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?
- 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.
I recently went through these exact pains trying to contribute to a project that exclusively ran through Discord and eventually had to give up when it was clear they would never enable issues in their GitHub repos for “reasons.”
It was impossible to discover the history behind anything. Even current information was lost within days, having to rehash aspects that were already investigated and decided upon.
It’s the “see no evil” approach. If you didn’t report the issue while the admin was online, then they aren’t compelled to do anything about it. Convenient for the project maintainer who doesn’t actually like maintaining things. Awful for the rest of us.
would never enable issues in their Git…
That’s a worrying sign for a project.
Did you clone their Git and start tracking issues there? ;-)
PLEASE I BEG OF YOU, STOP USING DISCORD IN PLACE OF FORUMS AND PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE BOARDS!
But Discord is too convenient.
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.
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.
I bought a keyboard kit recently and to my horror discovered all the “documentation” to build it is on Discord. The creator’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 don’t want to run a forum or plan on dipping. It’s not that hard.
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!!! 🤮
Discord is the worst. Requires a phone number, does not allow email aliases and logs your chats.
Matrix and SimpleX is way better
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.
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.
I’ve actually had good experiences with Element except on mobile. Are you talking about mobile?
Discord separates and controls possibly useful information from the public internet. It’s one of the worst platforms to use.
I refuse to use discord.
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 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.
deleted by creator
So, what do we use? Matrix? Element? Idk?
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 didn’t care about privacy or security, but overall the tech is solid. We didn’t like that discord was moderating private chats and they don’t offer any type of encryption.
For synchronous communication? Element, Zulip, Rocketchat (or if you really must, IRC 🤮 ), just something opensource and privacy respecting.
Neither here nor there, but how typical is it to turn on notifications for a medium size discord server? Would you consider it?
I refuse to use Discord for many of the reasons listed in the other comments.
