technom
@technom@programming.dev
- Comment on Pulsar, the best code editor 8 months ago:
More like a distasteful snark that the author thinks is funny.
- Comment on Apple Wants To Kill PWAs 8 months ago:
They’re a trillion dollar company acting like a petulent child
No. They’re a trillion dollar company acting like a greedy dirty scum that they are.
- Comment on Apple Wants To Kill PWAs 8 months ago:
You think that’s going to convince them? Plenty of people consider Apple as the second coming of the messiah. They would cheer if Apple dropped a bucket load of crap on their desk.
- Comment on 83% of Indian cybersecurity, IT workers impacted by burnout, fatigue: Report - Social News XYZ 9 months ago:
That sounds like a … good thing?
PS: I didn’t realize wood working and gardening are therapeutic. Sounds like a wonderfully productive solution to a pesky problem.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
It’s been 8 years and they’ve done nothing and still haven’t.
My uploads from the day discord released are still there.
Is there any guarantee that they won’t? The same statement has been repeated for many such platforms and has proven to be completely myopic. Reddit has a 20 year history and they still managed to screw its entire user base. This argument is very weak is because it relies entirely on the benevolence of a for-profit company, to whom their profits outweigh the interests of their user base. All the alternatives mentioned here have a way to replicate and archive the data for future searches - they don’t depend on anyone’s benevolence.
The criticism that you have to make an account to use a search feature which many forums already do makes no sense.
I don’t know the exotic logic you rely on. But I can search forum posts from Google or DuckDuckGo without ever registering. Let’s see you search Discord messages without installing a crappy client (their web interface is lobotomized), registering and possibly giving up your phone number in the process.
There were many times I couldn’t find a Reddit thread using a web search whereas I could immediately find it using reddits built-in search.
You are attacking a strawman. The target you choose to prove your point is Reddit? The company that screwed its entire userbase in order to cut off their competitors from data access - which is the reason why they don’t work well with searches? People don’t like Discord for the same reasons as Reddit. Both are silos meant to lock users in.
Most of the search engines aren’t actually that good because there is too much noise in most web browser results these days.
If you know the exact website or app where the discourse for your topic is happening then 99% of the time you have far better results just using that websites built in search instead of the trash results modern browsers give you.
This is laughably inaccurate. So, you’re just making up facts now? I do web searches on technical problems and search engines perform very well. Your claim doesn’t stand up in an actual test.
May I remind you that situation you’re describing already happened countless times since the days of free forum boards and irc channels going down. Yet we’ve always managed to keep things going.
There is a reason why Discord is not searchable online - it’s a silo by design. And they intend to monetize it someday. Doing that today will affect the growth of their platform. But some day when their growth slows down and once they’ve achieved lock-in, they will start restricting it. Even if you have reasons to believe that the current management has no reasons to do so, they will get acquired by someone else lacking the same sensibilities. You should be completely blind to not see this play out again and again and again. Reddit is the most recent example. If you think that it isn’t going to happen with Discord, then you’re just deluding yourself about the value you represent to a for-profit company.
On the other hand, those forums and IRC servers that you claim to have gone down, have backups and searchable archive because they are designed with them in mind. Longevity of information is not an accident - it’s by design.
Things shutting down and information needing to be found again is not a big deal.
You’re making up nonsense again. May be it’s not important to you. But they are important to FOSS projects and their users. They don’t just want to be able to pull up solutions to previously encountered problems - they depend on the traceability of the said information. You wouldn’t have made such nonsensical claim if you were seriously involved in a project.
Yes I and most of the world are willing to not cry about making an account for that guaranteed stability.
The statistics of this entire discussion doesn’t agree with your statement. But let’s forget that for now. You’re not crying about making an account or stability of the platform because you’re foolish enough to believe in those. You don’t have the insight required to observe what’s happening all around you. I can’t wait for the day to come back and say ‘I told you so’. Because it will happen. Nowhere in history has it happened in any other way.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
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.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
I didn’t know that. That single reason alone is enough to completely exclude discord from open source projects.
- Comment on RelaGit: First Beta Release now available to download. 9 months ago:
I had the fortune of being the trainer for my company in all things git. I made sure that my colleagues (most of whom were straight out of universities) were introduced to git CLI and git concepts. No git GUIs were introduced. Consequently, the mess they made was easy to rectify. And then I occasionally read about horror stories like these where GUIs are allowed.
- Comment on RelaGit: First Beta Release now available to download. 9 months ago:
Funny. I have the opposite experience with git. Use GUI for simple tasks and drop to CLI when it’s complicated or something went wrong.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
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.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
That is extremely annoying. Hate it when it happens.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
Ooh! A post with claims backed by evidence!
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
That’s not the case for open source projects. There are many projects that use Discourse as their primary support channel. There seems to be no dearth of users asking questions there.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
The gold standard of threaded conversations is Zulip.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
It’s bloated, filled with features no one needs for straight-forward work, has a somewhat obtuse UI and is buggy as hell. I don’t like Matrix much more than Discord. But even it has far fewer problems. I don’t know in which universe Discord is considered as ‘good’.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
Using phone numbers as second factor authentication is neither secure, nor is it in good faith. Force the customer to use something more anonymous and secure - like Fido keys or even TOTPs. Sneaking in ways to force the customer to reveal their personal details, in the name of security is a sinister dark pattern.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
Do you know how crappy the discord client is? Even element with all its flaws behave better.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
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.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
Anything else that can:
- Segregate topics clearly, without stuffing all of it into a single stream
- Can be queried from a web search engine.
Discourse is a great choice - it meets both criteria. Even phpbb meets the requirements.
Even Zulip is objectively better than Discord. It meets point 1 very well. I don’t know how well it does in point 2.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
Wow! You are so deluded, thinking of yourself as a cool new kid with cool new tech (Discord) fighting against old people. What you don’t get is that people are protesting the use of Discord for something it’s not suited to. There’s no generation gap in it. The best of the youngest developers I know have the same opinion. Perhaps it’s time for you to reflect on your own standing.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
Ooh! I’m surprised that somebody made the same conclusion, but from a different perspective.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
There is one possible explanation for that conundrum. There are two types of people who are looking for solutions:
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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.
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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.
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.
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- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
I can’t understand how the people advocating for Discord in place of support forums can be so tone deaf about the core complaints others have about Discord.
Discord’s search feature is worthless to me and a huge section of others. The search results don’t show up on web searches. Web search indices are important because they aggregate information from many sources. Forums like Discourse don’t have that problem. With Discord, you instead have to install a shitty electron app and register an account just to do the above mentioned search. No - I don’t want to do that for every software problem I need to resolve. Even plain mailing list archives are miles ahead in that aspect.
Meanwhile, the community discussions are stuck inside a proprietary silo that appears convenient until the company decides to profit from it through eventual and inevitable enshittification. At that point, the rest of the world will be left looking for a way to free those discussions.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
That lazy culture is exactly why discord is bad for the job. I search for solutions first, instead of barging in with a question that may have been asked and resolved a thousand times before.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
Recommending the use of a software for a purpose it wasn’t meant or designed for, is the real bad argument. There are a lot of projects that use forums for support questions just fine. Instead when you offer a chat room, people will try to get away with quick answers. But it rarely ends up like that and all the conversation that ensues also becomes buried.
Short lesson - use software for what it’s meant for. Don’t shoehorn a support forum’s job to a chat application simply because people already use it.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
I didn’t advocate for IRC. I’m strongly on the side of forums. But in case you want to compare, IRC is still a better deal than Discord. IRC has loggers and searchable web archives where it matters. Discord on the other hand is holding the conversation hostage. Someday the closed nature of discord will come to bite. The honeymoon isn’t going to last forever.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
Exactly!
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
Discord is an OK chat app. But it’s TERRIBLE as a support forum. It’s precisely the latter everyone is complaining about.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
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.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 9 months ago:
- Ability to search answers without having to join a ‘server’