Comment on FLOSS communities right now
ono@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
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 conceivably develop into something that comes close.
The worst thing is that the mods can ban you for any or no reason, locking you completely out of the information they’re providing.
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
Ooh! A post with claims backed by evidence!
That’s most likely due to low rankings. Lemmy doesn’t prevent it.
Use “site:lemmy.world” (for example) at the end of your search
I’ve had Lemmy post first result in Google idk what your doing
Open source search engine SearcxNG works very well with Lemmy posts and comments.
So nice, right? Just being able to curate where your search engine pulls result from… I wish I’d discovered it sooner
Perfectly summarized and the stance everyone should take for the wellbeing of any community. Look at cs.rin.ru for example.
elrik@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
That’s a worrying sign for a project.
Did you clone their Git and start tracking issues there? ;-)
wrekone@lemmyf.uk 8 months ago
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.