- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
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The biggest problem with Discord is that its an information black hole. Its not properly searchable and not indexed by search engines.
Discord is fine for casual chat, but horrible when used for forum-type discussions and even worse when used for documentation.
You see the same problems being discussed and solved again and again, but you cant just “link” someone the solution like you could with a forum thread cause its spread out over 3-10 chat messages that are interleaved in-between other topics being discussed in the same room
Anything of long-term value for the project (forum-type discussions, documentation etc) should not recide in Discord
There’s going to be a lot of shocked Pikachus when the inevitable enshittification hits, and suddenly they charge to host all the documentation and wiki pages. All that barely maintained stuff will just vanish overnight.
At this point, charging for the service is the only thing left to do to make it more shit…
You would think that people would learn not to put all their eggs into one corporate basket after Facebook fucked everyone over…
Chat in general is so flawed when talking about multiple topics at once. At least when people dont use matrix threads, spaces and rooms correctly.
I have all the issues with Discord that you mention, but struggle to find a better alternative. Do you have any recommendations?
Forums. Phpbb, Mybb, hell even discourse is better than discord. If you’re specifically dealing with a coding project, most git repositories offer an issues page and wiki you can use.
And if you want something realtime, IRC & XMPP are low-resource chat options—with the latter being federated & can offer encryption for private rooms.
Sure, but those options solve literally none of the issues discussed above
There’s still been a time & place for realtime communications where the history preservation doesn’t quite matter… it can be some general recon of a problem to know what to even ask so as to not clog up the signal-noise for SEO or even if it’s mostly off-topic banter to relate to community members.
I’m thinking of a rapid alert on a problem in the project using IRC/XMPP/Matrix and then the project managers posting it in a forum about problems in the project.
I could see a bot that could escalate a post with a 🐛 reaction from a maintainer & post an issue. I do feel sometimes tho it is nice to get chat to help the one in need shape the question in a way that folks can help as often they may not know what they are looking for or the root cause. The issues tho is that often those in chat & the asker don’t like the context switch of going to the forum later rather than just answering it here & now–even tho this comes at a detriment to the community as the answer slips into the void.
Forums used to be a lot more common before Reddit kind of ate most public forums.
I guess that the Threadiverse is a substitute, but I dunno how long a given server will stay up.
What about a lemmy community ? I noticed the Github «discussion» tab also.
A solution would be to save the chat log as a text file. An LLM might be able to turn it into FAQ format with little oversight. Of course, someone would still have to volunteer the work.
Obviously, Discord doesn’t want that sort of thing since it lessens their hold on a community and the people in it. They could decide to cause trouble.
That just sounds like something a discord bot could do
Any non-trivial support enquiries should be directed to log a bug report/formal support request regardless of the community platform you’re using. Discord isn’t any worse than IRC in this regard and we’ve been offering support via the latter forever.
I think a happy medium for this is to rely on GitHub issues for support, and then people can discuss each issue on GitHub or Discord
Both are proprietary, closed source from US-based, for-profit entites. Same problem arises.
I miss regular old web forums, mailing lists and that sort of thing. Discord / Slack / etc have zero discoverability. The ability to google your question is gone, and knowledge is ephemeral, when a chat is the central source of community.
I’ve been finding this out at work recently. Got lazy and started doing most of my conversations via teams instead of email and now having to find shit from like a year ago is practically impossible. Even some conversations I know contained what I’m looking for just have random gaps where posts have disappeared.
Teams are just shit like that. Although my company has migrated to 365 for our work apps, the team’s main communication is still Slack. With Slack I’m still able to find old messages easily and be able to link it in relevant context.
A few weeks ago the community manager of the Helldivers Discord got upset and deleted the whole thing. Years of discussions and knowledge (and memes) gone.
Naturally you can’t even bring up the idea that a Discord community takes on a life past its “owner” once it reaches a certain size or level of activity. “Your container, your rules” say the defenders unironically, while not acknowledging that you neither own the “server” nor make all the rules.
Thank you!!! I feel the same way and I felt like I was losing my marbles.
Discord is just way too ephemeral and the answers you get depend on who is logged on at the time. I don’t expect an immediate answer but I also don’t wanna wade through 14 conversations either.
yeah, discord do be like that
on hindsight they are trying to implement a “forum” like experience, where you can create a dedicated threads channel where you csn search previous threads, but it’s not exactly like a real forum, pretty useful tho
The search in their new forum system is really, really, really, very, very bad. It only searches for exact matches in post titles. So not very useful. I hope we’ll see more projects start to use GitHub discussions, but it depends on the commitment of the maintainers
from the article:
In short, using Discord for your free software/open source (FOSS) software project is a very bad idea. Free software matters — that’s why you’re writing it, after all. Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
Interesting to do a “s/Discord/Github/” replace on the above. Same situation yet hardly anyone gives a shit.
So yes, Drew DeVault is right. But he overestimates people’s commitment to free world digital rights principles and consistency thereof.
not at all the same situation. Git itself is not proprietary so all the projects can survive without GitHub if the need arises. Additionally, you don’t need an account to view the repository or its discussions. There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue, however it doesn’t compare to discord, which is much, much worse.
I don’t care about the wall around the garden as much as I care that the wall was made by a deranged clown with no UI design experience.
There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue
And if you insist on using Microsoft GitHub, this contribution concern can be mitigated by offering an alternative mirror or a mailing list/email address to send patches. One way to help prevent lock-in would be to use MS GitHub’s repository settings & straight-up disable non-portable features like “Discussions”, “Sponsors” & maybe even the “Issues” tracker favoring a third-party option or the issue tracker of the mirror along with disabling “Actions” choosing a third-party CI option or the CI that comes with the mirror (or require checks ran locally before pushing).
Having a bug tracker in that walled garden is the biggest problem. It demonstrates what I’m talking about: digital rights being disregarded.
like I said I agree, Discord is simply more terrible.
Git itself is not proprietary so all the projects can survive without GitHub if the need arises. Ad
You’re neglecting the exclusion that’s inherent in Github when the need to bounce does NOT arise.
Also worth adding that during the war in Gaza some of us boycott Israel. Which implies boycotting Microsoft.
Additionally, you don’t need an account to view the repository or its discussions.
Advocating read-only access is comparable to endorsing only freedom 1 and 2, not freedom 0 or 4. Which is precisely what I’m talking about: FOSS projects that discard digital rights and partake in digital exclusion for some convenience frills.
There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue, however it doesn’t compare to discord, which is much, much worse.
Bug trackers have more of a monopoly on bug reports than discord has on discussions. There are countless decentralized discussions about free software all over the place – threadiverse, probably facebook, ad hoc phpbb forums, IRC, usenet, mastodon, mailing lists, conferences like FOSDEM … and rightfully so. Discussions don’t need the centralization that bug trackers do. General discussions also do not have the degree of importance to QA that bug tracking does.
Case in point, when bugs are reported outside of Github, they don’t get noticed by developers and triaged.
not sure what to answer, I made clear in my comment that github is also problematic, discord is simply worse, therefore they’re not the same like the original commenter said. I’m hoping both of them will fuck up like reddit and twitter did and more people will make effort to move away from it.
Same situation yet hardly anyone gives a shit.
I give a shit. Open source contributions shouldn’t require proprietary services if open alternatives (even if it requires more than a single service) suffice. In the case of Git forges, the alternatives are great–& the more you buy into the Microsoft GitHub-specific features the harder it will be to migrate which will lead to lock-in.
I give a shit.
There are not enough of you. Evidenced by ~95%+ of noteworthy FOSS projects being jailed in Github’s walled garden.
And certain projects I don’t deem it worth my time to contribute due to this fact. The unfortunate issue with that is usually there isn’t a good way to communicate that to the maintainers when they lock all coms to Microsoft GitHub & Slack/Discord. There are certain projects I have skipped on trying based on this too as to me it becomes an indicator of poor decision-making trying to capture hype/marketing rather than fostering goodwill of the free/ethical software movements. At least on Lemmy you get an upvote instead of harassed by asking for an open communication and/or contribution option 😅
There’s not really much point in using a self hosted gitea or codeberg or sourcehut if you want the barrier of entry to be as low as possible for potential contributors. Maybe if some larger projects made the move. But GitHub has more features (like discussions), provides better hosting and ease of use. The focus of any open source project should be on development of the software, not the software which supports its development.
There’s not really much point in using a self hosted gitea or codeberg or sourcehut if you want the barrier of entry to be as low as possible for potential contributors.
But GitHub has more features (like discussions), provides better hosting and ease of use.
Bingo. Prioritizing convenience features above digital rights principles is exactly why Github’s walled garden dominates over forges that have a lower barrier of entry.
The focus of any open source project should be on development of the software, not the software which supports its development.
Again, people to setting aside their principles is exactly what I’m talking about.
It’s not so much a case of people setting aside their principles, it’s more like people considering stability, potential contributions and convenience alongside their principles.
Give Codeberg a few more years of stability and people might re-evaluate choosing GitHub. The controversy around Gitea forming a company and the fragmentation of development unsettles that trust.
doesn’t help that modern tools like lazy.nvim, etc make alternative hosting a barrier to entry. and a GitHub mirror is a tedious half measure.
Can’t wait for the day Discord backstabs everyone and people decide to get the fuck away from it. I seriously can’t stand having to search past troubleshooting messages, it’s a fucking mess, almost unusable. Whoever uses Discord as a Forum seriously needs a full force punch in the mouth.
Discord can and sometimes does monitor your chats.
Source: CEO himself said that, in a hearing
Also a large portion is owned by Tencent with whom Discord is allowed to share all the data they want according to their ToS.
https://github.com/privy-cafe/discordspyware/blob/master/README.md
Discord can
Well that’s pretty obvious.
and sometimes does monitor your chats.
Probably, although why would they? More likely they’ll just data mine everything an sell it on for AI learning program to nom nom on.
why would they?
People use it for things like planning terrorism, child enticement, and sharing CSAM. Discord probably wants to ban those people, and maybe aid in their prosecution.
Of course if you’re sharing something that’s actually private, Discord is a poor choice. So is email or DMs on Lemmy where the server admin could read the content.
Can’t wait for the day Discord backstabs everyone and people decide to get the fuck away from it.
I can’t wait either, then maybe all the communities that disappeared into discord that I feel unable to actually feel like I am a genuine member of and connect with anymore because I am not part of the conversations on discord will go somewhere where I can be a part of them again.
sigh
FUCK DISCORD
Well that’s no better than searching IRC logs, which are something folks have absolutely done in the past. I still haven’t figured out why folks like discord so much though.
People like it cause when it first came out, it was considerably better than other popular voice chat software available for PC games at the time, like TeamSpeak and Ventrillo. But most importantly: it was free, unlike those other two. So people flocked to it and it blew up big, leading us to where we are today.
ooh… can we do a fedi-discord? But like, good?
you mean matrix?
I use Matrix. I even kind of like Matrix and have high hopes for its future.
But like, good?
Discord is only good for coordinating game events and helping to facilitate gaming community engagement. I’m so sick of everyone pushing it as the central hub of everything social and the idea of entire projects centered around Discord is absolutely ludicrous.
Why should different chat programs be used for different purposes?
The whole idea is to… chat.
I guess you’re the kind of guy who has multiple phones when 1 would work perfectly well.
Yes, discord is for chatting, that’s correct. It’s not a tech support platform, nor is it a documentation repo, yet people commonly try to use it as such.
I think discord is great for the technical support side of things. It gives you a chance to talk through a problem in real time with someone more knowledgeable and ask follow up questions without waiting hours for a reply lile frequently happens in support forums. That being said it should absolutely not be the repository for documentation.
The problem with using it for real time tech support is that when someone else comes along with the same problem, they have to search chat logs and hope they can find the thread where the issue was mentioned/fixed. Forums are much better at making past information accessible, but you’re right, a chat client like discord is better for quick response times. It’s a trade-off I suppose
I would argue that is the point of having an FAQ/Examples in your documentation. Ideally someone would stop their first before asking clarification questions in the discord. Admittedly a lot of people are just going to go straight to asking questions but personally that’s not really been something I’ve ever really minded. Some people just learn better that way and it’s unusual for one of these discord channels to be so busy that repeat questions are drowning others out.
i don’t understand discord’s popularity at all. it’s so annoying to use
It was my replacement of Skype, which was leaning hard into its enshittification around that time.
Where discord never had to lean into it as it was born shit
But it can always get worse. When they run out of money, some of the stuff that used to be free will begin to cost you something.
What? Skype is better than discord
Literally how
Not when discord launched. Discord had far better audio quality, multiple text and voice channels, and some moderation tools. Skype was basically a group chat with a group call function
It started getting popular years ago and that’s when me an my friends switched to it too (back when I didn’t know shit about privacy). You gotta keep in mind the alternatives back then were Skype, which was meant for 1 to 1 calls, had shit audio quality and issues all the time and TeamSpeak, which was complicated because you needed a server (we were kids, we only knew what a server was from Minecraft) and had a text chat that was only a small part of the bottom of the window that was full of connected and disconnected messages, so I actually didn’t even know you could write in that. TeamSpeak’s interface also isn’t exactly good-looking or very intuitive. Then came Discord, you could create a server for you and your friends for free, you saw who of your friends was online and playing what, you could see when someone was in a voice channel and could just join, you had multiple text chats where you could easily send a link or memes while playing and you could easily share your screen with the others. It was a major improvement over the other two. I know that it sucks from a privacy standpoint but there’s good reasons why people started using it.
I used ventrillo
I just got off a Mumble session. The technology is still here.
hey man get on vent
Man those were the days .
Because that’s where people are?
How familiar are you with IRC?
I was told by someone that IRC is kind of what discord is built on. Maybe the answer is someone in that relation, if what i was told is accurate or not
Discord copies a lot of concepts from IRC, like servers and threads are almost identical. But it isn’t technically based on IRC. Maybe your friend mixed it up with Twitch chat which is actual IRC only slightly modified.
I second this!
It’s especially disappointing to see FOSS people on Fediverse promoting it.
It’s incredible, yes, even more considering that Discord has been complicit on spam attacks on the Fediverse.
People love discord. When Microsoft tried to buy it, people freaked out. They turned down the multi billion dollar offer. IMO, I don’t believe the paid portion of the app is worth the money because it’s mostly cosmetic bullshit. They don’t give me a good reason to give them money
They don’t give me a good reason to give them money
The constant harassment was enough to get me to pay for it. But guess what? After I paid for it, the harassment continued, trying to get me to give them even more money for products I don’t even understand. And that’s just not something I tolerate.
That + the inevitable data-mining + refusal to provide any sort of deletion tools = no more Discord for me. I use Revolt now when I need that sort of thing.
I also think discord nitro is kind of B.S . The only reason I still use discord is because my friends use it.
I wish there were similar features in Matrix clients like Element. Just the voice channels feature will be enough for me.
Revolt chat is a good alternative. It lacks in features but its pretty good for an FOSS project. I tried to convince my friends to use it but they crawled back to discord after 2 days.
you shouldn’t use discord at all … I think nowadays it’s the only app that uses plain text for all messages avoid discord
my main problem is issue cannot be searched on search engine
Chat and forum are different things and serve different purposes. Even matrix doesn’t solve the search problem. Use a forum for this.
yeah that is why discord should not be used for problem-solving or archival purpose. Hell, even mastodon,reddit and lemmy can be indexed properly on search engine.
The biggest problem with traditional forums is the fact that participation requires yet another account. This is the most significant thing that discord has going for it, nearly everybody already has a discord account. Federated forums mostly solve this issue tho
is the fact that participation requires yet another account.
You can literally connect most active forum engines to eg.: OpenID, XMPP, email or any/most kinds of online identifiers. Worst case scenario you can literally enable “sign in with Google”.
Irc was never searchable, but that was never an issue before.
The issue is that we used to have both irc and forums. Discord has taken on the role of both in 1. Unfortunately, that means that it also needs the remote search capabilities of a forum to not screw over the community, long term.
It’s amazing the number of times a 3+ year old discussion on either a forum, or Reddit has bailed me out of a hole. Everything like that on discord is cut off, unless you know it exists.
Popular IRC channels usually have an searchable web archive. But yes, chat is not a good solution for stuff that needs to be documented.
I think you misspelled “Please use the appropriate tool for a specific job”
Which certainly isn’t Discord
Depends what job, keeping a community ? Why not. Gaming with friends ? Yeah. Keeping track of a project ? There sure are many - even - free tools to manage that
I get that people want a “simple way to chat” and Discord does that well, I guess. I mean, everyone’s talking about the forum aspect but what’s the alternative for chat? Mumble?
Just, please, don’t hide documentation in the Discord. A neocities page costs literally $0. Please. Think of the poor SEO consultants!
Yeah I’m indifferent to discord as a platform. It’ll eventually be enshitified and people will move on.
The bummer is that it’s enabling people to be poor at documentation in a whole new way.
That said, if Discord went away tomorrow most software projects would still have garbage documentation, because most software projects are ephemeral at BEST.
I find that some Matrix clients make it easy to build and interact with a community. Even Element has a lot of Discord’s core features, it just lacks the streaming and some of the gaming-related stuff. Otherwise, Matrix rooms are sufficient for building an “easy to chat” community.
I have never used Discord and never will. No project has ever been able to change my stance on it.
On the other end I have a lot of first-hand experience of Discord’s abuses and that’s precisely why I have my stance on it.
If you’re desperate for a discord-like experience (because lets face it, irc and mailing lists arent very flashy anymore!) you can try:
- rocket chat - General purpose chat platform, very similar discord
- mattermost - developer-centric platform, similar to slack
- Matrix - open protocol, has a bunch of desktop clients
Yes you wont have voice/vodeo chat for these but IMO that’s rarely useful anyway. And if you DO need it then you can use stuff like teamspeak or zoom******yes i know the issues with these options but for devs you dont really ever need to use meetings for very long and sometimes using a shitty free service with all you need is better than self hosting your own. Maybe Nextcloud talk can work?Some good arguments made for FOSS voice/meeting apps, and why VC and meetings are more important to the FOSS workflow than I thought :)
Jitsi Meet for zoom replacement
Jitsi is amazing. Even during 2020 it always has worked way better than Zoom for me, and I haven’t even tried hosting it myself.
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I think that’s actually what discord should be used for. It’s one of the better platforms for voice/video/text chat. It’s mostly just when people use discord for what should be a public forum or wiki that it becomes a problem.
And sure, it’s not a great place for open source developers to do all their communication in, because being able to reference things in the future if a project lead closes the server is important. But it’s probably fine for coding sprints and meetings here and there as long as someone is taking notes to be documented elsewhere. Discord is arguably better than zoom for that use case.
How about Revolt? It’s open source and it’s pretty much a Discord clone.
Stop recommending closed-source, paid solutions. It makes you look like a shill.
Matrix is the only suitable replacement for discord, as it is the only federated replacement.
Matrix is the only suitable replacement for discord, as it is the only federated replacement.
No, stop recommending questionable open-source. Matrix is a metadata disaster and XMPP is the true and the OG federated and truly open solution that is very extensible.
Can you explain xmpp? I’d like a federated discord replacement buddy if you could show me the way I’d greatly appreciate it :)
XMPP is like email, a very open standard that was designed for interoperability even with more closed servers that included proprietary features and extensions. You can message anyone by email no matter what’s or where’s their server and can be configured to be secure and private. Here a quick overview of the architecture.
XMPP is the only solution that treats messaging and video like email: just provide an address and the servers and clients will cooperate with each other in order to maintain a conversation. Everything else is just an attempt at yet another vendor lock-in.
Matrix was built by Israeli intelligence & consumes so many resources that it’s not feasible to self-host on most budgets. As such it’s highly centralized & the community is still largely being ran by Matrix.org as the keeper of the implementation server, the most popular client, the specification, the largest server- which syncs back the metadata.
Mattermost is by-design centralized but it’s self-hostable & AGPL so I’m not sure where the closed-source accusation is coming from. At least it’s less wasteful than trying to be decentralized & if you wanted lightweight decentralization, you would reach for XMPP.
Matrix was built by Israeli intelligence
It get some resources from them at the start, but they do not fund it for a long time.
consumes so many resources that it’s not feasible to self-host on most budgets
When you join large rooms like #matrix:matrix.org, it consumes a lot of space. But otherwise it is not that heavy. I hope they fix this, as this can be fixed with better resource planning, the biggest tables on the database are those like state_groups_state that does not hold bare information and just group information together for quick search. (I hosted a server and MatrixHQ room took 100GB…, 95% of the database).
As such it’s highly centralized
Looking at server list it seems very healthy. Also (opinion alert) I think having thousands of public server running by a randoms like there is for big chunk of Fediverse will not be as healthy as dozens of well funded community servers.
the community is still largely being ran by Matrix.org as the keeper of the implementation server
Synapse is not the reference server, there is no one official implementation for a purpose. And old news, it is now hosted by Element under AGPL.
They could still be funding it in other ways. It’s a conspiracy, but one that would make some sense.
I gather you are saying there still are real storage issues. The bigger your server grows the more wildly this can get out of hand once just one of your users joins a big room. The whole model is about distributing the syncing of messages & no matter how they slice it to speed parts of it up, I feel it will remain an issue by design unlike other protocols that treat realtime chat as ephemeral & just give you enough history to get context of the current conversation. I’ve already witnessed 3 servers try to grow a following, then when users came, the bill inevitable shut them down–in the same way that Mastodon can skyrocket bills due to fundamental designs. Other protocols also handle decentralization better in ways that don’t require massive funding & empower users to host their own decentralized server–to which I think is healthy & desirable.
Synapse more or less acts as a reference server in the way that all Twitter-likes are basically required to be Mastodon-compatible.
Matrix was built by Israeli intelligence
Source?
Thanks for the interesting rabbithole.
Well, that’s something I didn’t know, but it seems like they’ve been in the process of removing or giving the ability to remove the parts that communicate back to the main Matrix coordinators since 2019. And it’s been 2017 since they had funding from Amdocs. I’d certainly listen if someone says they’ve recently analyzed that sort of data going back to the organizations servers. It doesn’t look like it though.
At this point, the fact that it’s all opensource and the self-hosting options/configurations let you keep things internal now would make the point of its origin moot. TOR is another example of something that may have suspicious origins but because it’s public and OS, most people trust the privacy of its implementation.
There are ways do funding while being in the shadows. It’s absolutely conspiracy, but something I can see being of importance to spy agencies as Matrix is defacto centralized with all metadata & assets syncing back to the mothership. Signal also had their server code closed for a while, & I wouldn’t be surprised if something regarding US intelligence wasn‘t involved. I think you can trust these platforms more than most, but I’d prefer keeping an arm’s length until we are years removed & see open governance (something Matrix is slowly (finally) transitioning too, but other chat protocols have done for much longer).
Yah, I have my doubts about Signal as well, given the insistence, even now that the username function has been added, of needing a phone number to register. That doesn’t seem to fit with an application that’s supposed purpose is to be a private communications network and has been promoted for political change purposes in developing countries.
irc and xmpp federate…xmpp is highly extensible.
I created a discord server for an open source project of mine, but grew to dislike it. It got spammed multiple times, people are off topic and talking about their lives in channels that aren’t for that, and so I started pushing the community toward GitHub discussions.
Discord isn’t searchable, nor archivable, nor public, but GitHub is (I’m aware of another conflict with Microsoft for some people, but to me this is the easiest solution to get contributors and have an easy CI setup).
I haven’t had much success yet, but I’m slowly shutting down all links to the discord and will let it die (for outside contributors at least). I might keep it to stay in touch with a few developers, to refine issues and prepare migrations that aren’t ready to be turned into public discussions/ issues / pull requests.
I’m on board with this, but I may be biased because I also don’t like using Discord for anything else. Every time someone sends me a Discord invite I feel a little defeated, because it is usually after I have agreed to participate in something.
It’s an upgrade over Skype, but a downgrade over forums and irc. I setup a discord for some tech troubled friends because I didn’t think they could handle anything else and even that was trying for some of them.
I feel that way about Teams/Sharepoint/Office. I’m happy to serve on a board or committe, until I find out they’re using Teams or Sharepoint. Microsoft’s SSO is a fucking mess. Put in your email to get a one-time code, get that code and enter it, then it logs you in and asks for an email address to be added to the account. Add the same email address you just got the code via, and it tells you it can’t use that email address. But if I don’t use that email address, it won’t let me into the Sharepoint docs.
It’s just a fucking nightmare. I fucked around with one committee trying to get the accounts deleted and done the Microsoft TM way and finally gave up and bowed out of that group.
