™m already in 40 of them and 5 of them are FOSS projects. So switching those over increases friction, if itā€™s not a total replacement.

As for forums, they are for async. Are you going to seriously tell me discord is a good forum replacement?

This is inverted. I donā€™t need to defend why the platform Iā€™m on is good, (itā€™s not), you need to explain why forums are supposed to be better (they are significantly worse).

Documentation belongs on a dedicated website, Issues belong on some gitlab or something instance. If I have a question, I want the answer reasonably quickly or Iā€™m just not going to use the software youā€™re providing. If Iā€™m nice, Iā€™ll leave a post on the bug tracker that the install/getting started documentation didnā€™t work.

Forums serve no purpose anymore.

Right now, Iā€™m going to stop using element/matrix again for the forseeable future because there are no communities with public rooms Iā€™m interested in.

onlinepersona OP ,

I think weā€™re talking about different things then

You are in a comment thread with the title ā€œFLOSS communities right nowā€. I donā€™t know what you were expectingā€¦

Forums serve no purpose anymore.

So programming.dev is useless and serves no purpose? A budding community must be online 24/7 to provide support because ā€œI want the answer reasonably quicklyā€? Not even a budding community, imagine a community with many people and the chat moving forward quickly enough for your question to be out of scrolling view within minutes due to other discussions going on. Even in that scenario there is ā€œno purposeā€ for a forum?

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

peak_dunning_krueger ,

Weā€™re talking about discord and why people use that and not other technology. 99% of the people on discord are not involved with FOSS, but they are what make the platform attractive.

programming.dev is useless and serves no purpose?

No, this instance is federated and not a traditional forum.

A budding community must be online 24/7 to provide support

No, itā€™s fine if that support is given via the git platform, and itā€™s also fine if it takes a while. And itā€™s also fine if the question goes unanswered.

imagine a community with many people and the chat moving forward quickly enough for your question to be out of scrolling view within minutes due to other discussions going on. Even in that scenario there is ā€œno purposeā€ for a forum?

Yes. Because it is functionally no different than a forum main page where so many new topics get created that questions people donā€™t get to get buried. And also, Iā€™ve never seen that happen with chats. What I have seen is that people didnā€™t have time or interest to answer my question. Which is fine because they owe me nothing. But a forum would not have ā€œsolvedā€ that.

onlinepersona OP ,

Weā€™re talking about discord and why people use that and not other technology. 99% of the people on discord are not involved with FOSS, but they are what make the platform attractive.

Dunno what to tell you, but I made meme about FLOSS communities using discord and youā€™re talking to me about the other ā€œ99%ā€. Not my problem if you go off-topic.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

pkill ,

mumble is better for synchronous communication

excitingburp ,

Mumble needs a new client. As much as we, myself included, hate Electron apps, no normie is going to use Mumble when it looks the way that it does.

pkill ,

you can style it though

pkill ,

usemumble.neocities.org

peak_dunning_krueger ,

Oh I agree, doesnā€™t prevent me from being locked into certain communities on discord.

technom ,

We donā€™t ask for forums because we donā€™t want features of Discord. We ask for forums because we want features that Discord does not offer:

  1. Ability to search the discussions from a web search engine
  2. Proper segregation of threads - a question followed by related replies (similar to github discussions, issues and PRs)
  3. Ability to back up the discussion history, so that it doesnā€™t disappear if the server goes down.
  4. Ability to operate unimpeded if the silo operator decides to monetize the information by holding it hostage.

Note: Privacy is not what we need here. We need the solutions to open source problems to be public - especially, searchability.

jrgd ,
@jrgd@lemm.ee avatar

The desired alternative is not Matrix simply because privacy-conscious, open-source ecosystem vs. proprietary solution is not the goal. Matrix would still generally be terrible for support. What people want is publicly searchable content that is ideally indexed like a wiki. Many will happily settle for issue boards or even forums though. Discord has pathetic search capabilities in comparison to any search engine and has no way to properly and publicly backup information that is posted to the platform. With a website of any kind, one could clone the site for mirroring or simply get a web archive service to crawl relevant sections.

onlinepersona OP ,

I get the impression that opensource communities are missing out on contributors by even including discord in the mix šŸ§

jeremyparker , (edited )

Iā€™m not sure I understand the problem. Is the problem that theyā€™re not using matrix? Or do you prefer that it was still all on IRC? I donā€™t hate IRC but itā€™s definitely way less user friendly.

onlinepersona OP ,

Another commenter mentioned that they have matrix, discord, IRC, and discourse, however everything but discord is dead. So, due to the network effect of just including discord, it reduces participation on other channels.
Communities that are ā€œdiscord onlyā€ however exclude people like those in this comment section.

I refuse to use discord for all the reasons people mentioned. Personally, matrix + lemmy/kbin/mbin = best. Other opensource direct communication solutions are acceptable too, like Zulip or RocketChat, but only if bridged with matrix. Then I just need one account. For async, discourse is alright, but not my favorite.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

YeetPics ,
@YeetPics@mander.xyz avatar

Is this loss?

Ascend910 ,

Laughs in matrix and element

rimjob_rainer ,

Discord separates and controls possibly useful information from the public internet. Itā€™s one of the worst platforms to use.

zarkanian ,
@zarkanian@sh.itjust.works avatar

Are you against IRC for the same reason?

kilgore_trout ,
@kilgore_trout@feddit.it avatar

IRC allows archiving

zarkanian ,
@zarkanian@sh.itjust.works avatar

How so?

T156 ,

You can easily log and archive things that happen on an open protocol, not so much a proprietary one like discord.

xenoclast ,

Is it possible to have a server/channel bot publicly export channel activity?

kilgore_trout ,
@kilgore_trout@feddit.it avatar

meta.wikimedia.org/ā€¦/Publicly_logged_channelswww.w3.org/2002/03/RRSAgent

Wikimedia and W3C log their chats with bots developed by themselves. I admit though that I am not expert in this topic, but I know that LiberaChatā€™s policies forbid logging.

zarkanian ,
@zarkanian@sh.itjust.works avatar

You canā€™t search an IRC channel for previous conversations, though? Isnā€™t that what we were talking about?

oshu ,
@oshu@lemmy.world avatar

Nobody considers IRC to be a substitute for documentation.

AMDIsOurLord ,

IRC archivers just idle on a server and record anything that comes by. You can do that with Discord. Matter of fact, I keep regular archive backups of a server we have thatā€™s full of news

drndramrndra ,

You never saw an IRC chatroom archive?

rimjob_rainer ,

IRC isnā€™t controlled by a single (shady) company

EngineerGaming ,
@EngineerGaming@feddit.nl avatar

Servers can be hosted by anyone; there is usually no account needed to join the chat; it would not randomly demand a phone number or an ID; it does not get pissed over people not using a very specific piece of bloated spywareā€¦ So nope, not against.

optimal ,
@optimal@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

also, IRC logs are usually public and searchable. thatā€™s actually how we got hunter2

KillingTimeItself ,

PLEASE I BEG OF YOU, STOP USING DISCORD IN PLACE OF FORUMS AND PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE BOARDS!

ALostInquirer ,

While I agree, what might everyday people use to set up forums as relatively easily and cheaply as their Discord servers, and not have them riddled with ads or other clunky elements?

Iā€™m pretty sure those that may have even been considering forums went to Discord because the only other options were more involved in terms of set up/maintenance and cost, the latter to get something without ads.

centof ,

what might everyday people use to set up forums as relatively easily and cheaply as their Discord servers, and not have them riddled with ads or other clunky elements?

Discourse is a clean open source forum software that is commonly used for application support and well suited for it.

Or if your a real die hard for the fediverse, you could set up a lemmy instance for application support. Thereā€™s even a phpBB frontend for an oldschool forum look and feel for it.

Usually everyday people donā€™t setup forums, thatā€™s the responsibility of the application owner(s) or provider. In this case, the easy option is also the shitty option if measured by discoverability of the content.

ALostInquirer ,

Usually everyday people donā€™t setup forums, thatā€™s the responsibility of the application owner(s) or provider.

By this do you mean official forums? If so I think this is kind of missing some of the independent forums for software (whether games or media players or the like) or other media, which some sorta-everyday people set up in the past. Many have migrated to Discord not only because itā€™s easy but, I think, because itā€™s simply more cost-effective.

Forums donā€™t seem to be cheap. Discourseā€™s own managed hosting goes for $50 a month, from one of their partners itā€™s $20, and looks like somewhere in-between if you try to spin it up yourself (e.g. Digital Ocean droplet runs $4 a month, then add in domain, and mail-provider (~$20-35)). Looking at that, itā€™s little wonder so many either opt for official forums, unofficial subreddits, Lemmy/Kbin communities, or Discord servers instead now.

Maybe if I dug around some more I could find some options for managed hosting (which makes more sense for regular people, I think, to deal with technical maintenance) for Discourse or the like that are cheaper, but I canā€™t imagine one may find much that beats free. Unless there is something, unfortunately I guess weā€™re kind of stuck with the situation as-is barring some pleasant exceptions.

centof ,

Yeah, I was referring to official forums for technical support or feature requests and the like. I donā€™t really think that everyday people were usually the ones who setup forums, it is website operators and other techies who set those up. The people who setup an independent forum are not the same people who setup a discord community. Discord has a much lower barrier to entry that usually results in a lower quality information and moderation as than a forum would.

I mean, yeah, forums are harder, for sure. $20-35 monthly for a mail provider seems to high to me; I would expect that to be about the yearly cost. But, I donā€™t really have much experience with an email provider for that use case. Really the problem lies in that a website operator and a community maintainer are 2 very different types of people that rarely intersect.

crispy_kilt ,

Github has discussions. The code is already there anyways

intensely_human ,

You can even have threads and comments attached to specific lines of code in specific commits. Github is practically effortless to set up.

jeremyparker ,

Microsoft is going to continue to increase their monetization of GitHub. Itā€™s going to get worse, not better.

clot27 ,
@clot27@lemm.ee avatar

Just hoping we get some github alternative on fediverse, so far Ive seen codeberg but its hosted by a non profit org in berlinā€¦ Which is great but for e.g. I cant contribute to the code without creating an account on their instance

SeekPie ,

I really donā€™t know about these things, but Iā€™ve heard that GitLab is a good alternative to GitHub?

Omniraptor ,

it used to be but theyā€™ve been focusing heavily into corporate clients and shutting off special treatment/support for foss software projects the past couple years

jeremyparker ,

Iā€™ve been loving Source Hut, but theyā€™re not ready to handle GitHub-level usage

ulterno ,
@ulterno@lemmy.kde.social avatar

Matrix chat works pretty well too.
Itā€™s ~ as convenient as Discord. More convenient in certain cases. And one might be able to easily use the API to create an Archive site for all discussions in there.

In other cases, you have the ability of encrypted conversations, which of course you wonā€™t be archiving. Right?

KillingTimeItself ,

honestly i would understand matrix more than discord, itā€™s a lot easier to just jump in and start existing.

po_tay_toes ,
@po_tay_toes@lemmy.sambands.net avatar

as relatively easily and cheaply

You pay more when using these types of software than if you hired an engineer to set up a complete forum ecosystem. Just not with money.

nao ,

Why not Lemmy?

KillingTimeItself ,

90% of the projects that i use and other people care about are developed by people that have the technical ability to set up and host a web server. They likely have the cash. Itā€™s not exactly outrageously expensive. If itā€™s small enough they dont have the cash for it, they donā€™t need it.

Im guessing the discord was more of a legacy thing, someone was like ā€œhey im having a problem, can you contact me on discord?ā€ and then suddenly we have the rust discord server.

Tattorack ,
@Tattorack@lemmy.world avatar

But Discord is too convenient.

Contend6248 ,

For a quick question yes, but if you try to search a solution for a problem itā€™s actual hell, 1000s of BS messages and countless other problems just thrown in one timeline.

You can either search through it for hours or ask the question which was answered 10 times before.

Itā€™s as inefficient as it gets

tslnox ,

Also the dumb system that thinks it knows what you want to search and no exact term search feature. Yeah, the search is unusable.

KillingTimeItself ,

convenient for what? forcing me to join a server, go through onboarding, and potentially even deal with not having enough spyware loaded on my information, at best waiting 10 minutes to say ANYTHING, and at worst not being able to say anything at all.

Not to mention these on boarding processes can explode and cause problems from time to time. Discord is only convenient for real time chatting, nothing else.

technom ,

Do you know how crappy the discord client is? Even element with all its flaws behaves better.

zarkanian ,
@zarkanian@sh.itjust.works avatar

Discord is more analogous to IRC than web forums.

noodlejetski ,

and yet people insist on using it as a forum, wiki, issue tracker, and a support channel.

sanguine_artichoke ,
@sanguine_artichoke@midwest.social avatar

Thatā€™s the problem.

KillingTimeItself ,

honestly, i dont know why this is so downvoted, this is basically just what discord is.

amanaftermidnight , (edited )

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    Grass , (edited )

    Itā€™s awful. It goes by channel and the cursed interface make it hard to search because when you go back after viewing a post it starts at the very top again. Then people shit on you for not searching through loads of shit and normal chat channels to find a bunch of disjointed info woven into random unrelated banter.

    I miss the days when I could search the problem, open a browser tab for each one that seems relevant, and close the tab when it turns out not to be, and have my search tab right where I left it. Discord just gives me an aneurysm every time I open it and try to bungle through the UI. Not to mention being asked to sign in almost every time I open it, and they moved the qr code log in option to be harder to find on the mobile app.

    KillingTimeItself ,

    not to mention the QR code login is actually scary insecure. I think its basically equivalent to a login token?

    Potatos_are_not_friends ,

    You cannot search a discord without being a part of their ecosystem. Thats a walled garden and does not belong in open-source communities.

    KillingTimeItself ,

    lemmy isnā€™t terrible, but you arenā€™t going to find diehard thinkpad enjoyers flashing them with coreboot here, and you certainly are likely to find much if any documentation on it here either. Maybe reddit. Forums though? Daily occurrence.

    Those ā€œforumā€ channels are locked behind community servers, for some reason. And also still not a replacement for forums. Still not publicly accessible. Threads also suck btw. Matrix likely wouldnt copy them, because forums exist.

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