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”.
As an open source developer.
Fuck that. Discord allows me to do so much and centralize communication. Small developers do not have the manpower to monitor multiple communications. I know people love to tout matrix, but it’s features pale in comparison to discord.
Additionally, 99.9% of your users are already on discord. The other 0.1% are going to bitch and whine about the fact that you’re not using matrix.
It’s great that you have centralized a community but the trade off appears to be that information is also centralized and unsearchable by traditional means (internet search). What if stack overflow partitioned it’s knowledge base in such a way ?
Why are you comparing a community to a knowledgebase?
My community has a wiki on github for knowledgebase purposes. That’s what wikis are for.
Those of you saying the discord search is bad with regard to its forums are just completely off base. It’s search does extremely well for its forums. With phpbb you have to use Google sitesearch if you want to find anything, generally.
Moderating a forum is far more difficult than moderating a discord community.
Why not use a forum so that search engines can actually index information from the support site? Users are capable of going to forums. ~Strawberry
Users are capable of going to discord. The vast majority of your users already have a discord account too! Awesome!
Forums are a pain in the ass to moderate and maintain. If you need a knowledgebase, wikis exist.
If I may ask, what makes Discord less of a pain to moderate? And forums also tend to be good for users to ask more obscure questions that aren’t likely to be easily answered on a wiki and for other users to be able to look them up later. ~Strawberry
Discord has forums and enabling slowmode means that you can enforce longform content in them. The search in discord is better than any search in phpbb by miles, this isn’t even an argument.
Discord moderation is easy. See something, right click, perform action. Automod. Bots. The entirety of the “Safety Setup” section on discord servers. Verification levels. I mean, it’s not even remotely close. People arguing that forums are better are either delusional or have never really owned a remotely active discord server.
However, content in Discord servers can’t be indexed by search engines. ~Strawberry