Words from a queer, neurodivergent, feminist, Linux sysadmin/dev/advocate and geek.

Recently I accidentally made a Fediverse post which went viral:

stop using discord for your open source communities

That post is short, punchy, opinionated, and prescriptive, which I suspect is the cause for its virality.

Unfortunately, like many micro-blog posts, it lacks nuance, which many replies highlighted. I made the post to vent my frustration at needing to join a Discord server to interact with a community, so it is far from a measured critique of the subject.

This blog post is an attempt to address those nuances in greater detail. This is not an exhaustive analysis, and I’ve resolved to not let “perfect” be the enemy of “done”.

  •  douglasg14b   ( @douglasg14b@beehaw.org ) 
    10•11 months ago

    100%. There are community tools made for this purpose. Make a discourse forum, if your project is on GitHub use GitHub issues and discussions. Discourse is fantastic, and is purpose made with all the features and gamification you could need for community knowledge management and q&a.

    These are actively indexed and can hold a wealth of information that is invaluable to users of your open source project. And decreases the load on you.

    Also, somehow, you can get worse than discord… Slack. Slack servers that wipe anything more than 10k messages ago is absolute cancer for communities and community support…

      •  douglasg14b   ( @douglasg14b@beehaw.org ) 
        1•11 months ago

        Gamification of support has worked out wonderfully for stack overflow and similar sites.

        It has also worked out to the benefit of discourse and communities that use it. With those communities benefiting from greater community engagement that results in more questions being answered, and more positive interactions.

        It works, what community wouldn’t want more engaged users answering each other’s questions? Better search engine visibility, visibility into unanswered, common, and difficult questions…etc?

        Your DM on discord is information that is dead and is useless to anyone else that has the same question. Or in the case of popular projects the other thousand people that have the same question who are also dming someone, not getting answers, if they use your route.

        •  Cinnamon   ( @CinnamonTheCat@beehaw.org ) 
          1•11 months ago

          I didn’t say I support discord. But what I do say is people benefit from personal interactions and to be quite honest the gamification of stack overflow hasn’t worked out for it at all. They’re fighting toxicity to this day, and any question that’s deemed ‘dumb’ is destroyed.