4 pane comic of dolan on the left and spooderman on the right
pane 1 (dolan): cum join opensurce cummunity!
pane 2 (spooderman): shure! how joyn?
pane 3 (dolan): Here discord! (with discord logo)
pane 4 (spooderman with tears in eyes): y u do dis?
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- Terrible format for archiving knowledge
- Terrible tool for retrieving knowledge
- Locks community access behind a corporate license agreement
- Hands control of community-created content to a corporation
- Prevents indexing by web search engines
- Antithetical to interoperability
- Privacy-hostile
A web forum is far better in most cases. If you can’t manage to run your own, there are plenty of lemmy servers that will do it for you. Even an email list (with searchable archives) would be better than Discord.
If you have collaborative documents that outgrow the forum format, use a wiki.
If real-time chat is needed, irc or matrix.
A project hosting its community on Discord is a project that won’t get my contributions.
A web forum is far better in most cases
It’s sad when a web forum is better than the tool you’re considering. Bumps, aggressive garbage collection, no Resurrection, it’s weird.
I’m old, I guess. I miss NNTP, mainly for the archived posts I could discuss with the authors for an updated take or revised solution or some clarification. And yes, I know there’s a good webUI front-end for an NNTP server as a back-end. ;-)
On the bright side:
Aggressive garbage collection and automatic thread locking are optional settings in most web forum software I’ve seen.
Lemmy shares some of the important parts of Usenet, and could develop into something that comes close.
Lemmy also doesn’t get indexed by web search engines. I have yet to find a single post from lemmy on google or DDG even when specifically searching
That’s most likely due to low rankings. Lemmy doesn’t prevent it.
I’ve had Lemmy post first result in Google idk what your doing
Perfectly summarized and the stance everyone should take for the wellbeing of any community. Look at cs.rin.ru for example.
PLEASE I BEG OF YOU, STOP USING DISCORD IN PLACE OF FORUMS AND PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE BOARDS!
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?
I’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.
Github has discussions. The code is already there anyways
- intensely_human ( @intensely_human@lemm.ee ) 11•9 months ago
You can even have threads and comments attached to specific lines of code in specific commits. Github is practically effortless to set up.
Microsoft is going to continue to increase their monetization of GitHub. It’s going to get worse, not better.
Just hoping we get some github alternative on fediverse, so far Ive seen codeberg but its hosted by a non profit org in berlin… Which is great but for e.g. I cant contribute to the code without creating an account on their instance
I’ve been loving Source Hut, but they’re not ready to handle GitHub-level usage
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. There’s even a phpBB frontend for an oldschool forum look and feel for it.
Usually everyday people don’t setup forums, that’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.
Usually everyday people don’t setup forums, that’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 it’s easy but, I think, because it’s simply more cost-effective.
Forums don’t seem to be cheap. Discourse’s own managed hosting goes for $50 a month, from one of their partners it’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, it’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 can’t imagine one may find much that beats free. Unless there is something, unfortunately I guess we’re kind of stuck with the situation as-is barring some pleasant exceptions.
Yeah, I was referring to official forums for technical support or feature requests and the like. I don’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 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 don’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.
- ulterno ( @ulterno@lemmy.kde.social ) English4•9 months ago
Matrix chat works pretty well too.
It’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 won’t be archiving. Right?
honestly i would understand matrix more than discord, it’s a lot easier to just jump in and start existing.
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. It’s not exactly outrageously expensive. If it’s small enough they dont have the cash for it, they don’t need it.
Im guessing the discord was more of a legacy thing, someone was like “hey im having a problem, can you contact me on discord?” and then suddenly we have the rust discord server.
it’s awful and I hate it. I generally prefer not to have a shared identity across communities, and there’s no way to create a usable discord identity without a phone number.
The worst part is that they act like you can set up an account without a number, but then it acts like there is ‘suspicious activity’ and requires you to verify with the phone immediately.
Just rant into this yesterday trying to set up a work account as my work phone is not a mobile phone with sms.
Was registering really suspicious?
Same. It makes it much easier for someone to doxx you.
🤔…is this a new requirement? I have 2 accounts. Neither with phone numbers and it’s never asked me for one
Discord separates and controls possibly useful information from the public internet. It’s one of the worst platforms to use.
Discord is a fucking plague. I loathe it for communities. As soon as there are more than 10 people in a room, no one can follow what anyone is saying. Threads? No dude, this isn’t the 90s! Let’s slack it up!!! 🤮
It also seems to attract a younger crowd - I had to state my age to join one server and the mod screenshotted my info and everyone laughed calling me “boomer”. I’m only 40 (Millennial) and it wasn’t a gaming or specifically teen-server. It was a silly ironic European Reddit server.
The subreddit seems to have a range of ages. The Discord server is a bunch of kids commenting capybara and cat emojis like it’s funny. :/
The age is represented?
I dunno why but they wanted you to comment your name, age and location in a welcome channel. I did and they screenshot and shared it in the main channel. Most of the people are around 16-19 with a few 20-25yo. I didn’t know that til I joined though!
I was very weird to be there apparently.
I just wanted to take the piss out of Europeans. There’s no age-limit in that.
I just wanted to take the piss out of Europeans.
Please do, I enjoy banter, especially when it comes from the colonies
Colonies?! Colonies?!!!? I’m British you dirty Kraut! Wait, do you mean the Saxons?
Listen here you little shit! Don’t try and be funny. You’re German - it’s not in your nature!
Ouch. I’ve been called many things, but never that. Calling someone German who isn’t, is not banter, that is genuinely hurtful.
Being hurt by being called German although not being one hurts my German feelings.
That is truly weird…
Thanks for answering!
To.be fair, there are threads though. That one is on the users.
A bunch of the servers I’m on actively discourage the use of threads. No idea why. In a different server I’m on, an admin creates a thread for every post in general, so that people can talk about the post without cluttering up the main thread. I wish more servers followed that example.
Are we confusing threaded chat conversations with Threads, the FB/Snap Twitter with dreams of usurping federation to reach new ad contacts; or is it just me?
The children do not yet know how much they yearn for the mines of listservs.
A new, novel solution to an already-solved problem that is worse in pretty much every way. But at least it is anathema to retention of institutional knowledge.
In short: just do a fucking PHPBB forum, it’s better than this shit.
In short: just do a fucking PHPBB forum, it’s better than this shit.
Or a wiki or IRC or Matrix or Lemmy or Mastodon, etc. There’s so many FOSS platforms for this kind of thing to choose from. How someone looks at all those options and then chooses Discord is beyond me.
Mattermost is open source and has a ton of integrations with other open source tools like Gitlab and CircleCI.
i feel everyone has just forgotten about gitter? literally its entire schtick is being the communications platform for github and gitlab, and now it’s even been acquired by the matrix team!
Like surely that’s the obvious place to go?
Please, not phpBB. Whatever the merits of PHP as a language are now, phpBB came from a time when it was exhibit #1 of why the language was terrible.
Adding a community on a Lemmy instance is fine. Far less admin work on your part, too. Encourage your users to donate to the people who do run the instance.
isn’t discourse (important to note that’s a completely different thing from discord) just a modern and much nicer version of phpbb?
It’s real-time chat. That’s fundamentally different, philosophically, from the way a forum/wiki works.
You can cludge forum-like features into it with stickies and bots and yada yada yada… or you could just use a platform that is designed from the ground up to be a permanent knowledge store instead of extended, glorified AOL chatrooms.
Discourse is a forum software. Maybe you are mixing it up with something else like disqus?
I thought they were talking about Discord. Discourse should rename itself for its own sake. It’s easy to get it confused with the two junk.
yeah I’ve really noticed it’s hard to find info and therefore use any project that does this.
and it must suck because anyone new, instead of finding the answer to their question in a forum archive from when it was first asked, has to log in and ask it again.
whenever I have dumb noob questions on setup and I see a discord link I give up a little.
dude i give up completely, you think im joining a random discord full of a bunch of people i dont know with a culture of who knows what dialect?
Nah fuck that i’ll just go use some dudes random piece of scrapped together software that’s actually pretty based instead. To that guy who wrote the bash script for flashing windows ISOs under linux. Thank you.
And then to top it off users get annoying and angrily point at sticked posts, wikis and whatnot when people ask the same questions for the nth time.
This. I literally just joined. I have no idea what the server layout is or where all the important links are.
My biggest pet peeve is when you join a new server and you have 15 different steps you have to do before you can ask a question. Verify with a bot or two, send picture drinking verification can, send emoji here, ask for emoji there, introduce yourself, publish your whole biography, wait for the pope to bless your account, and then, maybe, you are allowed to use the #help channel. I’m not a discord user, I don’t know what this all means ffs!
Even if you’re a Discord user it’s still annoying as fuck.
…And in addition, Discord itself can randomly nuke your account by asking for a phone number.
I would accept discord/irc over mailing list. But nothing beats a proper forum website.
And no, subreddit is not a proper forum.at least subreddits show up in google results, that’s the only good thing about them.
as yet
gotta love the modern internet…
yay.
For the main project I’m a maintainer on we do have forums too but they’re pretty dead, we mostly just use Discord because that’s what everyone else seems to be using.
Discord is absolute trash if you’re a user searching for solutions. It simply doesn’t turn up in web searches. Why would you want your users to ask the same questions again and again?
It just so happens to be where all our users end up anyway so for us it’s been okay for the most part. Having moderator commands for frequently asked questions, and automating frequently asked questions tends to help even more. Discord also seems to work well for projects far larger than ours, ones like RPCS3 etc.
After reading the comments on several communities including Lemmy, reddit, YouTube and several others, I don’t get the feeling that FOSS users are as enthusiastic about discord as you portray. Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps it’s a restriction that you impose on your users?
Besides, all the bells and whistles of Discord don’t solve the biggest gripe that I have with it - the searchability and discoverability of questions and answers. Despite the history recording in Discord, it acts essentially as an information black hole. People’s efforts in solving problems are just lost because they can’t be found again.
And finally, there’s one thing that corporate social media has proven time and again. Eventually all of them pivot for some reason or another. Perhaps they want to monetize the platform on unacceptable terms (like reddit recently). That will happen to discord too some day. They are holding the community content hostage. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that they won’t ever try to make money off it, cutting the community from it.
I mean, I don’t disagree with you, but our forums are dead. Our users do seem to like Discord, we also have a Matrix and IRC but those are dead too. Discord is where our users seem to flock to.
All I can really say is my experiences, and what I have seen in other cases too.
I wish Discord weren’t the giant that it was, and I wish it were open-source, but unfortunately that’s just how these things go sometimes I guess.
Again, I think another good example of this is RPCS3. They have forums that are pretty dead, and they have a Discord that has a ton of users in there.
Our users do seem to like Discord, we also have a Matrix and IRC but those are dead too. Discord is where our users seem to flock to.
What is really happening is that people are looking for documentation or support, seeing that the forum, the IRC and the Matrix are dead, that the only other thing is discord, and give up. Minus some fraction who already use it for other purposes (gaming, probably) and don’t mind using it.
But from your perspective, it looks like everybody is joining discord and liking it, because all of the other people just give up. It’s only a very particular demographic that uses discord. Most likely (I might be wrong, but this is what I guess) very young, male, gamer, european descendent, and from a relatively wealthy western country. That’s a very small part of humanity.
If you as the maintainer go and use the forums, and maybe announce this in discord, the users will follow.
Like a survivorship bias?
We have been using the forums. It’s been announced in Discord, we have a webhook that posts in our main Discord channel every time there’s a post in our main forum section. Every announcement goes to both the forums and the Discord, and the Discord announcements link to the forum posts.
We are using the forums. Our forums are still dead.
You’re the maintainer and presumably you control the discord server. You can decide to move things to a more available platform by removing Discord as an option.
There is one possible explanation for that conundrum. There are two types of people who are looking for solutions:
-
Those who want quick answers. They don’t want to do the research - to see if the problem has been addressed before. They don’t care about if the question has been asked before.
-
Those who prefer searching for solutions. They don’t like joining any community just to search for those solutions.
Group 2 is going to be very invisible to you (maintainers), because they ask questions only if they can’t solve the problem themselves and nobody has asked it before. (I know this because that’s me). This group isn’t a minority.
Group 1 is the vocal type that you are more likely to interact with, since their first instinct is to ask. If you provide them a choice between forums and chat rooms, they always choose chats because that’s where they can get away with providing minimal background information on their questions and doing minimal to no research.
This doesn’t mean that the majority of your users are happy with chatrooms. It’s just that your observations are going to show this survivorship bias.
-
I prefer mailing lists to forums, and forums to IRC, Slack to Discord and Discord is dead last just because it’s so fucking annoying. Forums can be annoying too but they are far more usable/searchable than the stream of consciousness, ephemeral nature of chat.
Everything beats a proper forum because most proper forums are basically dead since small projects won’t have many users and only a small number will sign up for a specific forum.
Forums used to be great since there was not much else, they still are good for large communities, but other than that, nope.
only a small number will sign up for a specific forum
Most people don’t have to sign-up, 90% of cases should resolve on just searching the problem. Good chances it was already asked and answered.
Most of the time, forums with few users aren’t dead, they’re just really slow, whenever you post a question - expect at least 12-hour delay. I’ve never seen a message on Discord answered 12 hours later - you either get somewhat instant response or it’s ghosted forever. Also good luck asking questions if there’s heated/rapid discussion in the room, or you have a little time and other responsibilities other than checking discord every couple minutes.- intensely_human ( @intensely_human@lemm.ee ) 3•9 months ago
That’s because when you ask a question on discord it’s only visible for a few seconds
I get the impression that opensource communities are missing out on contributors by even including discord in the mix 🧐
I’m not sure I understand the problem. Is the problem that they’re not using matrix? Or do you prefer that it was still all on IRC? I don’t hate IRC but it’s definitely way less user friendly.
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 “discord only” 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.
I feel like so many people talk about how it’s not searchable or other concerns but for me I don’t really care so much because there’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 project… 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.
FCK DSCRD!
(They should use lemmy instead :-P)
Discord performance is inversely proportional to the number of servers you’re in. Until Discord addresses this, it’s a shit tool for this use case unless you participate in a tiny number of servers in one facet of your life. Unlike chat tools like Slack that allow you to focus one server or community tools like forums, Lemmy, or VCSaaS which don’t consume resources when you don’t use them, Discord just tanks everything. Since you can’t easily hop in and out (something community tools let you do because, you know, you’re not constantly polling the server), you can’t self regulate.
Every single gaming community, coding community, project, store, hobby group, friend group, and professional group (study group too) has their own Discord. It’s a goddamn nightmare because Discord does not prioritize basic community functionality. Voice and streaming kick ass, but I need some server management and resource optimization.
I’m in a ton of servers and it performs pretty okay for me. No real issues.
Do you have trouble in other programs with Discord running, especially resource-intensive ones? That might have been a better way for me to phrase that.
Around 98-99 here (100 is max for non nitro users),and I’m noticing a significant delay when loading.
I use the browser version of discord in firefox.
WebCord is a beast! Maybe runs better for you.
Basically Discord desktop client experience, but privacy (well… as much as you can have with discord) from the browser-version. (minus discord desktop client exclusive features of course)
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 isn’t electron based), and they both felt slow, clunky and unresponsive.
Fluffychat or Gomuks
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 change 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 don’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).
it had some stability issues, alternatively, also weechat’s quite decent since it has quite long history of development
I’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 it’s actually more reliable than the Discord mobile app.
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. It’s still missing some features though (like spaces). But it’s getting updated fast.
Cinny. It uses Tauri instead of electron
I just use element right now, pretty good for phones and imo excellent for desktop (ux and usability wise)
I’ve actually had good experiences with Element except on mobile. Are you talking about mobile?
did you just license your own comment?
electron bloat
Nope. Desktop.
The people in this thread are open source power users who don’t get and don’t want the features that discord offers. It’s no surprise you’d rather have your forum back. I don’t think that’s how it’s going to work.
Privacy is good and what discord does is bad. But don’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:
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) it’s when discord is the only way to interact that it’s annoying IMO. Part of the benefit of forums and git issues is searchability imo, can’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 that’s a different issue.
We don’t ask for forums because we don’t want features of Discord. We ask for forums because we want features that Discord does not offer:
- Ability to search the discussions from a web search engine
- Proper segregation of threads - a question followed by related replies (similar to github discussions, issues and PRs)
- Ability to back up the discussion history, so that it doesn’t disappear if the server goes down.
- 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.
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.
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 https://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 don’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?
mumble is better for synchronous communication
To me it looks like the features are about 80% there, can’t find the screen sharing, login with QR doesn’t exist. Not really sure how to even search for some features because the naming is so extremely bad. “matrix automation” “element bot”. E.g. this is a very poor collection: https://element.io/integrations Looks like custom emotes are still missing.
But let’s say all of that exists and works.
What other features are essential for an opensource community that only discord provides?
I think we’re talking about different things then. I don’t need something for an opensource community. I need something for ALL communities I’m a part of. Because I’m already in 40 of them and 5 of them are FOSS projects. So switching those over increases friction, if it’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 don’t need to defend why the platform I’m on is good, (it’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 I’m just not going to use the software you’re providing. If I’m nice, I’ll leave a post on the bug tracker that the install/getting started documentation didn’t work.
Forums serve no purpose anymore.
Right now, I’m going to stop using element/matrix again for the forseeable future because there are no communities with public rooms I’m interested in.
I think we’re talking about different things then
You are in a comment thread with the title “FLOSS communities right now”. I don’t know what you were expecting…
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 “I want the answer reasonably quickly”? 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 “no purpose” for a forum?
We’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, it’s fine if that support is given via the git platform, and it’s also fine if it takes a while. And it’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 “no purpose” 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 don’t get to get buried. And also, I’ve never seen that happen with chats. What I have seen is that people didn’t have time or interest to answer my question. Which is fine because they owe me nothing. But a forum would not have “solved” that.
We’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 you’re talking to me about the other “99%”. Not my problem if you go off-topic.
Oh I agree, doesn’t prevent me from being locked into certain communities on discord.
While I understand why FOSS community hates Discord, I don’t know an alternative that is better at everything.
Discord’s main problems:
- Not FOSS / Privacy respectful
- Hard/Impossible to index/search for data and organize tech support
However alternatives we have are not ideal either:
- Old-school web forums
- Great for info archival / organized tech support
- Separate accounts for every one of them, different sets of newsletters / email notifications. Basically, to efficiently be active on several forums you have to manually log in to each on regular basis and check what’s new
- Due to slower pace of communication, it’s harder to just log in and “hang out” with community, everybody is more of a pen pal.
- FOSS messaging applications (e.g. Matrix since that’s what most use)
- Info archival is even worse then on Discord. Every time I tried to search for anything useful on Matrix I would give up due to poor results and HUGE delays for every search
- Because most communities use a single Matrix chat, it’s a huge disorganized mess for any communication and tech support. There’s often 2-3 concurrent conversations in a single room and some just stop abruptly due to it getting confusing to keep up
- it’s FOSS and Private, though
Feel free to downvote me for this, but I think that Github for support & issue tracking and Discord for community hang out spot is currently the lesser evil approach until better Foss tools arrive
I would rather be pen pals than use discord
So you are suggesting forum software that supports single sign-on?
We are talking about an open source project, not a high school reunion. I don’t want to hang out with people, I want to have a discussion about a focused topic.
I want to ask a question and get an answer. If the question is not one that anyone online can currently answer, I want to be able to tell at a glance if anyone has talked about my question. If I don’t understand the answer, I want to ask a follow up question.
In the evening, I want to be able to take a look at new posts from that day, grouped by topic, to see if there is anything I find interesting or can weight in on.
With Discord (or any real time chat), it is hard to follow a single topic when more than one is being discussed. It is doubly hard to do so after the fact. I am aware that Discord has a forum feature. I have only seen one server ever enable it and no one posts anything to it.
Can’t you do everything you’ve listed on github though? Report bugs on issues tab, ask questions on discussions tab, following up is easy. Everything is also indexed by search engines and can be looked up later on.
I know, but this thread is about projects that don’t want to use GitHub as the center of discussion and use Discord instead. The Discussion tab need to be enabled.
The most important downside for me is: I’m looking for some information about an issue I’m having or how to install or configure something and I find none. Because all the people talk behind closed doors and googling etc doesn’t help any more. Only solution is to join every Discord and platform before you start using your software and scrolling trough pages of chat messages.
I’d rather google for an error message and then be directed directly to an issue tracker where people discussed that specific problem.
Yep, that’s exactly why in the end of my comment I say that I currently believe a combination of Github+Discord to be best. Github for bug reporting, Discord if you want to socialize with the community, that’s what it does best
I’m somewhat fine with that. But you absolutely have to tell people to keep the discussions to random chatter and the absolute minimum then. (And internal talk maybe, if that’s of no interest to the public. Once it gets important or someone asks for advice that could be beneficial to others, the discussion on Discord needs to be interrupted and switch platforms. Or be copied to a Wiki after the fact.
I could accept discord if it has threads. But it’s all just such a jumble.
Discord does have threads. I think the server admin has to enable them though. In rooms where it’s enabled, you can choose to post a thread or a regular message, and people can create a thread by replying to a regular message and choosing the option to make it a thread.
Ok, fair. I guess this is an issue in the discords I frequent then. I’ve never seen threads used in anger.
Their licence grants intellectual rights to anything you give them. So there’s that.
Spaces have been a thing for over 2 years now.
Spaces are just group chats in a trenchcoat
so are Discord’s “servers”.
Not really. They don’t show up in your dms, they don’t take 1 minutes to join after clicking the “join” button, they have great permission management.
