Submitted 2 months ago by onlinepersona@programming.dev to programmer_humor@programming.dev
https://i.imgflip.com/8fab8p.jpg
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?
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. He code is already there anyways
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.
Why not Lemmy?
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?
as relatively easily and cheaply
You pay more when using these types of software than if you hired an engineer to set up a complete forum ecosystem. Just not with money.
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.
Discord is more analogous to IRC than web forums.
and yet people insist on using it as a forum, wiki, issue tracker, and a support channel.
That’s the problem.
honestly, i dont know why this is so downvoted, this is basically just what discord is.
But Discord is too convenient.
For a quick question yes, but if you try to search a solution for a problem it’s actual hell, 1000s of BS messages and countless other problems just thrown in one timeline.
You can either search through it for hours or ask the question which was answered 10 times before.
It’s as inefficient as it gets
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.
Do you know how crappy the discord client is? Even element with all its flaws behave better.
You cannot search a discord without being a part of their ecosystem. Thats a walled garden and does not belong in open-source communities.
It’s awful. It goes by channel and the cursed interface make it hard to search because when you go back after viewing a post it starts at the very top again. Then people shit on you for not searching through loads of shit and normal chat channels to find a bunch of disjointed info woven into random unrelated banter.
lemmy isn’t terrible, but you aren’t going to find diehard thinkpad enjoyers flashing them with coreboot here, and you certainly are likely to find much if any documentation on it here either. Maybe reddit. Forums though? Daily occurrence.
Those “forum” channels are locked behind community servers, for some reason. And also still not a replacement for forums. Still not publicly accessible. Threads also suck btw. Matrix likely wouldnt copy them, because forums exist.
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?
Wait I thought this was depended on the Discord channel?
I’ve got a Discord account and I’m in a lot of different channels for FLOSS and other things, I’ve never set up a phone number. I have occasionally come across certain channels that I can’t join because they require me to have a phone number authentication, but most of them don’t seem to.
Not to defend Discord, by the way. It’s fucking terrible and I despise this trend of telling people to come to your little private clubhouse to learn more about your software so I can sort through a bunch of obnoxious gifs and use an absolutely terrible search engine.
Same. It makes it much easier for someone to doxx you.
Nobody besides you can see your phone number. How on Earth does it make you doxxable?
🤔…is this a new requirement? I have 2 accounts. Neither with phone numbers and it’s never asked me for one
It’s decided by server. Most require it to cut down on spamming and trolls
Discord separates and controls possibly useful information from the public internet. It’s one of the worst platforms to use.
Are you against IRC for the same reason?
IRC isn’t controlled by a single (shady) company
Servers can be hosted by anyone; there is usually no account needed to join the chat; it would not randomly demand a phone number or an ID; it does not get pissed over people not using a very specific piece of bloated spyware… So nope, not against.
You never saw an IRC chatroom archive?
Fuck Discord when it’s used in lieu of a forum, documentation or proper support channels.
Well…Forums need to be maintained. Discord is free and easy and fast to use.
Discord should allow the servers to be browsable. But you can only participate by logging in.
Doesnt Disqus handle it like that as well? Same account on every website utilizing disqus?
easy and fast to use.
It just isn’t, if you don’t already have an account with them. And even then, I personally find ich horrible 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!!! 🤮
All chat tools after irc have been trash for large communities. That includes slack. Irc somehow still works with 1500 people in it. I can not explain how. With a logging bot the discussions can be archived for google searchabillity. I guess that could be true for a discord or slack also, But i never seen it implemented. In most slacks i can not search more then 60 days back.
Slack is really nice and is at least usable for large projects and teams.
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. :/
To.be fair, there are threads though. That one is on the users.
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.
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.
Please, not phpBB. Whatever the merits of PHP of 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?
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.
Seriously why did the cancer growth called Discoord suddenly dominate everything.
My guess: The kids who used Discord for gaming grew up, and just went with the familiar thing when starting new communities and projects.
Also, Discord did heavy marketing early on, until it carved out a network effect. So here we are.
It’s good?
Remember IRC!
Discord is the worst. Requires a phone number, does not allow email aliases and logs yoir chats.
Matrix and SimpleX is way better
Requires a phone number
It’s just an email based user ID, I have multiple Discord accts and never used a phone number with it
Try DuckDuckGO aliase, it works for me
I would accept discord 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.
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.
over mailing list.
LKML
I get the impression that opensource communities are missing out on contributors by even including discord in the mix 🧐
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:
FCK DSCRD!
(They should use lemmy instead :-P)
I bought a keyboard kit recently and then 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, creepy simping, etc. Just put up a wiki on GitHub or something. It’s not that hard.
While I understand why FOSS community hates Discord, I don’t know an alternative that is better at everything.
Discord’s main problems:
However alternatives we have are not ideal either:
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 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.
I refuse to use discord.
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.
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.
Half this thread is mad discord saves messages and the other half is mad that discord doesn’t save messages. You can’t make this shit up lmao.
I’ll eat all the downvotes but objectively discord is the best chatting service available to the public for discussion. Blows irc out of the water easily. The only point I’ll concede on is the phone number bullshit but otherwise I’d take it over anything else.
Using matrix would be better. Server plugins can publish channels like a public blog, viewable in a web browser.
every time I ran into an issue with Proton-GE it gets me angry again: github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom?tab=r…
Oh my fuck I’m so glad these characters died out. Dolan memes were the bane of my existence while they were a thing.
Am I the odd one out for actually liking discord? Or is most of this hate specifically for using discord for FOSS projects? As a replacement for MSN Messenger/Skype/Ventrillo Discord is actually pretty great for hanging out with friends
Discord is trash, but nobody seems to have presented anything better.
Is this loss?
Even worse if there’s a github page, but they’ve disabled issues and discussions.
Lemmy communities with discord channels are really quite something.
I use Discord with friends for a weekly online D&D game in what’s basically a glorified conference calls. It’s fine for that use-case, but it fucking sucks for trying to do anything organized or having on-topic conversations of looking up any sort of stored information. I kind of hate it when game companies have shit on there and you have to search/sort through hundreds of unconnected chat snippets to find anything.
ono@lemmy.ca 2 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.
elrik@lemmy.world 2 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 2 months ago
That’s a worrying sign for a project.
Did you clone their Git and start tracking issues there? ;-)
wrekone@lemmyf.uk 2 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.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
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. ;-)
ono@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
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.
Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
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.
JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 2 months ago
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
candybrie@lemmy.world 2 months ago
What do you mean by specifically searching? Because it totally comes up for me. Image
ono@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
That’s most likely due to low rankings. Lemmy doesn’t prevent it.
SeekPie@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Use “site:lemmy.world” (for example) at the end of your search
histic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
I’ve had Lemmy post first result in Google idk what your doing
po_tay_toes@lemmy.sambands.net 2 months ago
Open source search engine SearcxNG works very well with Lemmy posts and comments.
SurpriZe@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Perfectly summarized and the stance everyone should take for the wellbeing of any community. Look at cs.rin.ru for example.