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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…
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.
i don’t understand discord’s popularity at all. it’s so annoying to use
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.
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
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
I second this!
It’s especially disappointing to see FOSS people on Fediverse promoting it.
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
Or just don’t use Discord.
Use discourse instead? It’s really the best in my opinion.
Look at what just happened to Yuzu - Years of community just deleted because of a few lawyers.
I haven’t read the legal outcome, but wouldn’t this have happened anyways if the forums were in other places? The github got removed as well
basic news is: Yuzu and citra agreed to shut down with immediate effect incl. discords.
At least with an open platform youd have a chance to backup discussions or rehost. You’d probably still be dead in the water but it would beat the info being wiped.
Can someone point to the reasons why such talented people use discord for their projects?
Convenience probably.
Email is inconvenient?
Yes.
The correct answer was forum.
I merely suggested an alternative to forums because everyone said signing up was inconvenient
You don’t need to sign up for forums for them to be searched through.
The point is that Discord is an information black hole. It’s all contained within the server, unindexed, private, hidden, and entirely gone if the server gets deleted.
You would need to sign up to be able to participate, which seems to be the pain point from the beginning. That was the reason why I suggested email threads akin to what Linus and Co use for Kernel development, since those can be searched no problem, whilst almost everyone has email IDs
I don’t think participation is the problem. If you think about it, you wouldn’t want just anyone to post something on a platform without first engaging in said platform. That can only have a neutral or negative effect. People asking stupid questions or people cursing out users. The act of signup ensures that the would-be poster has to signup first and rationalize their post during that process.
Therefor, the problem must be something else, it is the information gateoff (amongst other things) that makes Discord and similar apps unfavorable for community management and information distribution.
Or you can use Github SSO.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
I think you misspelled “Please use the appropriate tool for a specific job”
Which certainly isn’t Discord
I have an existing community of thousands of users on discord, attempts to migrate to other platforms have failed. What would you suggest?
The community was inherited and existed when I became maintainer.
Set up a Matrix bridge and promote it too. You can’t force a community but you can inform and give choice.
We tried that. Did nothing but divide the community, cause increased cost, increased administrative burden, increased spammers and detracted efforts from actually working on the project. Ultimately, about five legitimate community members continued to used it over three to six months.
Matrix is IMHO a bad choice as it attracts the same demographic as Discord (glossy webclient) but is much more janky. Realistically speaking it is a poor Slack clone once you look beyond the technical aspect of federation which few people care deeply enough about to endure the buggy and half-broken user experience of Element.
I have had great success bridging to IRC (and XMPP). Yes, it will not fully replace Discord, but it allows a very dedicated group of people to participate in a community on their own terms and with great lightweight clients.
I agree though that any kind of bridge increases the risk of spam. But you should really try to get community members on board to deal with this kind of thing. Developing a software and running a community alone is not a good idea.
This article has a few primary arguments for not using Discord—
- because it is proprietary software
- because it has poor accessibility
- because control over moderation and other administrative tools is ultimately in the hands of Discord rather than the community.
I know this opinion is going to be unpopular but here I go anyway.
Other than the accessibility argument, I find these arguments quite weak. Yes, Discord is proprietary software, but the reason it’s used is because a lot of people are familiar with it and many people already have Discord accounts.
Although I’m a firm supporter of free software, I also believe that it’s more important to use the right software for the job than to idealistically use inferior software just because it happens to be open-source. And yes, I regard most of the alternatives to Discord listed in the article to be inferior solely because they are unfamiliar to users. Sometimes, the superior choice happens to be proprietary and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. That’s the way it is sometimes; you can’t win every fight, as much as you’d like to.
If your goal is to foster a community of regular users and make it easy for normal users to interact with contributors, there is no choice that will hamper that goal more than using an obscure alternative software that nobody’s heard of.
With respect to chat logs and administration tools… for the most part, nobody cares. Discord’s tools are sufficient for most groups and few people consider the drawbacks to outweigh the other benefits.
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 :)
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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 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
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.
